Nocturnal Nattering

2003-07-11T07:34:00.000-04:00

I am seriously tired. It's that sort of I-have-a-hangover-but-I-didn't-drink-anything tired. (Given that I haven't drank anything in five years, one month, and seven days, I doubt it's a hangover.) I just have not had the sleep lately, and I've been flitting about in that weird extra-energy buzz you sometimes get if you are under-rested. And then, bam, you slam into a Green Monster of exhaustion. At least it's the end of the week.

I'm also tired of controversy... every so often, I get in this mood where conflict and issue-wrestling just makes me nauseous. It's just the level of the debate... I was walking around a bookstore last night, and just the titles of these books made me want to hide under the bed, clutching a security blankie. Books like "Treason" and "Why The Left Hates America", and on the other side, "Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta" and "Blinded By The Right" -- just a few examples of how our discourse is rooted now only in calling those we disagree with traitors, criminals, dictators, whores. I can have a pleasant discussion with people of different political views; these nasty screeds make me feel like I'm supposed to see my more liberal friends as Taliban-huggers, my more conservative friends as oil-chugging barbarians. It makes me want to just keep my views to myself -- it doesn't seem like anyone wants to hear anything different than their own views lately, anyway. Look what happened to the poor Dixie Chicks, or to the rare Republicans in Hollywood... I think I'm rare in that I am really more interested in creating an environment where any idea can be expressed respectfully than in promoting any particular idea myself. But no one seems to want to hang out in such a place.

2003-07-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

I am feeling very adult these last few days. Perhaps it is the fact that my sister just had a baby, or my recent career successes, or just the fact that, well, I am an adult. My chimes at midnight stopped ringing hours ago. I was reminded of this yesterday, discussing a college acquaintance with a work colleague. This college friend seems young, too young, and not in a good way. Attitudes, language, lifestyle -- all are the sort one has in school, or in that first strange year thereafter. But five years on? One begins to look silly, like the creepy older guy who keeps hanging around campus.

Recently, I have felt a desire to act younger again, to care less about dress, to sleep later and be less responsible, to grow my hair and slack off a lot. I take this instinct as a good sign, that I am finally relaxing a bit in my adult life. But I'm careful to not take the mood too far. It seems there's a point at which it's just time to grow up.

2003-07-10T07:52:00.000-04:00

In the Washington Moon, there's another piece saying there ain't gonna be no baseball in D.C. this year: "Baseball is staggering in position to jilt Washington again. This has come to be the unofficial pastime of the erstwhile national pastime in the past 32 years." MLB is supposed to decide by next Tuesday what it will do; most likely, it will do nothing. Meanwhile, the Orioles are considering trading Jeff Conine to Florida. Sigh.

I am considering running for governor of California.

2003-07-08T04:33:00.000-04:00

Wow.

The last few days have been chock full o' activity -- and some of it even happened to me. The latest news first: With the birth of my sister's baby Monday morning, I am an uncle for the first time, and Rufus Mathias Brey IV -- a name that probably weighs more than its bearer at the moment -- has been introduced to the world.

Meanwhile here in Washington, things have not been quite that eventful. Farrar is taking advantage of her summer off from school to travel all about the nation visiting friends and family, so I've been left to my lonesome. Since it has been hotter than Rumsfeld's temper in D.C. lately, I spent a fair bit of that time in our one air-conditioned room, reading. I knocked off The Year of Reading Proust with great speed -- and greater disappointment. I, of course, am at the midpoint of my own year of reading Proust, and was hoping for textual companionship. But this was just yet another of those rambling quasi-memoirs, not really about the author's life so much as about whatever silly thoughts she was having at any given moment. Marcel appeared only in the periphery, and his too-rare quoting reminded me why I was reading him and not this Phyllis Rose person in the first place. (Apparently she's a well-known writer. But not to me.)

I also read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait 'Till Next Year, which was lovely and moving. I confess to being a Goodwin fan, though my colleagues mock me for it -- I know she's a popularizer and comes off as a bit of a flake, but I love the way she tells a story. I think baseball books have replaced alternate histories as my "fun books." I recommended this one to my mom; she also came from an Irish family that worshipped the Dodgers. That wasn't the only baseball in my weekend; since getting interested in the game early this year, I've gotten hooked, so on Sunday I went up to see Toronto face Baltimore. I told myself that if Toronto won, my sister's baby would be a boy, and the Orioles a girl ("B" in Blue Jays also being my brother-in-law's surname initial, "O" in "Orioles" being the first letter of my sister's maiden name). Baltimore blew it after six innings of shut-out and eight of a lead, but it was a great game -- a tie, an extra inning, the Orioles manager getting ejected for getting up in the ump's face. Also, since it was so hot, folks down near the field abandoned their seats to seek out shade, and I spent the last four innings in unhealthy heat but just a dozen (mostly vacated) rows back from the field.

The weekend had started Friday with a pleasant day as well. I went down to the National Mall to check out the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. I'm always a bit ambivalent about it -- it tends to let down -- but as I've mentioned before, I have a great interest in Mali and I wanted to see the Mali exhibit. I also like to go down to the Mall on the Fourth of July because the Hare Krishnas put on a Festival of India with wonderful music and dancing. A strange way to spend the Fourth, perhaps, but what better way to celebrate freedom of speech and religion and assembly?

2003-07-08T04:14:00.000-04:00

So I see from skimming back-a-blog a few days that I never really finished my year's-midpoint whine. Fitting; it was about my problems meeting my goals. Now, I am actively trying to learn to procrastinate, to let things go, to not obsess about every little thing all the time. But while my yearly goals are not resolutions, in that I can decide to give them up or let them take more than a year, I do tend to meet most of them, and this year I'm a bit behind. So I'm conflicted.

I started out with five goals.

Learn Spanish. Or at least study it again. I signed up for a class, and tried, and it just wasn't taking. I have no aptitude for languages. So I decided this simply would not happen at this point in my life, and I dumped the goal. I have not felt bad about this at all.

Work on my photography. This one's almost too open-ended, but my photography is proceeding apace and I'm ever more pleased with the results. Over the past few weeks I haven't been inspired to do much, but it's just a temporary lull. I'm nearing the point where I might even try to exhibit some of it informally, but there are technical skills I need to hash out first.

So, three "active" goals remain to be achieved (or junked):

Read Proust. I think I've said enough about this. I fall behind, I catch up. And I never said I'd finish this year, though I'd like to. Finishing Proust will make me stop feeling bad about never finishing Ulysses. Besides, it has madeleines and top hats and parasols and stuff like that in it. Much more of a mental vacation than Bloom's Day in Dublin.

Lose a little more weight. A vague one, one I feel pretty good about. I'm not really overweight, since I'm about 5'9" and around 170. But a couple of years back, I was up near 200 (eek) and set out to lose a lot of it. At that time, I'd set 160 as a goal. I never got that low, but I got lower than where I am now. Still, it always balanced out at about 170, so maybe that's just where I should be. I actually threw away my scale, as it was a negative influence -- I was agonizing over fluctuations of a pound or two, and ignoring how I actually looked and felt. I think I'm okay on this one.

Start writing again. Ah -- here's the rub! I have not tried to write fiction in years, which makes my dream of publishing a novel at some point a bit less realistic. Now, I've had a fairly successful writing career, but all of it in media. Fiction comes hard for me, but it's something I want to embrace, at least once. I wrote a lousy novel in college and realized that anyone can write a book; you just start writing and don't stop for 200 pages. The trick is, how do you make it good? I dunno. But I finally have an idea, and I've started the research, so maybe this one will start moving, too. I just want to start in 2003. The book itself can take 20 years for all I care.

2003-07-07T02:32:00.000-04:00

After some consideration, I've resolved my conflict over Lawrence v. Texas. I have decided the ruling was correct, both morally and judicially. It has always been the place of the Supreme Court to make extraconstitutional decisions that increase the general spread of freedom among U.S. citizens, and to provide greater liberty to greater numbers. I am always wary of endorsing the right of the judiciary to decide what is "right", as many judges have paleoconservative conceptions of what that means. But adding to collective freedom is certainly justified.

2003-07-02T05:11:00.000-04:00

Book report!

As readers know, I have spent a decent chunk of the past six months reading a decent chunk of literature -- Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In fact, this was one of those goals for the year I wrote of yesterday. I am about 1,700 pages along, having completed the first three volumes. I cannot recall why I decided to read Proust, but I am enjoying it immensely. I don't know the why of that, either. It's not at all the sort of stuff that usually interests me -- it's all about parties and society and social etiquette, and he goes on for pages on end about the most trifling matters. But I find the language calming, and certain of the insights quite original and telling. (I just stumbled upon a blog called The Daily Proust, which, remarkably, is formatted in the same style as my own late blog -- the one I unwisely killed off -- Lysander's Letters.)

Anyway, when I started my year of reading Proust, I picked up two recent books on the matter -- The Year of Reading Proust and How Proust Can Change Your Life. I hadn't intended to read either of them until finishing Marcel himself, but, as the act of reading Proust requires many breaks, I read de Botton a few months ago (witty, fun, ultimately rather ephemeral) and started on Year today. I was quite pleased to learn that, not only had it taken the author more than a year to read Proust (as may be the case for me), she had not even finished when she started writing the book! So my anxieties on that front are lessened a bit. (Perhaps when I'm done, I'll try for the All-England Summarize Proust Competition.

I am not solely reading Proust. I finished Jackie Robinson's stellar autobiography I Never Had It Made last night. Robinson is one of the heroes. While I admire him immensely, it would be unfair to say he is one of my heroes, if only because heroes are meant to inspire us in confronting obstacles in our lives, and Robinson's obstacles were radically different, and immensely mightier, than any I have encountered. But his book is that rare autobiography of a great man who examines himself with real honesty and explains himself with candor.

Books keep piling up for me. I've added Katherine Graham's Washington, which I found at a used book store, to the pile, as I continue to delve into the history and culture of my beloved adopted city. I also plan to pick up Steven Brill's After when I get a chance.

Next year's plan: to read all the Booker Prize winners...

2003-07-01T07:54:00.000-04:00

Halftime show.

We are at the midpoint of 2003. Well, technically, that's tomorrow. I know this because, when I was about 10, I was playing Trivial Pursuit (back then, it was all the Eighties version) and there was a question asking what day was the midpoint of the year. I guessed June 15. It's like the feeling that the bottom of the fourth should be halfway through a baseball game -- I picked halfway through the month that's halfway through the year. Of course, June 15 is only 5 1/2 months gone.

But now, half the year is gone. And I'm thinking about it too much.

People who know me and people who read me know that, as a good left-brained sort, I'm a bit fixated on numbers, rankings, andsuchandsuch. And I'm a bit fixated on calendrics -- on New Year's and my birthday, on the length of various whens. And, as a self-betterment type, I tend to set lots o' goals.

For the past few years, I've set goals at the start of each year. I've rationalized away from calling 'em "resolutions", because my "goals" were just that -- things to reach toward, but if they did not happen, or if they changed, no great loss. But, because I'm a bit obsessive, in the past I've usually actually achieved them. This year, not so much -- or at least, not so much yet. And I'm beating myself up over it.

But more on that later.

2003-07-01T00:49:00.000-04:00

Howard "Dr. Evil" Dean has raised (pinkie to lip) seven millllllllion dollars. This is stunning, and means he's now a serious contender for the nomination by any estimation -- in fact, he raised the most this quarter. Kerry, Edwards, and maybe Gephardt will hit the $5 million mark for the quarter, and Graham about half that.

So with Dean moving into the top tier, two guys have to worry a lot. Kerry is quickly falling from the frontrunner spot, and if he gets shoved aside in New Hampshire, so much for him. But there's a more immediate impact on Lieberman, who, tellingly, is not giving any hint of how much he raised -- or, more accurately, did not raise, over the last three months.

Quick analysis: Lieberman is toast. His campaign may fold before the end of summer. Edwards is holding on in contention, but there's a four-man crowd for top tier now. If Kerry falls back a bit, it's to Gephardt's benefit. So right now, Gephardt is probably the nomination frontrunner by the tiniest bit, followed by Kerry, with Dean not too far behind. Edwards is a longer shot, but still plausible. Graham seems less and less likely. And Lieberman's relegated to Kucinich Kountry.

2003-06-30T02:50:00.000-04:00

I found my past life analysis online. The Internet can do anything. Turns out I was a Portuguese woman in the 1750's, and either a sailor or shoemaker. Now, neither of those were really women's professions in that time, but I was also "inquisitive, inventive, you liked to get to the very bottom of things and to rummage in books." And from that life, I learned that "the world is full of ill and lonely people. You should help those, who are less fortunate than you are." So I think maybe I was a Portuguese nun who crossed the Atlantic to Brazil to help the poor there. (Either that, or I was a cobbler in drag in Lisbon.)

2003-06-30T02:31:00.000-04:00

I find myself a bit conflicted about the Big Ruling from the Big Court last week. Of course the decision was morally right, and I was elated (and a bit surprised) at the announcement. But I have misgivings about the Court's reasoning. Now, I am not arguing for strict constructionism here -- interpretation is at the heart of intelligent judicial reasoning. (Otherwise, we'd still have segregation.) But I feel there is a difference between the recent affirmative action ruling and the sodomy ruling. The affirmative action case said a system required modification due to equal protection, etc. This is standard constitutional interpreting. But in the sodomy case, the Court threw out a law (a really dumb one) that is completely in line with the longstanding right of legislatures to set behavior policies for those whom they represent. The Court essentially said, "We know states have the right to pass such laws, and not only is there nothing in the Constitution to prevent Texas from passing this law, but there is a history of federal courts upholding the right to pass such laws as a constitutional right. But we're going to step in anyway."

I am concerned by the notion of federal courts, or the federal government at all, setting moral standards for localities and states -- even if I personally agree with the morals they are imposing. Any imposition of morals should make red flags go off for civil libertarians. I was impressed by Justice Thomas's dissent, in which he said the Texas law was silly, and if he was a Texas legislator he would try to repeal it, but he's not, he's a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and it just wasn't a Constitutional matter.

In the end, I think it was the right thing to do -- basic civil rights eclipse constitutional nit-picking. But it gets me worried when I hear smart people applaud the ruling simply because it's the right thing to do. If we don't keep in mind the limitations and duties of the Court, we're in line for rule by fiat, based on the moral whims of the federal establishment -- and these days, that's not a very freedom-minded bunch.

2003-06-27T05:04:00.000-04:00

Oy, it's so humid. (Click here for the video!) It's been about 95 degrees with humidity of 127 percent. Ah, Washington in summer.

That orange-haired Hans Moleman from South Carolina, J. Strom Thurmond, finally died at age 396. With Lester Maddox now frying chicken in Hell, having died less than a week ago, I think someone's out to get the segregationists. Benched Republican cheerleader Trent Lott better watch his back.

Thomas Boswell pens a brilliant column in the Post that is essentially an early eulogy for Washington's baseball bid. The near-home run seems to be heading right toward the big mitt of dunderheaded MLB officials. Of course, there's always my Orioles. About their latest no-star effort, the Post writes: "There was the misplayed grounder, the missed cut-off man, the dropped double-play ball. There was the four-pitch walk, the botched rundown, the careless fastball that hit a batter to load the bases. And that was just the bottom of the first inning."

Tom Davis, my real congressman, has a clever idea for getting D.C. a seat in the House -- expand the House by two seats and give the second to a solidly Republican state, to cancel out the certain Democratic vote.

Larry Sabato has a page of amusing maps on how Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman, Graham, and Gephardt could conceivably beat Bush in the electoral college. Note the absence of ever-more-plausible candidate Howard McGovern from that list. The most he sees any Democrat getting is 287 electoral votes.

2003-06-26T05:02:00.000-04:00

I voted in the MoveOn.org "primary" last night. I am not a big fan of MoveOn (though I did have a few nice online conversations with Zack Exley during the GWBush.com brouhaha back in 2000), but I felt Bob Graham should get at least one vote. The D.C. primary is now inked for January 13, so we will be first, but who knows how many candidates will bother with the D.C. sideshow when Iowa (1/19) and New Hampshire (1/27) are getting all the attention? So I have to get my votes in where they might have some meaning.

Choosing a candidate is sometimes a hard task. In my head, I want someone with the strongest resume, the most clearheaded approach, and moderate positions close to mine. But my head is sometimes at war with my spirit, which wants someone exciting to instill a bit of passion, a sense of purpose. This is a silly reason to choose a leader -- almost as silly as "likeability" or the other reasons people pick presidents. But it's not entirely the fault of the voters. The system has evolved so that the presidency is seen as a sort of reward, a career-capping prize. So rather than soberly assessing which applicant should be hired for the executive job, we opt for someone who makes us feel a sense of greatness.

While on paper and in my head, I am entirely pro-Graham, I am pleased (though befuddled) by the latest speculation that Joe Biden may still get in the race. I think I would move on (there's that phrase again) from Graham to Biden.

So why don't I like MoveOn? It's got nothing to do with the folks themselves; it's a fascinating bit of successful Web political organizing. But its history troubles me. By converting from an anti-impeachment movement in 1998 to an all-purposes liberal lobby, MoveOn supports the untruth that the Clinton impeachment was a partisan matter. I voted for Clinton twice, and also thought impeachment was deserved -- as do several other Democratic friends of mine. Maybe MoveOn should move on and adopt a name not so closely linked to that sordid, trivial, but entertaining era in our recent history.

2003-06-25T03:06:00.000-04:00

Well I'll be jiggered. D.C. finally has Comedy Central. They've been promising it for years (at least as long as I've lived in the area, and that dates back to the summer before Clinton's impeachment) and no one ever thought it would really happen. Mind you, in Washington, the absence of Comedy Central was an issue of some significance, because politicians and reporters need to know how political humor is playing, as a quickie Zeitgeistometer. (Just like they count the number of jokes-per-topic on Dave/Jay/Conan.) So the inability to get The Daily Show was a pretty big deal.

This blows a hole in my D.C. Never-Never list -- the three things we've been promised for years that never happen. The first was Comedy Central, the second a baseball team, the third the completion (or for that matter, the start) of the Tivoli redevelopment project. Two out of three ain't bad -- Jon Stewart has entered the building, and the Tivoli is actually underway.

I'm sad to say I've decided I'm reluctantly against the D.C. baseball campaign. It's hard to justify blowing all that public money on a stadium and on a team when so many other city services are shutting down, and when there's a massive deficit. (The Post reports this morning that even the Mayor is retreating on this point.) Besides, we have a team: the Orioles. D.C. baseball boosters gripe that this is the largest metropolitan area without a team. But it is the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area that is the nation's fourth most populous. I would love to be able to get on the Metro and ride 10 minutes to a game in my real home city. But with all D.C.'s other worries, a half-hour drive out to Camden Yards is not that big a sacrifice.

2003-06-24T04:23:00.000-04:00

The Orioles (wasn't there once a professional baseball team by that name?) lost 317-4 last night, or so it seemed, anyway. Orioles Hangout has a poem to mark the slaughter.

2003-06-23T03:25:00.000-04:00

Is it time to put away childish things? I have a longtime conflict between past and present. Every so often, I resolve to center my social life in the present, to seek out friends around me, based on my location, current interests, career, and place in life. And yet, and yet. When I get bored or lonely, I find myself googling the names of high school and college acquaintances -- sometimes folks I wasn't even that close to -- and e-mailing them. After a friendly message or two, I try to ignite a more meaningful friendship, and often come off looking the fool. These folks have their own lives; shouldn't I get around to getting one of my own? And as for those I was close to in the past -- I have had many lives within this one, as most young people do, and have tried on and cast off several personalities. Some of these friends knew me in an incarnation that no longer exists... can there really be a friendship there? And if so, is it worthwhile, to build yet another correspondence with someone far away, when I have so few people in my geographic proximity?

On a completely different note, I'm slightly amending my long-standing prediction on the Democratic presidential race. I have said that I expect Kerry, Gephardt, or Graham to be the nominee. Now, I think the nomination of either Kerry or Gephardt is exceedingly likely; I'd peg that at 67 percent likelihood. (The Political Oddsmaker is far less certain; the two top their list, but only with a cumulative 29.2 percent chance.) I think there is a third slot, but it is no longer certainly Graham. I expect some third candidate to emerge by the end of this year, and the race to be between those three. Right now, that third candidate seems to be either Graham or Dean (who may even win Iowa.) I do not think Edwards has a serious chance of winning the nomination, Lieberman even less so. I still also hold to my prediction that Kucinich could do well in Iowa, but he's not a real factor elsewhere.

2003-06-23T02:36:00.000-04:00

So there's a new teevee movie that offers a gleamingly pro-Bush account of how Dubya spent 9/11: "When a Secret Service agent questions the order to fly back to Washington by saying, 'But Mr. President,' Bush replies firmly, 'Try "Commander in Chief." Whose present command is: Take the president home!'" Ecch. Butanyway, the guy who plays Bush in this oh-so-serious movie is the same guy that played him in the Comedy Central reality series "That's My Bush!". (That wasn't a reality series? Who'd'a thunk it?) I somehow doubt the new movie ends with the line, "One of these days, Osama, I'm gonna punch you in the face."

More quizzes culled from other blogs:
The Right/Left Brain Quiz sez I'm 72% left-brained, 27% right-brained. In Stephen Jay Gould's collection of baseball essays, he denounces the oversimplification of the right-left paradigm, and rightly so. But it's still fun.

The sorting hat quiz puts me in Ravenclaw. No shock there.

The What Kind Of Grammar Whore Are You? quiz says I'm an Obscure Grammar Whore, because I know lots o' rules and am a bit anal about them. Fair 'nuff. I am, after all, on a one-man crusade to force my company to stop writing the possessive of "New York Times" as "New York Times'" -- to little effect so far.

2003-06-22T11:55:00.000-04:00

Thoughts on a troika of websites with typically odd Web-style names:

1. Why is Friendster the way it is? I mean, I know the notion of making friends online is inherently dorky, but as I've said before, I'm a dork. I just prefer to get acquainted with people via their minds and interests, and I come off much better in text than in person, so the venue suits me well. One of my closest friends was discovered via Emode (one of the most funnest websites I've ever found), and, while I met my wife in person briefly first, our friendship developed entirely over e-mail over several months before we saw each other again. Since I'm not the type by temperment to go to lots of swingin' shindigs, and my friend Bill W might frown on my hanging round in bars, it's tough to meet folks now that I'm nearing my score-and-ten.

It's tough to find friends-just-friends online, since all the sites are dating sites. It's especially tough since I tend to have closest friendships with women, and they assume I'm some guy doing the nice-guy-looking-for-action act. So I was thrilled to learn about Friendster -- a site created to help you find friends. Yet people there don't really want to! They're either looking-for-action (dude, that's why there's Match.com) or get creeped out if they hear from people they don't know. What a waste of a pretty decent concept.

2. I go to Yodlee far more often than I should. I'm strangely obsessed with my account balances -- knowing the exact degree of my savings and debt somehow makes me feel like I'm in control of my finances. "Yodlee" must be techie for "placebo."

3. The good thing about Netflix is that it is one of the few sites that's as good as advertised. I looooove movies but find teevee less and less interesting (Buffy's gone, Simpsons is five seasons past its prime), and Netflix has documentaries as well as movies. My queueue is about 80 movies long, and I've already rented over 100. The downsite: Netflix is a natural resource, and natural resources lead to war. We have big rows over Netflix policy in our house. I get the movies, watch them, send them back. My wife likes to get them and wait for the mood to strike her. Her way is more logical, mine more efficient. And since I'm obsessed with seeing lots of Great Movies, I tend to rent crazy old crap that you really need to be in a mood to see. (Saw "Rashomon" this weekend. Disappointing. The fame of its storytelling style far surpasses the value of the actual story itself.)

2003-06-21T23:24:00.000-04:00

Back from several slothful days at the Coolfont spa. I've never really had a pamper-me vacation; I'm usually riding trash-filled trains seated next to urinating babies crossing China, stuff like that. So this was quite a luxury. I had a very satisfying massage, and even tried acupuncture. I'm not sure it is for me, though the practictioner gave me some homeopathic advice for depression that I might try. God knows the prozolofanaxbutrin-style treatment has never done much good. I was surprised by how little of acupuncture is actually, well, puncture. She gave me a cursory massage, did a bit of acupressure, put maybe five or six needles in me -- it's really hard to feel it -- and then left me to meditate (something I'm very poor at, due to my overactive mind, but which I handled fairly well, since I was so relaxed). We puttered around the spa town of Berkeley Springs -- the first spa in the U.S., home to a spot labeled "George Washington's Bathtub (1748)". (Yes, I put my feet in it.) It was three days of peace, love, and napping. Lots of napping. I was so mellowed out that I even really enjoyed reading Proust for hours on end. Usually after 15 minutes I look to see what's on teevee.

2003-06-18T02:08:00.000-04:00

Wow -- my template looks completely different at home. I'm told that's because my home computer "lacks robust Stylesheet." I wonder if there's a vitamin complex for that.

Yeah, so I said I wouldn't be writing until the weekend, but I lied. I ended up sleeping today, so even though I'm not at work, I am awake. Luckily, we're in no hurry to take off early tomorrow. After this post, I'll do a few minutes of Proust -- that'll knock me out. (Readers who hate Western medicine: If you're looking for a non-chemical sleep aid, Proust-Doz is for you.)

A day into my low-intensity vacation, and relaxation is starting to kick in. (If watching a documentary about Kissinger and then having an argument about the justifications of the CIA coup in Chile can be called "relaxation." Hi, I'm a dork.) The last few days I've been supersaturated with tension... the straw that broke the blogger's soul came on Sunday, when, after two days of forced labor in our front yard (it does look nice now, I have to say) I was trying to unwind by taking a few photos and a belligerent guy about three houses down started screaming because he was sure I was photographing him. Of course my explanation that I was taking a photo of two interestingly symmetrical rooftops in the distance, and not of his beer-belly and Wizards shirt, did no good -- I don't think he's artiste enough to get why I'd be snapping shots of buildings.

The whole thing captured my recent ambivalence about photography. I'm fairly good at it, for a novice amateur, but I am just not assertive enough nor aggressive enough to throw myself out there. I hate interpersonal confrontation too much, and taking pictures outside "sanctioned" areas leads to that. I get the nastiest looks if I walk around Columbia Heights with my camera. It's weird -- in my neighborhood you can scream for no reason at two in the morning, loudly threaten your spouse and children, or just stand in the middle of the street motionless, and no one will even notice. But take a picture of the old neon sign on the long-shuttered liquor store, and people look at you like you're insane.

2003-06-17T05:07:00.000-04:00

It is three hours and five minutes until my first vacation in two years (excluding a few family visits), and I am very ready for it. I keep catching glimpses of my reflection in a glass frame on my desk, and I look like I should be on the celebrities without makeup page -- except I'm not a celebrity. It's mainly cuz I haven't shaved in a few days and opted for an extra 10 minutes napping rather than a shower last night. (I'm about two months into a hair-growth experiment, so it's hard to mask my unwashedness.)

Hopefully, three days at a spa in Berkeley Springs will work miracles. It's not my usual sort of vacation -- we are, after all, seriously entertaining thoughts of touring Mali next summer. Today will be a lazy day, and then tomorrow we'll set off for West Virginia, eschewing free hot dog day to get a start on our trip. Then, there's not a smidge of plan or obligation all week.

2003-06-17T00:39:00.000-04:00

Right, then.

So for about two months, I kept a blog called Lysander's Letters. I adopted a pseudonym to sort of dip my big toe into the blogging world as I first gave it a shot. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but once I'd set the precedent of publishing a few times a night, it began to feel more like an obligation than an outlet. And my posts were all over the map -- some personal, some political, some analytical.

Now, at the start of each year I like to set goals for the coming 12 months -- not "resolutions" that must either be kept or cast aside in failure, but general plans for the year. If I succeed, great; if not, no big deal. In addition to my plan to read Proust in 2003 (I'm about 1,300 pages along), one of my goals was to start writing a novel. I've tried this before, so it's not outside my abilities, and since I have no desire to leave an Updike- or Oates-like pile of books at my death, it's fine with me if it takes 20 years. But I wanted to get started.

I had one vague autobiographical idea that I'd attempted for NaNoWriMo last year, but it ended up a failed project. I got my antihero protagonist alter-ego (i.e., "me") to wake up and look around a room, and I had about 11,000 words of description -- but then nothing happened. I tend to like writing where there's a lot of action, but in this case, I was doing just the opposite -- all description, no activity.

So as 2003 started, I procrastinated on the writing goal (I'm a bit obsessive, so I'm actually actively working to increase my procrastination skills to avoid early death) and focused on reading that huge friggin book, plus my photography. (That and, you know, earning money and stuff.) Finally I had an idea for a book a few weeks ago -- more on that in time -- and, apropos of Proust, suddenly was searching for lost time that I could use to do research. In a rash and spontaneous act (my typical decision-making mode), I shut down Lysander's Letters to spend more time writing.

I missed it a bit, and, far from writing, spent most of the time reading other books or puttering around places like Friendster. And a few people missed the blog.

The writing project is proceeding now, and I want a blog back. But Lysander is dead, and unlamented. The nom de blog made it hard for me to write about my personal life in anything but general terms, and also kept people I know from finding the blog. And I found I wasn't writing anything I needed to worry about.

So now, a new blog -- with super procrastination-power kung fu grip. I won't force myself to write every day. I will make no apologies for rambling (like right now). And I will pretty much leave politics out of it -- there's enough of that in my professional life. Welcome to Lysander Unplugged.