Shorthand for Nothing

This afternoon I had lunch with a number of people I hadn’t seen since early December of 2008, as well as a few people I didn’t know. There was something curiously settling about seeing them again, though most of them were people I could at best call long-term acquaintances. In a way I feel like somehow this was a return to normalcy–the winter break is over, life can continue again.

As is often the case with such exchanges, there was almost no comment on the fact that I hadn’t seen a number of them for over a month. Things just continued more or less as they were, to the point that when someone commented on the fact that she hadn’t seen me since I had cut my hair I was actually surprised.

Information Superhighway 4 is coming up soon. Somehow this ridiculous monthly party has become normalcy for me. It’s amazing, but at the same time it reminds me that I’m a part of a legitimate culture here, and not just a bubble isolated from reality. There’s a critical mass. It may have been a bubble once, but it’s too big for that now. This is the sort of thing that comforts me when I wonder if I’m just tricking myself.

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Over the past week or so I’ve started envisioning what the book I’ve been wanting to write, about diners, greasy spoons, coffee shops, and truck stops, is going to look like. Previously I had no real idea. I figured maybe it would be a laundry list of various places I’d been, some anecdotes to tie them together–and it was about as shapeless as that sounds. But I thought up a title, and for me that’s the hardest part of anything I write. “Meetings With Remarkable Men.”

I have spent many hours of my life at cafes, usually drinking drip coffee, eating bad diner food, talking about the world. In a way it doesn’t matter who you’re with, so long as they’re just as committed to the adventure. I’ve had hours-long conversations with people I barely knew and people I’ve known forever, gone home with my voice cracked from talking so often, my hands shaking from the caffeine. It’s a neutral ground for stories. A haven from the real world.

I keep going back because it’s always a new experience. You come home with new stories. You feel like you’ve accomplished something. The experience tends to fade with time though. It’s time I started capturing the moments forever.

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Yesterday, the House unanimously voted to reject the ~$800 billion economic stimulus package. Liberal commentators have been saying, essentially, that if the Republicans don’t want to play ball, the Democrats can, and should, pretty much play without them. And as Nate Silver pointed out, quoting the AP article, this doesn’t look good on their parts. And the fact that it’s unanimous makes it look like it was scripted, even if it wasn’t.

Assuming it was scripted, I imagine they were hoping for the reaction to go something like “Barack Obama couldn’t get a single Republican to vote for his stimulus package–what a failure on bipartisanship on his count!” I also imagine they were banking on the idea that, if it fails, suddenly they look prescient.

They did not take into account two things. First, Obama is very popular right now–given. So nobody is likely to spin this into an anti-Obama story unless they already dislike him. And the media doesn’t dislike him. Second, and this is probably the important part: a unanimous vote looks like posturing. I’m not convinced it will look good for them if the package fails. If anything, they might be blamed for it somehow. That’s obstructionism at its finest.

Maybe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe just none of them liked it. But I know what the narrative’s going to be from here.

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Things like this annoy me a great deal.

Let me start by saying that I believe everyone deserves fair treatment, that I acknowledge that sexism/racism/etc are still a huge problem and are sticky issues we need to address. That said, I detest how most such movements handle things–namely by complaining loudly and at length about it, and accusing people of being actively, deliberately sexist. (The speaker in question acknowledged that this was not the case–but seriously, don’t cause a scene about it. YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.)

The blog to which I just linked, though–oh, the whinging sense of entitlement going on there. The self-righteous “you didn’t have any women on any panels and this is because of Sexism” tone. There is nothing about this sort of thing I approve of.

If you’re going to advocate civil rights, which you should, could you be kind enough not to act all petulant about it? Patience and understanding go a long way towards making people approve of your cause rather than doing what I’m doing right now, which is casually dismissing you as a waste of my time. When you take up a cause you become its ambassador. There are lots of people working towards feminism etc. who are perfectly decent individuals and are doing a lot of good things–but it’s much easier to remember someone who is whiny and demanding about it. That sticks with you.

As an aside: in the little microcosm of internet culture I live in here in Boston, the male-female ratio is kind of ridiculous. Sure, there are girls, and many of them are just as geeky as the rest of us, but there’s just not as many of them. Sometimes instead of insisting that it is Simply Wrong, perhaps it’s worth pausing to consider why, exactly, this might be the case in the first place. If nothing else, maybe once you’ve done this you will stop acting as if it’s the worst crime against humanity ever committed.

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Well, that was an adventure. It was my first time in New York; I didn’t do anything too touristy but I was not disappointed. There are diners, there are things open late at night, there are cheap food places open late at night, there are coffee shops where I can sit for four or five hours reading Sarah Vowell. The streets are on a grid. The subway system kind of makes sense.

I mean, seriously, where does that go wrong?

ROFLThing was good times. There is not much else to add, except that the afterparty took place in a loud club with annoying club music and REALLY FUCKING EXPENSIVE DRINKS so it was something of a let-down (especially after the initial, if brief, belief that drinks were free). It was also too loud for conversation, and I’m not much for dancing at the best of times–especially not when I am carrying my bag around because there is also a two dollar coat/bag check.

Still, a successful weekend all told. Good conversations, good speakers, good liveblogging. Hurray.

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HELLO TIME FOR MORE as soon as something starts happening!!! Jumps etc.

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Okay now it is time for more liveblogging. I appreciate that I don’t really know what is going on. So, after the jump, PART TWO.

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Getting in late on account of not being able to find a place to sit down and plug in but PROBLEM RECTIFIED, so please to click through, after the jump.

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Via Slog:

I, like many people, have been guilty of thinking that there is nothing that’s going to keep track of a candidate’s campaign promises. A candidate can say anything to get himself elected, then just renege on all of them, because who’s going to remember? He must make hundreds of them over the course of his campaign, right?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the Obameter, a compilation of about 500 campaign promises. The St. Petersburg Times is tracking their progress–whether the promise is kept or broken, whether he compromised, whether it’s stalled, or whether no action has been taken as of yet.

I keep forgetting that we live in an age of the internet. As John Allison once put it, “Google is giving people the facts, and we want them back.” Maybe this won’t be used in a terribly widespread fashion. A lot of political afficionadoes will have lost their interest in politics. But now there is accountability. Someone is watching, and it’s easy to access. People can get information more readily now. Is it possible we’re finally entering an age of government transparency?

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I have returned to Boston after the longest night of travel ever. It was a successful vacation, all things told, but it’s nice to be back in the world again. However, I am also officially exhausted, so there’s really nothing for me to say right now. Soon, more posts about fog and air travel on Dreamers and probably something like a vacation log, etc etc.

Normal service will return shortly. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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