A while ago, I compiled a list of every job I’ve ever had. I don’t know why I did this. Perhaps because I have a really lousy memory and might forget entire swaths of my life if I didn’t keep lists, pictures, and other triggers around to remind me of what I’ve done and who I’ve been. Perhaps I had some time to kill and was feeling nostalgic. Who knows.

This list is a bit long because I went through a period of time between the ages of, say, 15 and 23 when I never kept a job longer than three months. They just got so tedious, you know? So I’d stop going. Like the guy in Office Space. His concept wasn’t particularly novel to me, and I couldn’t figure out why he spent most of the movie debating whether or not to stop going to a job he hated. Just stop going, dude. It’s easy. (Though, admittedly, he was an office dude, and he’d gone to college, so his job was less disposable than all the clerk jobs betwixt which I flitted more flitty-like than a honeybee in a clover field.

So, without further ado:

1. lawn mowing kid
2. video store clerk
3. ice cream store clerk
4. convenience store clerk
5. TJ Maxx clerk
6. Burger King clerk (2 weeks)
7. grocery clerk (produce)
8. plastic container factory worker (1 day)
9. convenience store clerk (different store)
10. street sign changer and tree trimmer
11. apprentice woodworker
12. Barnes and Noble clerk
13. convenience store clerk (different store)
14. gas station clerk (graveyard shift)
15. convenience store clerk (different store)
16. driver for furniture designer
17. bike messenger
18. van messenger
19. temp worker
20. Tower Records clerk
21. focus group participant (intermittent)
22. driver for demolition company
23. recording engineer
24. indie-rock bass player
25. lightbulb changer
26. graphic designer
27. textbook typesetter
28. bookstore clerk again
29. assistant bookkeeper
30. Thrifty Nickel layout guy
31. Visiting Foreign Lecturer
32. Business Analyst
33. Senior Financial Engineer

You think you can tell where in there I finally finished college, but you’d be wrong. I actually finished college just before “bookstore clerk again.” There was a little lull in there, and the job market in Santa Fe, NM for liberal arts graduates wasn’t the best. I couldn’t find a full-time job to save my life. So I found four part-time jobs instead.

C says that my new job title puts me in unique company: I am now one of those people whose job title means absolutely nothing to 99% of people. I used to be a Business Analyst, so it was pretty clear that I analyzed business stuff during the day. You know, business papers, business processes, etc. These things need constant analyzing or they might get all out of whack. Most people can appreciate that. One must keep things strictly in whack at all times in the business world. Fine and good. But now I'm a Senior Financial Engineer. That means I engineer finances? That doesn't sound good at all. I like to think of myself as driving a financial choo-choo train, but I don’t mention that fantasy at work. Business people don’t really have a sense of humor about business things. They take business things very, very seriously.

When I was a twenty-something slacker, we always used to make fun of Systems Analysts. Not the people themselves, just the job title, because it meant absolutely nothing to us. One of the people in The Onion’s photo opinion section is usually a Systems Analyst, or at least that was the case in the mid-1990s. Maybe there are so many Systems Analysts in The Onion’s target demographic now that they’ve had to make some changes. Regardless, though, I am one of those people, from other people’s point of view, anyway.

But I think that what I do for a living rocks. It’s so much fun that some days I can’t believe they pay me to do this stuff. (On other days, when I’m doing tedious, bureaucratic business stuff—like updating spreadsheets that track the last time we audited process X, and trying to find the link to the drive where we stored the evidence of the audit, and then pasting the link into a spreadsheet and sending it to the guy who archives the spreadsheets—I remember exactly why they do have to pay me.) But primarily, the work I do, the part that I consider to be the part that rocks, is that I get to work on computer models. These models consume enormous quantities of data and try to resolve that data into very straightforward relationships among the quantities involved to predict useful things that you would never be able to deduce if you looked at a few hundred or even a few thousand of the data records. Instead, you follow this algorithm:

1. Dig into the data using various kinds of “computer programs”
2. Use “math” and “statistics” to find some relationships between the quantities
3. Design a model (an “equation”) that describes the relationships you found
4. Throw all the data at the model and see what comes out
5. Lather, rinse, repeat

Of course, there’s much more finesse involved in the process, but you probably don’t care too much about the details, so I spared you them.

Anyway, the reason I bring this all up is that The Economist recently featured an article that describes almost, but not quite exactly, what I get to play with all day long. The article focuses largely on analyzing consumer data and process-generated data to improve systems on the fly, while the models I work on are a little more static and straightforward. But the concept is the same: Distilling meaningful relationships out of piles upon piles of numbers and using those relationships to your advantage.

Algorithms: Business by Numbers
Sep 13th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Consumers and companies increasingly depend on a hidden mathematical world

ALGORITHMS sound scary, of interest only to dome-headed mathematicians. In fact they have become the instruction manuals for a host of routine consumer transactions. Browse for a book on Amazon.com and algorithms generate recommendations for other titles to buy. Buy a copy and they help a logistics firm to decide on the best delivery route. Ring to check your order's progress and more algorithms spring into action to determine the quickest connection to and through a call-centre. From analysing credit-card transactions to deciding how to stack supermarket shelves, algorithms now underpin a large amount of everyday life.

Their pervasiveness reflects the application of novel computing power to the age-old complexities of business. “No human being can work fast enough to process all the data available at a certain scale,” says Mike Lynch, boss of Autonomy, a computing firm that uses algorithms to make sense of unstructured data. Algorithms can. As the amount of data on everything from shopping habits to media consumption increases and as customers choose more personalisation, algorithms will only become more important.

Algorithms can take many forms. At its core, an algorithm is a step-by-step method for doing a job. These can be prosaic—a recipe is an algorithm for preparing a meal—or they can be anything but: the decision-tree posters that hang on hospital walls and which help doctors work out what is wrong with a patient from his symptoms are called medical algorithms.

This formulaic style of thinking can itself be a useful tool for businesses, much like the rigour of good project-management. But computers have made algorithms far more valuable to companies. “A computer program is a written encoding of an algorithm,” explains Andrew Herbert, who runs Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Britain. The speed and processing power of computers mean that algorithms can execute tasks with blinding speed using vast amounts of data.

Some of these tasks are more mechanistic than others. For instance, people often make mistakes when they key in their credit-card numbers online. With millions of transactions being processed at a time, a rapid way to weed out invalid numbers helps to keep processing times down. Enter the Luhn algorithm (see below), named after its inventor, Hans Luhn, an IBM researcher. The numbers on a credit card identify the card type, the issuer and the user's account number. The last number of all is set to ensure that the Luhn algorithm produces a figure divisible by ten. If it is, the card number has been properly entered and the processing can go ahead.

The Luhn algorithm performs a simple calculation. But the real power of algorithms emerges when they are put to work on much more complex problems. As far as most businesses are concerned, these problems typically fall into two types: improving various processes, such as how a network is configured and a supply chain is run, or analysing data on things such as customer spending.

UPS uses algorithms to help deliver the millions of packages that pass through its transportation network every day in the most efficient way possible. The simplest routes are easy to draw up. If a driver has only three destinations to visit, he can take only six possible routes. But the number of possible routes explodes as the destinations increase. There are more than 15 trillion, trillion possible routes to take on a journey with just 25 drop-off points—and an average day for a UPS driver in America involves 150 destinations. The picture is further complicated by constraints such as specified drop-off and pick-up times for drivers or runway lengths and noise restrictions for aircraft. “Algorithms provide benefits when the choices are so great that they are impossible to process in your head,” says UPS's Jack Levis.

Go here, go there

Solving this “travelling-salesman problem” means a lot to UPS. For its fleet of aircraft in America, the company uses an algorithm called VOLCANO (which stands for Volume, Location and Aircraft Network Optimiser). Developed jointly with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it is used by three different planning groups within UPS—one to plan schedules for the following four to six months, one to work out what kind of facilities and aircraft might be needed over the next two to ten years, and one to plan for the peak season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Getting the scheduling wrong imposes a heavy cost: flying half-empty planes or leasing extra aircraft is an expensive business. UPS reckons that VOLCANO has saved the company tens of millions of dollars since its introduction in 2000.

Logistics firms are far from the only ones working on “optimisation” algorithms. Telecoms operators use algorithms to establish the quickest connections for phone calls through their networks or to retrieve web pages speedily from the internet. Manufacturers and retailers use them to fine tune their supply chains. Call centres decide where to place an incoming call, based on things such as the customer's location, the length of queues that operators have to deal with and the reason for people calling.

Jeff Gordon, who looks after innovation for Convergys, a call-centre operator, says that the efficiency of algorithms is as crucial to his industry as the quality of call agents: “If you get the algorithm wrong and put customers into the wrong hands you degrade the experience. No one likes being handed off to someone else.”

The most powerful algorithms are those that cope with continual changes (see article). The delivery schedules for online grocers have huge “feedback loops” in which the delivery times chosen by customers affect the routes that vans take, which in turn affects the choice of delivery slots made available to customers. UPS is working on a real-time algorithm for its drivers that can recalibrate the order of deliveries on the fly, in much the same way that satellite-navigation systems in cars adjust themselves if a driver chooses to ignore a suggested route.

In the world of the internet, operators are looking at ways of marrying up the algorithms that find the shortest path through a network and those that control the speed with which information flows. At the moment, the routing algorithm does not talk to the flow-control algorithm, which means paths do not change even when there is congestion. According to Marc Wennink, a researcher at Britain's BT, combining the algorithms would mean that tasks such as downloading files could become much more resilient to network disruption. It would also allow BT to make better use of its existing network capacity.

Airports also have a keen interest in dynamic algorithms. Passengers at London's Heathrow and other congested airports often sit in a long queue of planes waiting near the runway to depart. Delays happen because air-traffic controllers need to leave a safety margin between aircraft as they take off. This margin depends on the size and speed of an aircraft, and re-ordering the queue can minimise the delay before all the planes get into the air (mathematicians call this the departure problem). Air-traffic controllers have always reordered planes in the departure queue manually, but researchers are working on algorithms that would be more efficient.

Just as optimisation algorithms come in handy when people are swamped by vast numbers of permutations, so statistical algorithms help firms to grapple with complex datasets. Dunnhumby, a data-analysis firm, uses algorithms to crunch data on customer behaviour for a number of clients. Its best-known customer (and majority-owner) is Tesco, a British supermarket with a Clubcard loyalty-card scheme that generates a mind-numbing flow of data on the purchases of 13m members across 55,000 product lines. To make sense of it all, Dunnhumby's analysts cooked up an algorithm called the rolling ball.

It works by assigning attributes to each of the products on Tesco's shelves. These range from easy-to-cook to value-for-money, from adventurous to fresh. In order to give ratings for every dimension of a product, the rolling-ball algorithm starts at the extremes: ostrich burgers, say, would count as very adventurous. The algorithm then trawls through Tesco's purchasing data to see what other products (staples such as milk and bread aside) tend to wind up in the same shopping baskets as ostrich burgers do. Products that are strongly associated will score more highly on the adventurousness scale. As the associations between products become progressively weaker on one dimension, they start to get stronger on another. The ball has rolled from one attribute to another. With every product categorised and graded across every attribute, Dunnhumby is able to segment and cluster Tesco's customers based on what they buy.

Where to put the biscuits

The rolling-ball algorithm is in its fourth version. Refinements occur every year or two, to add new attributes or to tweak the maths. All these data then feed into a variety of decisions, such as the ranges to put into each store and which products should sit next to each other on the shelves. “All this sophisticated data analysis and it comes down to where you put the biscuits,” laments Martin Hayward, director of consumer strategy at Dunnhumby.

Fraud detection has a touch more glamour to it. SPSS, another data-analysis firm, uses algorithms to scrutinise customer data and to build propensity scores that predict how people will behave. One of its clients is ClearCommerce, which provides payment-processing services to online merchants. SPSS helped ClearCommerce to build a system that looks at a customer's past transactions and learns what hints at fraud—it might be the amount of money being spent, the shipping details and the time of day, and so on. Transactions then get a fraud-propensity score based on these characteristics; merchants decide which scores should ring alarm bells and how to respond.

Algorithms are most commonly associated with internet-search engines. “The tussle between MSN, Google and Yahoo! is about whose algorithm produces the best results to a query,” observes Microsoft's Mr Herbert. Ask.com, another search engine, has even tried to popularise the term in an advertising campaign. Few other types of companies are so obviously dependent on algorithms for success, but the role that they play is rising in importance for two reasons.

The first is the sheer amount of data that is now available to companies. The information floodwaters are rising everywhere. Smart meters give utility firms data on consumption patterns inside households. Digital media will make it easier for firms such as Dunnhumby to see how what people read online and watch on television affects what they buy.

Online shopping means that internet merchants now know what customers are browsing as well as buying. Search engines are mining their own information on the relationship between queries and clickthroughs so as to improve their ranking algorithms. “For the first time in business history there is more information than many organisations' capacity to deal with it,” says Dunnhumby's Mr Hayward. Algorithms are a way to cope.

The second reason why algorithms are becoming more important is that companies inevitably want to use all this new data to do more complicated things. In particular, they want to respond to each customer in a personalised way. Tesco does this by using its analysis to tailor direct-marketing offers to each Clubcard member. As well as segmenting its customers on how they live, the data also enable the supermarket rapidly to spot shifts in their consumption patterns (caused by children going to university, say). Tesco's response rates to such targeted marketing stands at 10-20%, against an industry average of only around 1%.

Convergys wants to bring more real-time data to the operation of call-centres. Mr Gordon gives the example of a customer who calls an electricity utility from an area that has suffered a power failure and, because of where they are speaking from, is automatically put through to an operator who can deal with his queries. Such algorithms help firms to tease simplicity from complexity.

Algorithms are not for everyone. Some companies will always generate more data than others, of course: retailers, utilities and telecoms firms process many more transactions than house insurers, whose deals tend to happen once a year. Some will also be more focused than others on how algorithms can shave costs or maximise capacity. Firms that enjoy high margins and strong demand are going to be less worried about the efficiency of their supply chains, says Hau Lee, of Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Rocket science for non-boffins

What is more, lots of things have to fall into place for algorithms to work. They tend to be highly complex: it is not easy to find people with the right skills to develop and refine them. The systems within which the algorithms run—the user interface—need to be intuitive to non-boffins. “This is rocket science but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to use it,” says Jack Noonan, boss of SPSS. The inputs have to be right. One UPS planning model routed all the packages in the system through Iowa, which perplexed everyone until they found an error in the data that made it appear to be free to send packages via Iowa. The algorithm was right, in other words, but the data were wrong. Mr Noonan says that SPSS's “secret sauce” lies in its ability to deal with missing or unreliable data, rather than the algorithms themselves.

Above all, human judgment still has a role—a point perhaps reinforced by the recent performance of algorithmically driven quantitative funds in the financial markets. In fraud detection, for example, algorithms can eliminate the majority of transactions that are above suspicion but a human is still best placed to analyse the dodgy ones. Dunnhumby is trying to overlay attitudinal research on top of purchasing data to understand why people buy things as well as what they buy. Even so, Autonomy's Mr Lynch is convinced that algorithms are on the march. Algorithms process data to arrive at an answer. The more data they can process the more accurate the answer. For that reason, he says, “they are bound to take over the world”.

Certain kinds of rare events are called black swans, after Nassim Taleb’s term to describe the kind of unexpected, rare events that have significant and unanticipated consequences (the Internet, September 11, and so on). But not all rare events are black swans. Some are just rare, simply tail events. In any distribution of possible outcomes, many are probable and a few are outliers. Flip a coin 400 times. Odds are that you’ll see heads roughly 200 times, give or take. Yet there is a nonzero probability that you'll flip that coin 399 times before you see the first head. It’s a very small probability, but it could happen.

I mention this by way of introduction to my recent tail event. I mentioned in my last post that I’d just made a huge amateur investing mistake and that in all likelihood I had just flushed down the toilet a pretty huge sum of money. Huge for me, anyway.

In real time, I spent almost two weeks sitting on a lot of virtually worthless stock options, trying to come to terms with the stupidity and/or incompetence of a novice in way over his head. As I said at the time, “I’d gladly have given [that money] to any number of charities or individuals, but that is not an option available to me now.” Even though I have slowly but steadily come to regard myself as an atheist during the past seven or eight years, I found myself occasionally making promises to “the air, or any kind of supernatural entity that may or may not exist, given appropriate caveats, and of course assuming that said entity, given its existence, is the kind of entity that steps in to micromanage human affairs based on its own selfish wishes” that, if things worked out such that I didn’t lose all that money, I would gladly donate it to a collection of mindfully chosen charities whose goal it is to improve the lives of people having a difficult time in the world.

And as a result of making such pacts, or more precisely, as a result of allowing for the possibility that someone might be listening to them, I found myself falling into that simplistic mindset wherein one starts implicitly viewing events in the world as responses on the part of an all-powerful and ever-active deity to the unseen, internal sequence of thoughts, motives, beliefs, and doubts, that pass through a person’s awareness during the course of a day. Knowing full well that God does not manipulate the stock market to answer the selfish wishes of a non-believer, I nonetheless caught myself on at least one occasion wondering if he might. Realizing how weak-minded this was, I tried to turn the pacts inward and vowed to myself to follow through regardless of whether some entity had been listing, to follow through simply because it would be the right thing to do. This was the First Axiom of Morality that my mother had beat into my skull from as far back as I can remember: Do the right thing, even if no one is watching. But even so, as the stock price began to creep up and I realized that these things might not end up completely worthless after all, the deal gradually weakened: from donating all of the money, to only the profit, to just the percentage of a typical tithe. I justified each of these transitions admirably, but justified them nonetheless. A supplicant will say certain things that he might conveniently forget when he’s been given shelter, a warm bath, and a hot meal.

And, in fact, were God testing the sincerity of my resolutions, he could have chosen no better way than to make the bet pay off, and pay off big. That’s exactly what happened. On one hand, it was quite fortunate for me. It’s like I fell down a hole and found a bag of buried cash with my name on it. “To Mr. Proportion, from The Fates.” On the other hand, I now have that most difficult of decisions to make. Knowing (in my renewed certainty of God’s complete lack of desire or ability to micromanage human affairs) that there will be no consequences, I could conveniently forget to give any of it away. The First Axiom of Morality pretty much prevents me from completely reneging on the deal I made, but the Theorem of Rationalization, along with the associated Lemma of Justification of What’s Convenient and Self-serving, makes it quite easy to give away much less than the standard tithing percentage and still argue that it’s better than if I’d given nothing.

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, it all happened on a Friday I spent sitting on various airplanes, far away from Wall Street and my computer. Knowing that I’d be away from the computer and unable to obsessively track the price of this particular option throughout the day, I programmed a series of automatic trades to sell various increments at various prices if the price went up while I was away. I had bought these things for 15 cents each, so I set up the trades to sell some at 20 cents, some at 25 cents, and so on up to 40 cents. These may seem like trifling amounts, but I had accidentally bought quite a lot of them, and if you look at the prices as ratios, you see that selling them for 30 cents each would actually double my money. I thought it really unlikely that the price would go that high, but set up the trades as a precaution and expected still to own most, if not all, of these options when I returned on Monday.

So I was quite surprised, when I got to my destination and ended up somewhat randomly spending an hour at a public library waiting to be picked up, to see what I saw when I reserved 15 minutes at the public internet terminal and logged into my account. The stock price had skyrocketed that day. There was now an enormous amount of cash sitting in my account, and I no longer owned a single option. Quite the tail event.

I’m proud to say that I’ve identified four worthwhile charities this week and, again thanks to the miracle of the Intertubes, it took approximately 25 seconds to fire off donations to each of them. But my samaritanosity is starting to feel satiated, and I haven’t even reached half the standard tithing percentage yet. Did my mother fail? Or is okay to be only human? Or is it none of the above?

Recently, I made a mistake. It was a very expensive mistake. I decided to experiment with trading options, which belong to a class of financial instruments you may have heard of: “derivatives.” Essentially, an option gives you the option, but not the obligation, to buy or sell shares of a stock at a set price, regardless of what the market price is. Options expire on a set date, and if the stock behaves in particular ways between when you buy the option and that date, you can make a lot of money. If the stock behaves otherwise, then the option expires worthless. But they are cheap, in general, and are often used as a hedge on a stock you own. For instance, if I own Apple stock, which I do, I can buy an option relatively cheaply that pays off if the stock declines. So if Apple stock declines, my shares lose value but I make money on the option, which offsets my total loss. If Apple stock goes up, then the option expires worthless but I’ve made money off the appreciating shares. It works something like insurance in this scenario. I pay a small flat fee to cover my butt in an the event of something unexpected or inconvenient. These are not necessarily intuitive concepts, but after doing some research, I thought I'd see just to see how the theory played out in reality by making a small practice trade. I decided to buy a cheap option on a different stock, an option that was a bit “out of the money,” which means that as things were at the time, it would likely expire worthless, which is why it was so cheap. But if this particular stock went up, which I believe it will in the not-too distant future, then the option would pay off many times what I paid for it. A little like a lottery ticket, I suppose, but educational and not completely dependent on random chance.

My mistake concerns another aspect of options that I didn’t encounter in my research. The crucial detail is that a single option is actually an option to buy a bundle of shares, usually 100. The option also costs 100 times as much to buy as the amount listed. So when I placed the order for y options costing $x each, my account was immediately charged $100x, and I was granted the option of buying 100y shares of stock. This is not intuitive behavior at all, which I understand now, in retrospect, is one of the many reasons why every page that mentions options on the online trading company’s website has a huge warning plastered at the top: “Options are not suitable for all investors, as the special risks inherent to options trading may expose investors to potentially rapid and substantial losses.” Or, in short, “Chumps best watch out.”

For me, $y was pocket change, because I knew I was making a practice transaction. But $100y was not pocket change. And there is no way to undo a trade. So I’m fairly like to lose a lot of money when this particular option expires in late October. The upside is that there’s a tiny but nonzero chance that I’ll become a multithousandaire instead. Given that this is the only basket available to me, it’s the one into which I’ve put all my eggs. If either of my readers knows anything about manipulating stock prices, drop me a note. We’ll chat.

The thing that bothers me most about this loss is not that the money will be gone. That’s painful, but the real pain comes from the giant flushing sound that indicates where it has gone, and all because I didn’t read far enough into the manual. I’d gladly have given $100y to any number of charities or individuals, but that is not an option available to me now. No pun intended.

Corinne found me banging my head against a wall (figuratively) and asked what was wrong. I admitted my gaffe, and by way of making me feel better, she told me about this Guatemalan gentleman who recently lost a lot of money. He came to the US illegally and worked for 11 years as a dishwasher, making $5.50 an hour for most of it. Over the course of 11 years, he managed to save $59,000. If you’ve ever made $5.50 an hour, you know that it’s very difficult to cover all your expenses on such a wage, let alone save over $5000 a year. From this we know that Pedro Zapeta is a very frugal man, and probably did not enjoy many of the material comforts that were available to him in his adopted home. I suspect that he worked more than eight hours a day, and he perhaps shared a small apartment with several other people not related to him, probably more than one to a bedroom. I further suspect that he did not particularly enjoy his life here, but instead got through many days by thinking of the life he would have many years hence, back in Guatemala, living off the wad of cash he was working so hard to save. 11 years. That’s a very long time to live a life in the name of diligent delayed gratification. For the average person, that’s 20 percent of an adult life.

One day, Pedro decided he’d saved enough to realize his dreams, so he packed up his $59,000 into a duffle bag and headed for the airport. He apparently didn’t pick up much English while he was in the US, and as a result didn’t understand the part of the customs paperwork that informed him he was required to declare any cash in excess of $10,000. He didn’t declare it, and when it was discovered, it was seized. At that point they realized that he was in the country illegally, so they called in the INS, who promptly deported him.

My day was a walk in the country compared to this story, but hearing it didn’t make me feel much better. In fact, I think it made me feel worse. When his case became public last year, folks who sympathized chipped in and raised $10,000 in donations for him. However, he is not allowed access to that money for a reason that is not explained in the article. For me, though, the clincher of Pedro’s story is how the federal prosecutors assigned to his case tried to buy him off. According to CNN, “Robert Gershman, one of Zapeta's attorneys, said federal prosecutors later offered his client a deal: He could take $10,000 of the original cash seized, plus $9,000 of the donations as long as he didn't talk publicly and left the country immediately.” But Pedro stuck to his guns, which explains why his case is still wending its way through the courts two years after the incident. Go Pedro!

Possibly more disturbing than the ass-headed reaction of the authorities in this case (who are, admittedly, just following the ass-headed laws), is the reaction of the ass-headed right wing (in this case, self-appointed exposers of Liberal Media Bias), who are outraged that this man admits to not paying income taxes the whole time he was in the country, that he was illegal, that he never learned English, that he is brown. Um, excuse me, right-wing. Having spent several years earning $5.50 an hour, I can tell you confidently that, come tax time, you always get 100% of your deductions back, due to convenient reality that the federal minimum wage places you safely below the poverty line.

Nonetheless, the bloggers (who are far more kind than the commenters, as you’ll see if you dare read down to the kind of hateful, xenophobic comments posted by the kind of people who read right-wing blogs) have things like this to say about Pedro:

It is an insult to all law-abiding Americans to frame Zapeta's “mistake” as being his failure to successfully flee the country with his ill-gotten, untaxed cash. Zapeta’s “mistake” was entering this country illegally in the first place. Zapeta compounded his error by failing to pay income taxes—which over 11 years would likely comprise a significant portion of the $59,000. Wouldn’t we all like to keep 100% of our earnings for the next 11 years?    

Now I’m definitely more sad than I was. I can handle losing some cash. I can even handle the ass-headed way in which I lost it. But I am becoming less and less able to handle the fact that public discourse in my country, whose founding rhetoric is among the most beautiful and inspiring rhetoric ever crafted, is ever more dominated by small-minded, hate-filled regurgitators of bullshit rhetoric that would have made certain hate-filled fascists of the twentieth century proud. Like this commenter:

Had you came legally and attempted to learn english you wouldn't have this problem. You are a crimminal, be happy that we are only keeping the money and sendng you home, In my world we would keep the money, sentence you to hard labor, force you to pay back taxes and any tax payer paid services you scammed. We woyld also shave your head and brand you with a huge "I" in the middle of your forehead. We would allow you to choose what the "I" stood for though, illegal or idiot, your choice.

I bought a new iMac a couple of weeks ago. It’s pretty nice. I bought the 24" model with the new brushed aluminum case. It’s roughly ten times faster than my old computer, depending how you do the math, with double the memory and ten times the storage. The screen has two-and-a-half times as much real estate. Everything is bigger, better, faster, stronger, and more robust. My computing life has really turned a corner.

Normally the frugal sort, I justified the purchase of the hugest iMac because the price was brought down—by a combination of a $100 student discount and the offer (to students only) of a free iPod nano (which could then be sold on eBay) with the purchase of any computer—to within $50 of the smaller iMac. I divided the $50 by the five years I expect to own this computer, and figured that I'd be willing to pay $5 a year to have the luxury model. Who could argue with that math?

The selling of the iPod on eBay was more of a challenge than I thought. About two days after I ordered the computer and the iPod, Apple released a whole new line of iPods and lowered the prices. This sort of put a hole in my plan to recoup some of the cost of the luxury iMac. I bought the 4 GB iPod Nano (tall thin model) for $199 and before it even arrived at the house you could buy an 4 GB iPod Nano with video (short fat model) for $149. So I was surprised when my first auction ended at $157. But I am already familiar with the pattern of people getting so caught up in the auction that they overpay for used stuff on eBay.

It made sense when I got an email from eBay saying that they had “administratively” cancelled the winning bid because it was made by someone using a hacked account. I tried contacting a few other high bidders, but they were suddenly uninterested or tried to bargain me down. So I relisted it. Finally, about 16 days after I started the first auction, it sold for $141. Not bad.

Along the way, I had this sort of weird exchange with this sort of weird guy who seemed not to understand that I, as a guy selling stuff on eBay, am not in control of the eBay computer system. It started off with a standard question, but by the end it became clear that he thought I was eBay, both customer service and tech support.

Why is the UPC removed? Has this ever been used? Does it come with the warranty from apple?

The UPC was removed because I received a rebate on it as part of Apple's back-to-school deal. From the original listing:

"It was purchased with Apple's back-to-school promotion, and to process the rebate it was necessary to open the package to remove the original UPC information. However, a copy of this information (serial number, etc) will be included with the iPod. The iPod itself has never been used."

The iPod has never been used. It is under the standard warranty from Apple.

Thank you. I need to replace my daughter's iPod that got washed and dried. It is for her birthday.

Oh, it really hurts when that happens (an iPod gets washed).

This iPod is perfect for a gift. She'll be so excited to open it that she's not going to care if it has a UPC code or not.

I'll include in the box a photocopy of the part of the packaging I removed. It has the UPC code and the serial number.

Thanks for your bid.

I sure hope I win. I can't stay on the computer 24/7. Do you know anyone else who may have a red ipod nano.

Hi, sorry, don't know anyone else who has one.

eBay's bidding system works by letting you just enter one bid, which is the maximum bid you're willing to pay. It automatically bids in small increments up to that amount, but no more than it has to do to keep you in the lead. Once it hits the maximum, only then does the other person get ahead. So just bid the maximum amount you're willing to pay and let eBay do all that micromanaging for you. (Keep in mind that the brand new ones from Apple go for $150, so you'd be silly to pay more than that on eBay).

Last night I went online and placed a maximum bid of $145 for the iPod for my daughter and the bid was confirmed. I come in this morning and it shows that someone outbid me with $141.00 and my $145 maximum bid does not even show up. Please explain.

Sorry, I have no idea. That's a technical matter for eBay to explain. In my list of bids, I see your maximum bid being $123.46.

It was last night around 8:30 and it said bid accepted. Now I cannot locate another one for my daughter's birthday. Who should I get in touch with?

If you're willing to pay $150, which you seem to be, you can get one of the newer models right from the Apple store (online or physical). http://www.apple.com. That way, you don't have to wait for an auction to end. Otherwise, eBay is probably your best bet.

I offered to buy my daughter the new one, but she wants the exact same one I purchased for Christmas which was the red 4gb nano. I had it engraved. It lasted for about 3 weeks until it got washed and dried.

We’d like to introduce a new feature on Strange Proportion. Many of you couldn’t get enough of our Pennypages feature in 2005, and we’ve been neglecting this young star’s fans for too long. So this month, we’re unveiling LOLpenny. That’s right. We’ve caught the meme. We just can’t shake it, and neither can Penny. Click on a thumbnail to enlarge it.

But seriously . . . you must peruse PhiLOLsophers, courtesy of Pete Mandik’s Brainhammer. (If you’re at all intestered in philosophical questions surrounding consciousness and cognition, the nonLOL parts of his blog might entertain you as well.)

NO - U KANT!

I have some advice for you. I know that unasked-for advice can be among the most unwelcome impositions, but for your sake I am hoping to preempt any thoughtless, or at last not fully thought out, decisions you might make about your future, given your propensity to leap before looking, your slightly overoptimistic sense of being able to accomplish anything you put your mind to, and that ever-prideful claim you like to make about being able to endure any hardship for at least a short period of time.

If you were thinking about taking a graduate-level summer school class in linear algebra while working full time, I might suggest that you think twice. Who knows: it may turn out that the class requires two hours of class time every evening, so that the only time you'd have to do your two to three hours of nightly homework would be after class, wedged in around shoveling some instant dinner into your mouth and walking the dog, who's been home alone for ten hours since you went to work in the morning. It may end up that you have to leave some studying undone every night so you can go to bed in time to get to work early because the class schedule you've chosen requires you to leave work before 4:00 pm every day. Now, if you've taken on this schedule, and your boss offers you a new job and a promotion, but warns you that there will be a period of time during which you'll actually be doing two jobs—the old one and the new one, while taking some additional time to train your replacement—perhaps, if this double-job time span should exactly overlap with your five-week summer school class, you should take a moment to think things through.

It's only five weeks, you may have thought, and knowing you, you'll be thinking you can endure anything for five weeks. You've told me a hundred times about that god-awful job you used to have, what, back in 1997? The one where you worked 60 hours a week without overtime, yada yada yada, hauling bags of asbestos and demolition debris all over Chicago in unsafe vehicles while your boss screamed at you on the two-way radio until the veins bulged out of his neck? I know that job, plus getting your best grades ever the year you lost both your parents, made you think that the jackboots of the world were naught but water off your back, in the case of this mixed metaphor "you" playing the role of a duck with regard to the behavior of the water.

And all those years in the gifted math program in junior high and high school, not to mention those three math essay awards they gave you in college, may have led you to believe that you were somehow preternaturally-abled in the mathematical arts. Recall, though, that the mathematics program at your "liberal arts" college rarely actually required that you demonstrate any real computational facility; its focus being more conceptual meant that you never really had to "calculate" anything before you punched holes in the proofs of, say, Lobachevsky, or the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper. You just had to follow and understand their notation. In Lobachevsky or EPR this wasn't so bad, but Gauss and Riemann did really throw you for a loop. Riemann threw a lot of people through a loop, though, given that he tended to write like this:

I have in the first place, therefore, set myself the task of constructing the notion of a multiply extended magnitude out of general notions of magnitude. It will follow from this that a multiply extended magnitude is capable of different measure-relations, and consequently that space is only a particular case of a triply extended magnitude. But hence flows as a necessary consequence that the propositions of geometry cannot be derived from general notions of magnitude, but that the properties which distinguish space from other conceivable triply extended magnitudes are only to be deduced from experience. Thus arises the problem, to discover the simplest matters of fact from which the measure-relations of space may be determined; a problem which from the nature of the case is not completely determinate, since there may be several systems of matters of fact which suffice to determine the measure-relations of space—the most important system for our present purpose being that which Euclid has laid down as a foundation. These matters of fact are—like all matters of fact—not necessary, but only of empirical certainty; they are hypotheses. We may therefore investigate their probability, which within the limits of observation is of course very great, and inquire about the justice of their extension beyond the limits of observation, on the side both of the infinitely great and of the infinitely small.

But that's beside the point. This math class for which you've signed up may, in fact, require things of you that you've not really thought about or done since you were an engineering major, briefly, back in—what was it, 1991?—before you dropped out of college (the first time). In and of itself, that might be "doable," in the parlance of our times. But compounded with the situation at work that I mentioned previously, I suggest that perhaps you think twice before undertaking such nonsense. If it's not too late. It's not too late, is it?

Well, the groveling sycophants have finally swayed my otherwise iron will. We’ve long known that Penny’s a hit, but we had no idea that so many people really wanted to see pictures and movies of our new dog until both of our readers wrote in to request more. And, strive as we do to keep our fickle audience satiated at all times, Strange Proportion has unveiled a new feature: Pennypages. You know, pages about our dog, Penny. But I’ve got a Bill Cosby song running through my head now, too.

So this is my website about stuff I think is interesting. It ignores all the advice given by the countless sources who encourage bloggers to stick to a single topic, like we’re supposed to strive to be that one boring guy at the party who just won’t shut up about the intricacies of contract law. Clearly, the best way to attract a steady base of readers who share your interest in lawn furniture, cubicle decorating, or the Kingdom of God is to write exclusively about that single topic and nothing else. This technique, as a side note, is also crucial to boosting your targeted ad revenue (for instance, look a few inches to your left—on this website, they have a hard time figuring out whether we’re talking about brain tumors or seeking Sikh singles by the sea shore).

I think, though, that I might start tossing another topic into the mix. Since I don’t travel much these days on account of having a real job, and you don’t really care about how cute my dog is (or do you?), and I don’t have time to post multiple times daily about the latest indictments on Capitol Hill and how stupid that other blogger is for not crediting my post when I totally had my link to the AP article up like 12 minutes before he did, I might occasionally muse about the cost of owning your own home these days. I will tread carefully, because my job revolves around this very issue, and I certainly don’t want to raise anyone’s hackles by mentioning anything that might be considered even remotely proprietary. Nonetheless, it is widely known these days that housing prices have been shooting through the roof for a couple of years now. As I finally find myself in the kind of economic space where I might consider buying one of my own—you know, nothing fancy, just four walls and a small patch of grass for the ol’ hound—my jaw drops at the lack of possibilities. In this town, anything under $400,000 is a one-room condo or in a part of town where you don’t feel comfortable outside at night. I was reading in the Washington Post today about efforts to implement an affordable housing program for households who earn less than $90,000 a year, because they find it increasingly difficult to afford house payments. Where I’m from, a little town with heart in the heart of a big country, $90,000 a year is a pretty nice living, and half a million dollars at least buys a McMansion these days.

You can read the article here. For the record, I know that the housing prices cannot directly be attributed to the incompetence of the current administration, nor even to Alan Greenspan, though the historically low interest rates under his Fed chairmanship have certainly led directly to the current situation. They probably propped up the economy more than we care to realize when the tech bubble burst, but easy money has now created its own monster: an asset bubble.

This is no ordinary asset, either. This is the asset that constitutes the majority of the wealth for many of the 70% of Americans who own their own homes. Widespread home ownership, by granting a large majority of citizens a stake in the economic health of the country and their local communities, plays an enormous role in stabilizing the American economy. Just take a look around the projects, or look at the crime rates in neighborhoods where many people own their homes compared to adjacent neighborhoods where most people rent. A vested interested in the health of one’s community does more than all the bake sales in the world.

The housing bubble, if we may call it that, is not endemic to this country. Australia and Britain, among others, have already cooled sharply, but most of Europe is heading straight for the same cliff at the same breakneck pace we are, even if they do know more about cheese. And when we reach that cliff—at least the sheer vertical precipices in southern California, Florida, Las Vegas, and the other superheated markets—those caught holding the bag will have little choice but to drop it like a hot potato. I’m less worried about the investors and flippers who will get burned than about the families of four who got into bidding wars to take a shack for half a mil before it became a mil.

While I am happy to have had very steadily increasing site traffic over the past couple of weeks, it disappoints me somewhat that more than two-thirds of this week’s visitors have come in search of cubicle decorating guidelines. I did write about cubicle decorating a few months ago, it’s true, and I was proud of the joke for a day or two. But here I am, tirelessly transcribing my most heartfelt hopes and dreams so that you, dear friend, will have but one more tiny nugget of wisdom, once a month or so, to help you through your life of quiet desperation. After all, when miracles find their way home to heaven, all spent and frustrated, their maker accepts them back with open hands, washes them, and whispers, “We’re that much closer now.” When I’m silent for weeks on end, it’s only because I’m out there, in sort of a, you know, virtual sense, trolling through the muck and mud of the week’s auto-generated and continuously updated headlines to bring you the juiciest recent tidbits, reading the news for all you sinners.

Why just tonight I was hard at work writing about the American government paying Iraqi newspapers to print pro-American propaganda as news, but no one cares about that. Nor do they seem to care about secret CIA prisons, Michael Brown (“Anything specific I need to do or tweak?") starting up his own disaster-readiness consulting company, or US-funded mercenaries filming trophy videos of themselves allegedly shooting at random civilian vehicles. They want “christmas door decorating contest ideas” and “decorating a cubicle for christmas” and “feng shui your office cubicle” and “weird christmas decoration” and “decorate office like gingerbread house.” If I ran a cubicle-decorating website, I’d be floating on air. I’m famous, after all! Everyone who’s ever thought to consult the internets for inspiration when trying to win that coveted “best cubicle” prize at the office comes to my website! What higher honor is there?

This is a story that begins with a beautiful stroll on a perfectly crisp autumn day and ends with a dead deer sprawled out in our neighbor’s lawn, so read no further if either of these is likely to deliver sadness to your otherwise unencumbered spirit.

On Sunday we took our new dog Penelope, a year-old hound mix, for a walk in Rock Creek Park. This park is an enormous wooded area that runs through the middle of DC, but it’s actually a national park and was the inspiration for the whole network of national parks, and lies about three blocks from our house, so whenever we feel like taking the dog out for an adventure or disappearing from circulation for a while, the park offers a ready opportunity. Penny started out her life with us scared to death of water, but I usually try to take us on a path that requires fording the creek (thanks to my new Chacos this is easy and worry-free due to the ability they afford me to seamlessly transition between land and water) on the way back to the house, and she has shown less and less fear on successive trips through the water, to the point of jumping headlong into waist-deep water last time. (Her fear of my new acoustic guitar—complete with trembling, shrinking, and skulking—is another story. I’ll try to tell it soon, but you know how it goes.)

We headed into the park on Sunday, and when we got far enough in, that is, far from roads and park police, we let Penny off the leash because one of her few real joys in life is tearing through the underbrush at high speeds in enormous circles around us. Circles, that is, until the buck previously far off and out of sight happened to make his presence known, and she was gone. A couple of minutes later, we saw him bounding through again from a different direction, Penny right behind, and then they disappeared down a hillside. After a few minutes of silence, C. walked off to try to find her. I stayed at the last place she had seen us, in case she had a good sense of direction. We both yelled a lot. Voices echo quite uniquely in the woods. I recommend experimenting.

Not less than 15 minutes later, just when I’d begun worrying that the next we’d hear of Penny would be the phone call from the person who found her dead body by the side of the road and called the number on the tags, she came trotting on a beeline toward me from over the hill in the general direction of where she’d disappeared. She kept a couple of feet away from me, sensing that this had not been a display of optimal dog behavior, but when I made it clear that I wasn’t mad she came right up and started telling me all about the buck she’d been chasing, how free and exuberant she’d felt while chasing him, and how it was alright, really, that she hadn’t caught him. The chase is the real joy, she explained, the unrestrained liberty of movement and the becoming pure muscle and speed are unparalleled in the realm of dog experience. During the chase, there is no leash.

But wait, you protest. This story is supposed to end with a dead deer.

It does, and it will. Patience.

So we came home from the park, and I spent the rest of the afternoon reading as the light declined at long angles, moving my chair across the lawn as the sunny spot traversed it. It’s been weeks since anyone at my house has mowed the lawn, but since I’ve mowed it thrice more than anyone else, I’m recusing myself from the task until spring. The long grass tickles up near my knees now, but it’s not so bad knowing how the coming weeks will be, when there will be no grass. After a while, I retreated to the front porch because the light became necessary for reading in the dusk. I decided to put Penny on a 50-foot line we’ve tied to the pillar so she could chew on the ends of sticks and choke herself trying to sniff at passing dogs while I read. Unfortunately, during the four seconds between the opening of the front door and the reaching of the end of the line, she spotted another deer in the lawn across the street, and she was gone.

The deer in Rock Creek Park often head out into our neighborhood, especially when the weather grows cold, to munch on our shrubs. They have few natural predators left, and are probably out of practice, perhaps even overconfident, when it comes to evading the chase. This one immediately took off into the back yard of the house, but I presume it was fenced in, because there was a great crashing sound and some clanging, and then the deer tore out from behind the house and started at full throttle down the sidewalk, Penny right behind. The two of them headed toward the main street near here, which was thankfully low on traffic at that time, and disappeared into a small patch of cultivated woods kept in the front yard of one of the houses. I ran after them, but of course it’s been years since my days as a track star, and it took me a minute to reach the scene.

When I arrived, the deer was on its back on the ground. It let out a short groan while Penny barked and circled frantically. I flagged down cars, waving my arms like an idiot, to get them to slow down because she was running back and forth across the street in her enthusiasm and it had become quite dark by this point. She eventually came near enough to grab, and I grabbed her, carrying her back to the house because I didn’t have the leash and just didn’t feel like walking the block back to our house hunched over holding her collar. I put her in the house and returned to the deer, expecting it to be up and gone by this point. Instead, I found it dead, a small trickle of blood on the blades of grass near its mouth.

I still cannot figure out what killed the deer. As proud as I’d be to have for a pet—in the guise of a sweet and affectionate slobberpuss who’s afraid of guitars and water and one particular tile on our living room floor—a vicious and fearless deerslayer, she didn’t do it. There hadn’t been time—they were only only out of my sight for half a minute, and she’s simply not big enough. One car passed during that time, but it didn’t hit the deer. I was close enough to have heard the thud, and the car would have stopped. The only likely option remaining is that our dear sweet Penny chased the deer into that nicely cultivated patch of trees, whereupon the deer hit its head on a branch, or in some other clumsy way brained itself or broke its neck. This seems unlikely too, but more likely than a random heart attack or a sniper’s bullet in an upscale two-story brick family-house neighborhood where homes not quite as nice as the one you grew up in sell for $800,000 in a couple of days.

I returned home and called the DC Capitol Police, who directed me to call the Metro Police, who forwarded me to Animal Control, who suggested I try Streets and Sanitation. Their automated menu system—I listened carefully because the menu had recently changed—directed me to press 1 for trash removal, 2 for eviction trash removal, or 3 for dead animal pickup. I pressed 3. They instructed me to remove all clothing and identification tags from my pet, and place it in a box near the curb. They would be round pick it up the following day between 6:45 and 2:30. They reminded me that the driver would not retrieve dead pets from under porches, in dog houses, or from within the house. The deer was tagless, had no sweater, and was already conveniently lying in the tall grass not three feet from the edge of the road, so I left it to grow cold slowly in the night.

There have been muffled criticisms, here and there, that I don’t write anymore. I just “make fancy links,” as one fan put it. Perhaps he or she was correct. I don’t write much these days. I'm very busy. I’ve got this job they make me go to, every day. When I’m not at work, I’m studying hard for the GRE, which is coming up for me here pretty soon. I’m confident enough about the math part, being one of those ‘mathy’ kinds of people, but my knowledge of obscure and/or archaic English vocabulary is apparently woefully lacking. I don’t even know what ‘insouciant’ means, let alone ‘perspicacious’ or ‘meretricious’. But, statistically speaking, my knowledge of these words—or more specifically, their antonyms—is an excellect predictor of my chances of successfully completing graduate school. So I’ve got these flash cards, and I spend some time every day memorizing them. Or, rather, I spend some time every day looking at them in sequence while my mind wanders off into the more remote corners of itself to listen to virtual birds chirping in the trees or stare at its feet and count the hairs on their toes.

Then there's the puppy hunt. We’ve decided to get one, even though our landylady has technically refused to allow it. She’s over 140 years old, so we’re thinking we’ll be able to convince her it’s my nephew visiting from Detroit. We’ve already bought the crate and the food and water bowls, the chew toy, the rope toy, and the leash. Now we just need the dog. The adopt-a-stray business has been revolutionized by the internet. You can just surf over to sites like www.petfinder.com and put in your zip code and some basic puppy criteria, and out spits a list of adoptable puppies in your area—complete with adorable enlargeable photographs—and the humane societies and/or foster homes where they currently reside, awaiting their ‘forever homes’, as it goes in the lingo. The part I didn’t expect when trying to adopt a stray or unwanted pet was the multipage applications and strict adoptive parent screening. Certainly a shelter wants to ensure that they are not giving a pet to an irresponsible owner, a dog fighter, a junkyard in need of a guard, or an Asian bistro. But to reject a potential adoptive dog parent because Beatrice can only go to a home with a fenced-in yard and another canine friend? I’ve never been made to feel so unworthy by people for whom I was at least in part trying to do a favor. Some of the questions on the most recent two-page application I received are clearly no-brainers designed to weed out the ones who didn’t bother to think ahead about what pet ownership entails:

• Do you understand that some of the dogs may not be housebroken and that changing the environment of the dog may cause the dog to have accident and or destroy accessible household items?
• Are you willing to take the time to housebreak and train the dog? ____yes ____no

But some are a little more invasive:

• Are you employed? If employed, where and for how long?
• Have you ever been convicted of a felony or criminal charge or been put on probation?
• Please list references that are familiar with your life style (one that is a relative, one that is an employer (if employed) and one other)

I suspect that some of the foster parents have become slightly too close to their wards, guarding them as jealously as the father of his only daughter from potential suitors. So instead of applying to these ‘rescues’ and other premium pet shelters, we’ve been going a little further out of our way to find sources of unwanted animals that are more amenable to actually finding homes for the them. And that takes some time.

Then there’s the whole getting married thing. My upcoming wedding does not rank third behind the GRE and getting a puppy in terms of importance, so don’t go jumping to conclusions. But it’s far enough off that the daily time commitment to planning the thing, these days anyway, is fairly low. Ask me again in April and I might have another story to tell.

In the in-between hours, therefore, there’s just not a lot of time to write, and furthermore, since the nasty hot nastiness of the nasty hot summer has dwindled into purty darn nice weather, I’ve been out enjoying that, taking weekend trips to exciting places such as the beach and whatnot, entertaining out-of-town guests, spending time with my lady friend, etc. And I don’t see many of the complainers maintaining websites and posting creative, well-written essays regularly distilled from the raw material of their lives. “Fancy links,” indeed. Harumph.

I was so busy quoting long-dead writers in the last post that I never did get around to elucidating what exactly it is that inspires me about immature age-old humor.

It’s the cyclical thing. C. and I talked about it one morning last week when I took advantage of my employer’s flextime arrangement. I decided to go in to work around ten a.m., which meant that we were free to eat a leisurely breakfast outside on our uncomfortable hand-me-down patio furniture.

(This is the same furniture, incidentally, upon which rest my laptop and I as yet one more gloriously perfect spring day in a string of perfect days falls into night. It’s already wasp season, but the mosquitos have yet to find us, and the birds are extraordinarily and noisily randy overhead. I worked from home today (another option available to me as part of my employer’s flextime arrangement), since the last morning commuter bus arrived and departed from my stop five minutes ahead of schedule—as it does with frustrating regularity—at which point I had two choices: (a) stand at the bus stop for half an hour, sit on the bus for fifteen minutes, and then walk fifteen minutes to work, wasting an hour of my morning, or (b) walk home, change into shorts and a ratty old tee-shirt, and commence with a miscellaneous day of the kind of short-and-sandals professionalism I grew to love in Santa Fe. I chose the latter. Even after taking the time to change and open all the windows in the house, I was still on the clock within 15 minutes, with a hot cup of coffee and some pumpkin bread to fuel the daily can of whoop-ass I open on the data.)

So, as I was saying, C. and I were talking about the cyclical thing, which means realizing that almost every moment of your life has been played out before a hundred billion times, and will be played out again a hundred billion times, by generations of people you’ll never meet, in all the places you’ll never go. The details change over time, and now many of the interactions happen by email or Blackberry, but the universals never change.

The kid will continue to tell his parents what they want to hear and then proceed to do whatever he wants anyway. He will continue to be too busy playing to come home to dinner on time. The parents will yell from the front porch. He will pretend he didn’t hear.

She will continue to wish that he would be a little less brutish, a little more thoughtful. She will talk with her friends at length about how to broach the subject. He will continue to make resolutions to be better, to remember to bring flowers occasionally, to drink less at cocktail parties, but he will always forget. She will keep quietly hoping he’ll change, but he won’t.

He will try to come to terms with his mother’s death, or his grandmother’s. He will avoid people at first, then realize that he needs their support, but he will not know how to ask for help. He will not understand the strange series of emotions that drive him to all kinds of extremes, from anger to hopelessness, from resentment to forgiveness to forgetfulness. He will yell at people who are trying to help him.

But it’s not just the Raymond Carver moments that repeat. Every moment, no matter how mundane or epiphanic, is a rerun. From this vantage point, as the hour grows later here in the back yard, through the illuminated windows of all the houses around I imagine parents are beginning to remind their children to get ready for bed. Children are complaining that it’s not bedtime yet. Lights in some rooms go out. TVs cast eerie blue flickering shadows on the walls. Wives read newspapers. Husbands clip toenails.

This is not to say that life is mundane, or that we’re all boring. Sure, there’s some melancholy in knowing that nothing I do is original, that every brilliant thought ever to percolate through my skull has been thunk thousands of times before, that every ecstatic moment of love, adventure, and victory I’ve ever had has been had before by more nameless faceless young men than can be counted. But there’s something immensely comforting in it too. Nothing so terrible will happen that hasn’t been endured before. No immeasurable all-consuming grief will topple me that hasn’t been outjoyed by ten thousand former young men who have been dust for centuries—and knowing that they did, even if the particular circumstances and storylines are lost, is a rallying call for everyone.

But it’s not the just Hallmark moments that repeat. That you’re here reading this now means that your parents met, at some point, when they were your age, if not older or younger, and were attracted to each other. They talked and discovered that the conversation was fulfilling. They became friends. They found each other’s arrangements of bone and muscle and skin mutually attractive and, after feeling various urges and surges of emotion, including but not limited to feelings of completeness and satisfaction, they waited some amount of time (or didn’t wait at all) to engage in official ceremonies with the state (or didn’t). Whatever the circumstances, you are the evidence that, one night (or day), they both took off their clothes and did it like monkeys at the zoo.

When you’re standing at the bus stop, or waiting in line at the grocery store, look for this: A beautiful young woman walks past. It’s spring now, so she’s wearing one of those summery dresses that floats on the wind. She’s having a good day, so she’s got an accidental shadow of a smile on her face without knowing it. As she turns around to go back for the carton of milk she forgot, the eyes of ten men in three register lines will in parallel drift upward, come to rest on some part of her body, drift up, drift down, and then back to whatever they were looking at before. This is not a predatory thing, the grotesque behavior of objectifiers of women. It’s the same reason your eyes are drawn and redrawn to the horizon when you’re in wide open spaces. It’s aesthetics. Or is it?

Imagine all the contours in the world, if you can, all the possible curves and intersections of forms. That we find the particular physical features of another human animal irresistably attractive and even sexually persuasive—the particular alignment of the features on the front of his head, the way the medial collateral ligament on the back of his knee tenses when he walks, or the way his pectoralis minor draws his scapula forward when he writes on the chalkboard—suggests that we are hard-wired to do so. Why should arrangements of muscle on bone incite such strong emotions in us? What can be “beautiful” about those lines that form at the outside corners of her eyes when she laughs?

And why should we spend so much time thinking about it? How many trees have died so that young men and women could try to put into words the various urges and surges instilled in them by some other creature? How many

have been inscribed in the sand, bark, and picnic tables of the world? That ‘+’, whether inspired by the physical, the spiritual, the moral, or the unknown and unnameable, has as much of the monkey as of the poet. That’s reassuring too.

I never stoop’d so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey;
   Seldom to them which soar no higher
   Than virtue, or the mind to admire.
For sense and understanding may
   Know what gives fuel to their fire;
My love, though silly, is more brave;
For may I miss, whene’er I crave,
If I know yet what I would have.

If that be simply perfectest,
Which can by no way be express’d
   But negatives, my love is so.
   To all, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers best,
   What we know not—ourselves—can know,
Let him teach me that nothing. This
As yet my ease and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot miss.
                             —John Donne

Everyone is half-monkey and half-poet—you, me, and every last author, playwright, director, and singer. Bono celebrates God; John Donne celebrates what is unknowable about love; Chaucer wonders about virtue; we turn to these and others when we need wisdom, or inspiration, or a laugh. But there are times when it is most reassuring of all to know that the smartest of the smart, the most holy of the holy, the most moral of the moral, the people who feed on intellect, poetry, spirituality, and the other high beauties are also half-monkey. It makes my monkey-nature feel less ashamed of itself, less like an unwanted step-child. My spirit takes comfort when John Donne says

Wilt thou love God as he thee ? then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make His temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blest,
And still begetting—for he ne’er begun—
Hath deign’d to choose thee by adoption,
Co-heir to His glory, and Sabbath’ endless rest.
And as a robb’d man, which by search doth find
His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,
The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.
’Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

but my monkey-nature giggles with delight to know that the same man also says

. . . Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my newfound land,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
   Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee;
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s ball cast in men’s views;
That, when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul might court that, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array’d.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
—Whom their imputed grace will dignify—
Must see reveal’d. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to thy midwife show
Thyself; cast all, yea, this white linen hence;
There is no penance due to innocence:
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?

(Drinking vessel made ca. late sixteenth century)

Among the greatest pleasures of studying the great books is to be engaged in serious academic enquiry with the most venerable and revered of texts—the words and ideas that shaped the world as we know it—and come across dirty jokes from hundreds or thousands of years ago. It serves to reassure us that some of the loftiest minds history has known may have snickered when their friends farted. The connection drawn across unimaginable spans of time by the shared enjoyment of twelve-year-old humor is somehow more tangible than a common appreciation of aesthetics or philosophical principles.

For instance, Chaucer—writing in 1390—examined the nature of faith and divinity with unparalled insight:

The destinee, ministre general,
That executeth in the world overal
The purveiaunce that God hath seyn biforn,
So strong it is, that though the world had sworn
The contrarie of a thyng, by ye or nay,
Yet somtyme it shal fallen on a day
That falleth nat eft withinne a thousand yeere.
For certeinly, oure appetites heere,
Be it of werre, or pees, or hate, or love,
Al is this reuled by the sighte above.

But his theological insights do not incline me to want to spend a night hanging out with him in a bar. And to a certain extent, if you can’t hang out in a bar with a great mind, is that mind really worth the paper he or she is printed on? Nietzsche would have been a neurotic bore, as would Kant. But Chaucer, on the other hand (along with Virginia Wolff, William Shakespeare, and others we could name) would have been hilariously fun to drink with. How do I know? Let me set the scene.

The Pardoner, a travelling seller of indulgences, is in a group on pilgrimage to Canterbury. He has just finished telling his tale, in which he admits that his only motive in selling indulgences and pardoning sinners is the money. He doesn’t believe in what he sells, but his tale was a highly moral one about four youths seeking to confront and murder Death, when they stumble upon a pot of gold, and they all conspire and in the end murder each other over it. When at the end of his tale he asks the crowd who will pay to see his Holy Relics, the host has this to say to the Pardoner:

‘Nay, nay!’ quod he, ‘thanne have I Cristes curs!
Lat be,’ quod he, ‘it shal nat be, so theech!
Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,
And swere it were a relyk of a seint,
Though it were with thy fundament depeint!
But, by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond,
I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!’

Which of course translates as:

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘then I will have damnation!
Relax,’ he said, ‘it won’t be so, I beseech you.
You would make me kiss your old underwear,
and swear it was a relic of a saint,
though it was stained by your own anus!
But, by the cross that Saint Elaine found,
I wish I had your balls in my hand.
Have them cut off, and I will you help you carry them.
They shall be enshrined in a hog’s turd!’

When the Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by my house early last Saturday morning, I wish I’d had something as clever to say to them. Instead I just smiled politely and told them that the Kingdom of Heaven sounded very nice, and that I’d like to go there some day. I promised to read their tract called “Why You Can Trust The Holy Bible,” and said I’d call if I had questions. It seemed like the easiest way to get them to leave, but it certainly was’t clever, and it didn’t make me feel like I’d really taken charge of the situation.

But Chaucer is nothing compared to Catullus, a Roman poet who lived between 84 and 54 BC, whose poetry might make Larry Flynt blush. If you blush easily, you should probably stop reading now, if you haven’t already.

Improba Carmina

I will fuck you up the ass and in the mouth,
Aurelius, you sodomized ass-licker
And Furius, you perverted cock-sucker
Who read my sensual poems and conclude
I'm too wanton. For everyone knows
It's meet and proper for a poet to be
Pure, pious, and always correct in his behavior.
But we don't expect the same of his poems.
Of mine they'll say sure, they have wit, they have charm,
They're so sexy and lewd they can
Arouse—I won't say boys, but these hairy
Men whose unstiff dicks wilt on the vine.
You who have kissed many thousands of mouths
Upper and nether, man and girl,
How dare you think me less than manly?
I will fuck you up the ass and in the mouth.

(translated by Molly Arden)

It has homoeroticism, slander, assaults on others’ virility, insights about literary criticism, and all of it older than Jesus. I used this translation because I could not find the version submitted to the St. John’s student newspaper’s first annual Dirty Poetry Contest, which I co-sponsored, in which the translator rendered “hairy men” as “hirsute studs,” which I prefer.

Fine, you can quote me on it: I prefer hirsute studs. What’s the big deal?

Apparently, I’m still fat.

It started sometime in the late seventies, when I was but a wee lad. I didn’t even notice it happening. But in those days, my family was enduring difficult times. My father was in the throes of post-heart-attack existential depression, near bankruptcy and suicide, having lost his health, his stepfather, his job, and his mother in rapid succession. My siblings lost one of their best friends in a motorcycle accident around the same time. Somewhere in there, I’m told, I killed the family dog by opening the front door, whereupon it promptly ran in front of a car.

I was too busy thinking about where to hide boogers and wondering why kids made fun of my Toughskins to notice the heavy cloud hanging over everything, but the stress must have taken a toll on my young figure. Well, the stress, in addition to a heartland diet of meat, meat, cheese, milk, meat, cheese, Chef Boyardee, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I had one advantage over the kids these days: in the days before video games, I still had to play outside most of the time, which usually consisted of one of the following activities:

• Throwing stuff into trees and then climbing the trees to get the stuff back. Then doing it again.
• Throwing a tennis ball against the garage door and then catching it. Then doing it again.
• Running around in circles until I was dizzy.
• Riding my bike to the end of the block and then turning around.
• Rollerskating to the end of the block and then turning around. This was especially enjoyable the summer they repaved the street. You could go like a million miles an hour. Waving your arms like a moron helped a lot.
• Watching ants.

I first suspected that something was going wrong when Robert Allmart beat me in a race down his block, past the witch of an old lady’s house who every Halloween gave out nothing but Peeps and those shitty rock-hard peanut butter candies wrapped in orange wax paper. This had never happened before in all of our many races, and my young mind simply couldn’t or didn’t connect my decreasing physical abilities with the upticking digits in the waist size of each fall’s back-to-school Toughskins.

The problem continued through junior high and high school, but I’ll spare you all the painful details about name-calling and self-doubt and such. The point is this: I have carried extra weight pretty much since I can remember. And now, despite months of work and gallons of sweat on my part, the arrogant monkey at the gym, having applied his dreaded calipers to various fleshy bits of my body, has again decreed that I am “out of shape.” In fact, for all my work, I have gained ten pounds in six months.

Even though the recent news is bad, the fact is indisputable: I’m certainly less fat than I was. My girth was on the verge of impressive there for a while. During the year after I graduated and was unable to find a full time job, I worked three to four part-time jobs at a time, averaging 50–60 hours a week (but, sadly, without overtime) to save up for our open-ended journey to the Czech Republic. All my jobs had something to do with sitting at a computer, and none of them had anything to do with getting any exercise whatsoever.

The funny thing about getting fat is how it sneaks up on you. If 40 pounds of slimy goo waited to hear your first tentative snores, crept up under your covers, slid into your earhole, and oozed around inside your body, depositing itself more or less uniformly under your skin, you’d wake up screaming in the morning. But when that 40 pounds comes over many months in the form of delicious food and beer, it’s not quite as noticeable.

I left the midwest years ago. I haven’t necessarily noticed my diet changing, but it obviously has. While growing up, many of my meals involved ground beef, Velveeta, and/or ketchup. Milk, bologna, Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, Bisquick, peanut butter, and strawberry jelly were on maximum rotation. Vegetables, if they appeared, came from the freezer and were a mealy little lukewarm lump next to the real food, like your new girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend at a party—there was an obligation to cordiality, but no enjoyment on anyone’s part. My diet has slowly changed for the better, a result of the confluence of at least three factors: (1) further experience with the bags-of-frozen-vegetables food group in its natural state has proved surprisingly enjoyable and varied; (2) a year spent in a country where the choice of available vegetables ranges, for a few straight months in the dead of winter, from cabbage to cabbage has taught me that you don’t miss your water ’til your well runs dry; and (3) a girlfriend who (a) was raised vegetarian by parents who brainwashed her into thinking that artichokes and asparagus were treats for good children who mound their manners and (b) enjoys both (i) cooking luxurious vegetable-based meals from scratch and (ii) gardening like a mofo has proved a crowbar to my admittedly sometimes formerly closed-minded ways regarding unmeat.

And so it is that now, when I encounter fellow midwesterners still in the throes of their meat and whitefood addictions (my favorite is pasta in a cream sauce with mashed potatoes [which, for the record, are not a vegetable] and a glass of milk), I want to preach the glory of the vegetable with the zeal of a convert. I share a name with one of the most zealous, after all—and since I am careful to hold my tongue when it comes to reminding smokers about how much healthier I feel with two years behind me of not smoking (after emphatically smoking for twelve)—reminding white-food folk that they could eat better, and by eating better would look and feel better, seems like it would be a helpful thing to do. But it would not be welcome.

A few nights ago, C. and I decided we wanted to see some live music. It sounds simple enough, but C.’s manner of appreciating music is wholly different from mine. As a result, compromise is almost always necessary. For me, rock clubs are the default. The band should be loud or not at all. Ideally, there should be at least two guitars. Did I mention loud? I want the volume up as high as it goes, and I want to position myself dead center and as close as I can get to the stage, arms crossed, not dancing around like an idiot, just immersing myself in music so loud it vibrates the cuffs of my pants. Lyrics are disposable; I’ve come for the music—and mere volume is not enough. I want to get carried away by the subtleties in song structure and melodic details. The music should have texture—rich and luxurious, or thin and tenuous and strung out, or jangly and poppy—whatever the particular brand of music, it should have a self-consistent aesthetic that stands up to tough questions.

Since this has long been my favorite way to see live music, my ears are, well, less sensitive than they used to be. C.’s are not, and the noise level of what I’d consider to me a mid-volume band is intolerable and even painful for her. So I usually find other concert-goers when such bands are involved. But on this particular night, we were trying to decide between jazz and bluegrass, and I’m so picky about both that I had to call a few clubs to make sure that we weren’t in for a night of Kenny G. While looking at the jazz club listings in the City Paper (DC’s local arts & entertainment weekly), I happened upon the weekly schedule for the Black Cat, a rock club where the indie and punk bands I most often enjoy tend to play. There, on this very night, was Bella Lea, a band you’ve probably not heard of. They’re new. I wouldn’t have heard of them either, except that I’d recently been googling my old friend and bandmate, Ryan Rapsys, and discovered that his new band goes by this name.

So we hopped into the car and drove down to the Black Cat. Ryan had called to wish me a happy Thanksgiving in 2002, I think, but other than that, I had seen him only once or twice since I left Chicago in 1998, so my mind was all aflutter as we approached the club. I expected that he’d be pretty much the same guy I’d always known, but I have occasionally been surprised upon meeting old friends that sometimes they change quite a bit over the course of not too many years. Parenthood and marriage are the most radical catalysts, or at least one would hope, but there are others. Traveling can do a lot, as can heavy amounts of alcohol applied liberally over a long period of time. The refreshing thing about people who devote real energy and time to making art is that, despite what changes may have come, the front-and-center focus on art anchors a person in ways not much else can. Ryan’s drumming has changed—or at least he drums differently in this band; Bella Lea’s beats are more basic and the drums slide in line behind the guitar and serenely creepy vocalist (formerly of Denali)—but he has not. His drum kit has changed—the marbled blue Gretsch five-piece set has been usurped by something transparent (the better to try to catch the hummingbird-quick movements of his Stewart-Copelandesque hands)—but the lanky six-foot-five guy with the just-consciously coy yet always charming smile was no different.

We always suspected that if any of us would one day be able to quit our day jobs, it would be Ryan. His talent alone put him head and shoulders above many of us. When Euphone first began, it was all him and him alone. On stage, he had his drum kit, a little drum machine, and a cheap Casio; he’d play all three at the same time, one hand on the keyboard, doing more on the drums with his other hand than many can do with with two. (For an example of the drumming virtuosity, I recommend “Press On,” available for free download at the bottom of Euphone’s epitonic.com page.) Sure, the Lonesome Organist outshines him at the whole one-man band thing (and coincidentally plays guitar on “Press On”), but neither is a novelty act. In the studio, Ryan played bass, guitar, piano, drums, pen-on-thigh, glasses full of water, you name it. In fact, barring a couple of sporadic cameos, the first Euphone album (the self-titled one on Hefty Records) features Ryan on every instrument on every track. Watching Ryan approaching an instrument for the first time is always a bit like watching an idiot savant walking toward a piano. You know that within moments you’ll be witness to something amazing.

Of course, that whole ‘quitting your day job’ thing can be a mixed blessing in the indie-rock world. The way to get your indie cred is to strive to be not a rock star, but a musician, and the difference is crucial. The music comes first. If fame or money accidentally follow, it can only be as a result of word of mouth, of a fan-base built up one by one after experiencing life-altering epiphanies or soul-shaking orgasms upon hearing your records. Ryan was the butt of a good many bitter comments back then, not only because he was better at his second and third instruments than many were at their first, but because he could use that grin to network his way into opportunities unavailable to the rest of us, whose overdeveloped sense of integrity made us insist on doing it the hard way. In our early twenties, it was easy to criticize the business acumen of the networkers and schmoozers who sought out internships at record labels in order to inside-track their way to decent distribution for their records. Now that I’m 30 and effectively left that whole thing behind years ago, I must congratulate those who have found a way to make a living from music. If you’d told us ten years ago that Ryan would be making soundtracks for arcade games, scoring music for dance performances, and signing to Capitol Records, we’d have drawn up a list of 900 synonyms for ‘sell-out’. Now, I’ve nothing to say but ‘congratulations’.

That night was the second one recently that I’d been in the audience, neck craned upward trying to catch a glimpse of someone on stage with whom I used to play rock music. A couple of weeks prior, Dischord’s emo heroes Hoover got together for a reunion show at the Black Cat, where Alex Dunham—half of the guitar onslaught in both Hoover and Radio Flyer—used to tend bar when the music scene was in DC and I lived in Chicago. Now Al and the music scene are in Chicago and I live in DC (a day late and a dollar short, as usual). I haven’t touched a musical instrument in about three years, and even then it was in some ways but a feeble mimicry of what was.

While watching those who have kept the making of music front and center for these almost ten years since my last band, noticing all the while that my thoughts of musicianship occur almost exclusively in the past tense makes me a bit ashamed. I can remember emphatically, fist-poundingly-on-the-table decreeing that I refused to be one of those guys who “used to be in a band.” But that’s exactly what I am. And so it is, having been confined to the audience one time too many (and in fact, I couldn't even get close enough to the stage to say hi to Alex at the Hoover show, which really pissed me off) this ex-crafter of what would be, in other hands, sonic lusciousness—but with a you-can-dance-to-it-if-you-bust-out-your-TI-88 feel—has decided soon to acquire a keyboard that will interface with some lovely nearly-free software purveyed by Apple computer intended to make the making of music easier for those who’d make it. That’s me, with an itch buried so deep I think I’d all but forgotten how it could be otherwise, but not for long.

This just fit the color scheme [or at least it did when this page was in reds and yellows]. I took it upstairs at the Kennedy Center when we were there for an Alvin Ailey dance performance a few nights ago.

The worst part of having a bad memory has nothing to do with practicality. If it were just a matter of forgetting to pay bills on time or standing up my friends at the bar once in a while, it would so much more tolerable. My friends would understand. They would forgive me. The utility companies would tack a couple of dollars onto my next bill, and life would proceed as usual. But this is not a matter of being merely forgetful. No, this is a pathologically poor memory, a rusty bucket of self that empties out faster than it can be refilled. If I don’t pile up reminders around me, vast swaths of my past just fade out of existence.

Unfortunately, I can’t stand clutter, so I have to find figurative ways to avoid literal piles of junk littering my desk and collecting dust in the corners. I have a filing cabinet, that contains, for instance, my medical bills from a car accident in 1994; the cancelled check from the purchase in 1996 of my first vehicle, a 1985 GMC Vandura 2500, from my uncle, who was selling on behalf of my other uncle, who had just died; ticket stubs from almost every movie I’ve seen since 1998 or so; the ticket stub to every concert I’ve ever seen; gas receipts from my band Sweater Weather’s 1995 tour; my tax returns from 1994 through 1997, which document the years I made less than $5000; and so on, because I genuinely fear that without such triggers, my memories of these times will fade so absolutely from my mind they they will become irretrievably lost.

My computer, more than anything else, becomes my crutch. Like many people, I save documents, photos, and emails in an intricate and multilevel hierarchy, and like many people, I forget where I have stashed things. But I am diligent. I have saved almost every email I’ve written or received since I got my back-to-college Mac LC in 1998. (Email didn’t exist when I had the Apple IIc I bought after saving my lawn-mowing money from the summer before eighth grade, otherwise I would have saved those too). Being a member, apparently without being asked, of Generation X, my primary means of corresponding with my friends for the past 10 years or so has been via email. I think my last letter on paper was written over three years ago, and I rarely keep a journal. As a result, it is essential to me to keep backup copies of these emails, because they form the only record of substance of the day-to-day issues, dreams, questions, conversations, arguments, reflections, and advice that constitute my life thus far. So every couple of months, I copy the whole clump of them (105 MB, largely without attachments, at last count) to a new location for safekeeping. To keep things simple, I have also taken the folders of people with whom I no longer regularly correspond out of the email program I use and save them elsewhere as well.

In the process of copying everything over to a new backup hard drive a couple of days ago, I somehow forgot to copy that old-correspondence folder to the new location before I deleted it from the old, and in the time it took the progress bar to go from left to right, I lost at least three years of letters to and from everyone I knew between 1998 and 2001. Gone the letters from Dawn, Melanie, Brooke, and Farrell, the four young ladies with whom I spent most of the meaningful moments of my last two years of high school and every summer of college (the first time). Gone every single letter to and from my mother, who died in 2000. Gone . . . well, that’s just it. I can’t even remember what else was in there. Some inconsequential stuff, some receipts, sure. But it is conceivable that there is a lengthy correspondence with a friend whose existence I can’t even bring to mind right now. There’s at least one ex-girlfriend in there, maybe two, though I can only remember having one during that time. It’s possible there were more. No emails from my dad, because he never used a computer; I have both the letters he ever wrote me on paper in the filing cabinet.

Have I ever mentioned that there was a letter from my mother waiting for me in my mailbox when I returned home to New Mexico after her funeral? She must have written it the day before she died. The envelope was very heavy in my hand before I opened it. I had just come back from so much emotional wreckage and was trying to get my mind and heart back in order, stuffed back into tiny compartments so that I could return to the business of being a student, and there it was. Her last words to me, posthumously delivered to my hand by that harbinger of portent, the United States Postal Service. I opened the envelope carefully and drew out the single sheet of paper, unfolded it, and saw nothing but the garbled black lines of an inkjet printer that had run out of ink. Out fell a phone card. There was a small Post-it note attached, which read, “Well, I guess the printer’s out of ink, so I guess I’ll just send this now and write more soon. Love, Mom.”

And so now, crutch gone, I have to maintain my memory of those people and the times we shared on my own. It’s Woody Allen’s retention of War and Peace after his speed readi