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 reading course. “It was about some Russians.” Their words are already long gone, and I’m left now with just the gist of what they might have said. Or did I read that in a book? I can never remember.

And why is it so important to me to document the tumultuous twenties of myself and my friends? Because I think we were on to something. We fought hard against growing up prematurely, against the importance of owning things, against accepting at face value what we were told, against the bland asphyxiating comfort of the suburbs that spawned us. But Dave Eggers already wrote a much better book about it than I could muster, so perhaps our particular words are disposable after all. Had it been available, we could have all saved our breath and just talked about Halo 2 instead. Or Buffy.

Oh, and before I forget: Today’s my 31st birthday. Happy birthday to me.

Update (3/5/2005 11:10 pm): Within about an hour of each other, I finally found an old backup I made of the missing emails, and I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I highly recommend. It came out when I was in the Czech Republic, so I missed it the first time around. The emails were stashed in a zipped copy of a disk image of the home directory of my old computer. Eternal Sunshine was delivered to my door by Netflix. Why do I obsessively save old seemingly useless things like that? Just in case? Whatever the reason, I’m glad I do. Words do not always evaporate and become lost. Things we say do have substance, if occasionally only as magnetically aligned particles.

At 23 I was living with five of my friends in Chicago’s south Loop in a loft converted from what had once been a used car dealership. The car dealership had relocated into the buildings next to and across the street from ours, leaving the building at 2255 S. Michigan open for musicians, artists, and thespians who needed a cheap live/work space in which to practice their respective crafts. Our space was about 50' x 50' with 20' ceilings. Part of it had been lofted out, so a laundry room and a row of five bedrooms formed an L along one wall with the kitchen and living-room above. The space itself was cinderblock and concrete, and the living spaces were rendered in bare lumber. Thinking we’d spice the place up when we moved in, we decided to paint the whole thing maroon with the hulking support columns hunter green. That turned out to be a little overwhelming. Three of us had saved some money and bought some recording equipment, with the help of about $10,000 in insurance settlement money from when I’d been hit by a car while riding my bicycle on a long straight country highway at dusk. Diode Recording Studio were we, though Kevin and Adam never really liked that name.

At the time, the folks from Atavistic/Truckstop Records lived on the fourth floor, and a whole bunch of theater kids lived right above us. They always complained about the noise. (At least three bands regularly practiced there, not to mention the bands who came in to record in the studio. Kevin’s band Traluma liked to practice at 9:00 Saturday mornings. I always wondered, and never really got a good answer: What the hell kind of rock band practices in the morning?) We had built the most soundproof room possible on our budget, a freestanding room with double layers of drywall and a raised floor, covered on the outside with pink remnant hotel carpeting we bought at the used hotel furniture store down the block. The loft cats, “Crazy Legs” Lloyd and Mara (and later Diablo), loved to chase each other up, down, and around that oversized kitty playland. Have you ever seen a cat scale a nine-foot carpeted wall, stop halfway up to defend its rear flank from attack, and then continue up? It’s an impressive sight. Picture the Globe of Death turned inside-out. Well, until Lloyd got too fat to make it up in one try. Then it was like Marlon Brando trying to remake A Streetcar named Desire after he looked like Don Corleone.

I sound nostalgic, but I should point out that not all was lustrous in the loft days. We were all flat broke. Adam was working as a courier (driving a Chrysler minivan while it still ran, transitioning to bike messenger after the van died). Scott, Ian, and Jason worked in record stores. Kate worked at Starbucks. Kevin delivered groceries for Peapod, and his occasional freelance graphic design made him the most solvent of the lot. I worked for lengths of time up to—but never more than—four months as an apprentice woodworker, convenience store clerk, bike messenger, van courier, record store clerk, and driver for a fly-by-night asbestos removal and demolition company. Everything else hovered in the $5.50–$6.50 range, but that last one actually started at $11 an hour for 60-hour weeks. In order to avoid paying time-and-a-half for all those extra hours, the owner had set up three companies (ACES Maintenance, ACES Environmental, and ACES Asbestos), so employees usually got, for instance, a 40-hour paycheck from ACES Maintenance and a 20-hour paycheck from ACES Environmental, until someone finally turned them in to the Illinois Labor Board and we all got two-year retroactive overtime back-pay checks. Unlike many of my paychecks, that one didn’t even bounce. My savings from a year at that job, in combination with the money I got from selling the recording equipment, financed my first two years at St. John’s College (with the help of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans that will finally be paid off in 2022).

The Harold Ickes Homes were three blocks west of us, and that meant that I walked outside every month or so to find my van window smashed and some inconsequential thing of little value stolen. Once they stole nothing but some dubbed cassettes. Not much pawn value in those, maybe one rock at most, but about $100 in auto glass replacement costs (more than three days’ take-home pay in those days) for me, not to mention losing my only copies of several irreplaceable indie rock records on now-defunct labels. (But just now, while trying to remember the name of Shudder to Think’s first album on Sammich Records, I discovered that Curses, Spells, Voodoo, Mooses has been reissued after being out of print for 10 years! My copy should arrive in 3–5 business days, they say.)

So anyway, those days in Chicago were fine times. I played in a couple of bands, recorded a couple of records, played shows at the Empty Bottle, the now-defunct Lounge Ax, and the Fireside Bowl, went on tour a couple of times, lived the whole indie-rock life. It was great, despite having zero buffer between me and poverty, facing the choice at the end of every month whether I more urgently needed food or gas. But soon I owned up to the fact that I was at best a mediocre musician, and it became clear that the recording studio would never earn enough to support itself. When the Borders Books in Lincoln Park went union in 1996, it inspired Jason and me to try to unionize the Tower Records where we worked. We contacted the UFCW and held secret meetings once a week at a coffee shop a mile or so from the store. It soon became clear that few of our coworkers were interested in changing the status quo, and as the long gray miserable frigid winter of 1997 dragged itself through February’s slush—much as every long gray miserable frigid Chicago winter does—I got tired of kicking that same dead, dead horse and got the idea in my head to get the hell out.

I decided to move to the southwest, where I assumed the winters would be less long, gray, miserable, and frigid than those I knew. I’d never been there, knew nothing about the area, but figured it was probably better than where I was. And I decided to try school one more time (having had three majors and dropping out of the University of Illinois twice before living in the loft). Using my mom’s Mac Performa and dial-up connection, I looked for schools in the southwest and stumbled upon references to a tiny liberal arts college nestled in the mountains above Santa Fe, NM called St. John’s. When I read about their seminar-style great-books curriculum and education-for-education’s-sake approach, I knew I’d found my new home. Months later, in the fall of 1998, after the application essays had been written and accepted and the plans made and the arrangements arranged, I loaded all my crap into my 1985 GMC Vandura 2500 (which I’d painted black with semi-gloss acrylic house paint and a brush), filled my 44-oz. trucker mug full of Amoco coffee, and hit the road.

The sky is always blue in Santa Fe, NM. I’m not making this up. On average, there are over 300 sunny days per year. Average annual precipitation is less than 10 inches. I just went back in January for a visit, thinking I’d take a break from Washington, DC’s winter for a couple of days to bask in the blue skies and warm winter days of Santa Fe. C. had arrived a few days before me, and told me over the phone about the 60-degree afternoons and the walking around town in a sweatshirt. But the morning after I arrived, we got several inches of snow. It looked like this (click for larger picture).

Later that day, from my vantage point on C.’s parents’ front porch, it looked like this.

But the next evening, from the same vantage point, looked like this.

And later, somewhere else, it looked like this.

Look, if we’re going to pull this off, you need to remember one crucial thing: Under no circumstances are you to refer to me by my real name when we’re in there. Do you understand? In there they know me as Ben, and in there you call me Ben. It’s for a good reason, so quit asking stupid questions and listen. I’ve been working on this for a long time, and I can’t have some goofball mucking it up. Got it?

What if I have to pay with a credit card? No, of course my credit card doesn’t say “Ben” on it. Shut off your stupid question hose. It’s not like this is an official thing. The Feds ain’t paying for it. I just stumbled into this thing, and now I gotta keep it up. It’s too late to go back. What, after all these months am I just going to tell them, “Hey, you know, hate to break it to you, but my name’s not really Ben”? You crazy? I gotta keep this up. You with me?

I don’t pay with a credit card. Ever. I always pay cash. They call me Ben, I answer to it. It’s real simple. You talk to me in there, you call me Ben. Don’t go calling me Ben every time you say something to me, like “Hey Ben, you want a soda? Tough morning at the office, eh, Ben?” Not like that. Ease it in a couple times, that’s all. When we’re standing at the counter, ask me a question, use Ben, once, that’s it.

I don’t want to get into it. It’s complicated, it’s been going on for months. It’s like you’re walking into the middle of a movie and asking a lot of questions. If you’d been there on time, you wouldn’t have so many stupid questions. Now it’s half over, they found the guy with the gun, and you’re asking why the girl is crying. Forget about it. Just come in there with me, call me Ben, and that’s it. I’ll tell you on the way home. Right now, I just need a goddamn sandwich.

Katya had the same problem, you know. Katya, you know, the blonde who works for Steve. They thought her name was Latoya, but she did the smart thing. She told them right off, told them Latoya’s not her name. It’s Katya. Me, I wasn’t so smart. I didn’t say anything. I let them call me Ben that first day and it stuck. Next day, I walk in the door, and that Chinese guy making the sandwiches says, “Hey Ben! What can I get you?” It’s already too late. Now I’m frickin’ Ben. And I work right next door, so I’m in there all the time. After them calling me Ben for two or three days, what am I gonna do? I can’t correct them. Why wouldn’t I have done it sooner? “Hey, I know you been calling me Ben all week, but that’s not really my name.” Yeah right. I’m playing some joke on them? It’s not funny. A joke’s gotta be funny. Now it’s been months. I’ve been Ben for months in there. I can’t change it now. I’m gonna look like some creep.

And what the hell, it’s kinda nice being Ben. When I go in there, I ain’t me. I ain’t got that crummy job, I ain’t got that nasty bag of fleas at home. I could be anybody. I could be a Fed. I could be a senator, porn star, you name it. Hell, I could be the king of frickin’ France for all they know. Left my crown at the soirée, that’s all. Hell, I could drive a Cadillac. Now wouldn’t that be something? Me in a Cadillac?

No one around the accident who crowded behind the police lines with looks of worry, curiosity, thrill, and sympathy etched unmistakably on their faces, even those who tried not to betray their particular reasons for having rushed down to the corner after hearing the screeching and the scream and the unmistakable crunch of metal on metal by the ton, unable to leave the scene until they had seen firsthand the results of the work of the emergency crews with their torches and saws, could stand the waiting. Three large men were gathered together to one side, having found some shade and a long low wooden fence rail that served well as a bench. All had come from their patio table of empty pint glasses and residual greasy red bones that had been hot wings but moments before the commotion on the corner, and talked loudly to each other about what awful shape the survivors, if any, would be in when finally pulled from the heap of gnarled metal that had been cars, until the sharp and disapproving glance of a young mother in blue jeans and pea coat standing nearby had the effect she intended, which was not to change the attitudes of men who regarded such tragedies as if they were merely the highlight clips from some gruesome sport on television so much as to quiet them enough to cease reminding her of the utter lack of what she had always considered to be a fundamental human sense of compassion in the face of suffering, and not incidentally to prevent them from muttering callous commentary and jokes that she was sure to overhear later slipping tonelessly from the mouth of her son to one or another of his playmates, spoken without awareness of the meaning or the connotations of jesting at death but only because he tended to repeat things he heard when followed by laughter.

It had not occurred to the thin bald man on the other side of the street unconsciously rubbing his large bony wrist—who, bent on rediscovering himself in the newfound freedom of retirement, had been out walking all morning, reviewing the streets of his neighborhood and reminiscing about who had lived where, wondering how old their children would be now since last time he’d seen them it must’ve been, God, 1987? No, they moved back to Jersey the summer after Linda died, so it would have been 1985—that his wrist felt so large and naked because he’d decided this morning for the first time in years not to put on the watch, for a retiree, he proclaimed to himself, has earned the right to keep no schedule but what he chooses. More curious about the reactions of the spectators than the accident itself, he scanned the faces in the crowd and lingered, upon catching her eye, at the young mother turning from the group of men with accusation still wrought in her brow, just as her eyes swept smoothly down his face to his chest and then, the tension about her eyes passing away like a disappearing shadow, darted toward something else that must have caught her attention, but he kept watching her for no other reason than that something about her manner seemed agreeable as she, still looking toward whatever had drawn her attention, absent-mindedly and lazily rubbed the top of her son’s head, no higher than her hips, bathed in straight blond hair shorn angularly and shining almost white in the sun. The old man suddenly noticed that his arms were raised awkwardly and that he was rubbing his wrist; realizing that her chestward glance must have been directed toward that curious movement, he immediately and self-consciously dropped his arms to his sides and put his hands in his pockets. Raising his eyes again toward the dark-haired woman in the pea coat, he saw instead a reflection as if from far away, a frightfully malformed image of that unconscious moment: a lanky hunched old man with slightly sunken eyes and liver spots and a frantic paperwhite fringe of hair above his ears, wringing his hands manically while gawking at a motor vehicle accident, but this passed as soon as it had appeared, and he found her still gazing distantly over to his right. He turned to see what so captivated her but saw only a patch of cloudless sky partly framed by the storefronts that lined the street, partly fettered by an abnormally cluttered and unsightly moiré of wires running askew from the top of a wooden telephone pole on the corner where so many men in dark uniforms were still rushing about and yelling to each other.

Regarding those men now, the old man shifted his weight to his other foot and in a familiar motion swept his right hand from the pocket of his tan slacks into his front shirt pocket and adeptly pulled out a cigarette, patted his pockets to locate his lighter, and turned away to look for a place to sit.

People who met him barely remembered having met him. When they did, they remembered having sought the first convenient exit. At the party with all the Russians a few weeks back, the ex-marine and the Lithuanian guy, the one who loved knives, the one who had emigrated to study the military arts the American way, actually whispered and pointed not five feet from him, wondering to each other why he hadn’t spoken literally in hours. They cracked jokes about him, forgetting that he could hear despite remaining mute. He could hear without even watching their lips move.

“Why haven’t you said anything all night?”

“I’m listening.”

It’s not that he was nondescript. Not overly handsome, he was at least memorable looking, tall and barrel-chested, with a broad round nose, glasses slightly crooked. Almost as if by choice he let conversations fall into silence until others would shuffle their feet and find excuses to go. Perhaps he seemed unfriendly. He liked it that way. There’s an inordinate pressure to say interesting things to people you don’t know, he thought. Or, more accurately, most folks prefer to form friendships in real time, while he preferred to take in impressions, ruminating over them at his leisure, and if all was according to his liking, introducing cordiality into his demeanor in the subsequent encounter. By then it was often too late. He wondered why people were slow to warm up to him. In fact, lately, they’d begun to develop an outright distaste for him.

It used to be that conversations seemed so cliché, the exchanges so choreographed. Didn’t we see this in a movie? Or do you call them films? He preferred conversations like amateur tennis matches, where he knew his opponent knew where she thought he’d lob it, so he volleyed elsewhere just to keep it interesting. He liked saying what needed to be said at any given conversational crossroad, regardless if it fit the persona he ought to want to convey. Sometimes these techniques failed, though it’s inaccurate to call them techniques, as if they were so by forethought or design. Call it an inclination. But it was an inclination that required through practice keeping the wit sharp and the rhetorical abilities keen.

It sounds pretentious, but it wasn’t not really. It was all in pursuit of attention to detail.

As he spoke less, the words he heard his mouth speak more often disappointed him than not. They didn’t capture the substance of the thought. The thought may not have been particularly grand or well-crafted. It may have been under construction, and he resented being expected to give voice to it before completion. Sometimes, it had seemed like an interesting thought, worthy of words, when it was floating around inside his skull, but as he uttered it he became bored with himself mid-sentence. He suspected that this was a result of his consciousness becoming more fluid—asynchronous? chaotic? alingual. Whatever its cause, the effect was a real awkward manner in his interactions and, as it increased, an increased avoidance of social contact at all.

It would be a sad story, but during those same years, he became a much more eloquent writer, and those who read his writing thought him fascinating, his luxurious words as slippery and inviting to the bare feet of open eyes as a river-wet bed of algae-smoothed boulder bits, mountain-hewn, time-strewn. Writing allowed him the time to find the right word, the time to structure the idea, to frame and embellish it, to buff and wax it. And as people who met him through correspondence grew more emphatic in their admiration of him, and people who met him in person grew increasingly ambivalent, he began to wonder about the divide. It made him smile, though at times it caused him worry. He did not consider it wrong, merely unconventional and hard to explain.

My mother was a collector and hoarder of junk, especially later in her life. As she grew older, her life became more and more unhappy, and to me the implicit connection was obvious between the unhappiness of her silver years and her unwillingness to throw out old junk, however distantly related to her memories of golden days. That junk had acquired meaning somehow, somehow embodying the joy she felt at remembering the people to whom it had belonged or the simpler times in her own life, when her children were small and the future held promise.

My contact with the junk was frequent. My bedroom was in the basement—beginning in high school, and stretching into the various spans of time when I moved home between tentative forays into the frightening world of adult responsibilities—and was separated by a flimsy paneled wall from the piles of junk in the “back part” of the basement, as it was termed, which was the cement and cinderblock depot of broken chairs in need of wood glue and reupholstering and the boxes upon boxes of old, horribly scratched records whose sleeves had been ruined one, two, or three floods ago. There was so much old and unuseable furniture: a huge turntable/8-track console with built-in speakers from the early seventies that had belonged to my mom’s aunt, several rocking chairs and a couple of wooden armchairs from my dad’s mom, old bedframes, broken desks, several pieces of barstools from a set they’d bought twenty years before, a six-foot round coffee table, a couple of matching mahogany-stained oak end tables—all remnants of the days when they’d lived in a much larger house, before my dad had blown through his bank president’s salary in a binge of post-heart-attack depression and irresponsible existential angst and racked up about a hundred grand in credit card debt. There were knitting magazines from the sixties with lovely ideas for lime-green sweater vests and matching miniskirts or pillbox hats, and boxes piled to the ceiling containing fondue pots, wooden punch bowls, Waterford crystal, and cheese platters, remnants of the days when they had friends and hosted cocktail parties, before they had retreated into the creepy solitude of evenings spent in separate parts of the house, my dad in his recliner in front of the TV, my mom at the sewing machine or the computer or reading in bed.

In order to do laundry or add salt to the water softener, I had to tread carefully between the piles of this junk, down a narrow path we would carve out once a year or so, by piling the boxes even higher and, after much argument with my mother, throwing out just a couple of the things that had begun to stink of mildew. The basement would flood once every three or four years in the Spring. We’d throw out some things that had obviously become ruined, but the bottom-most chairs in the stacks of chairs and chair-parts had several rings on the legs that, were one so inclined, could have been used to measure and date the floods of the past couple of decades. One spring we got clever and collected a bunch of palettes from behind a department store. We put all the boxes of old junk six inches off the floor to protect it from future floods. Over time, those palettes and much of the dead junk nonetheless became so nasty and mildewy that my sister-in-law, who is allergic to it, could barely spend half an hour upstairs in our house where the living tended to gather. Once a year or so, usually after a flood, a sibling or two and I would attempt to clean out the basement, my mother watching over our shoulders and directing our efforts, but this ritual was never much more than an exercise in rearranging the junk, since it was all so precious and laden with sentiment that my mother would permit nothing to be thrown out.

The Christmas after she died, I flew home from college and spent my Christmas break cleaning out the house with my siblings, getting it ready to put on the market. We rented a 30-yard dumpster, and with relish and joy I finally carted all that junk up out of the basement and threw it away, letting it pile up higher and higher in the dumpster with an almost inappropriate feeling of satisfaction. We also took what we wanted for ourselves and filled what had been the dining room with more than sixty boxes of books and other stuff worth giving to the Salvation Army.

All in all, the resolution of the house and estate went very smoothly and with almost none of the emotional flare-ups that I’m told plague many families upon the loss of a parent. But there were some arguments between the brothers and sister and I when it came to disposing of the stuff in the house. Whenever someone held up some old thing of my mom’s and asked what we should do with it, my response was almost invariably, “Throw it out!” After all, her memory was safe in my heart, or at least I was sure it would become so in time. I had my photographs and all her letters. What was her would remain. What was her stuff had no reason to. Why on Earth would I want to save all this junk that had been plaguing me for so long? Why would I want to keep a bit of my mother’s madness for myself? These moldy piles were but broken shadows of her happier past, and if she could never bear to part with them, I felt like I was doing a service to her memory by cleaning the cobwebs of her past with a thoroughness she could never muster. At 30, I have long enjoyed saying that my worldly possessions would still fit in the back of a van, and that includes a large book collection and a bunch of records and stereo equipment. I must assume that my allergy to accumulating things is in some way a reaction to the ghostly piles on the other side of my bedroom walls when I was growing up. Well, that and a distaste for consumerism in general. It is so easy to become attached to stuff that has no meaning. And all that stuff can so easily come to dominate you.

And so it was that my extreme views and violent reaction to hanging onto the crap of other people’s pasts led to recent conflict with some of my siblings. When divvying up the stuff of my mom’s that we wanted to keep, it fell upon me to keep her old Nikon camera and lenses, and I intended to learn to use them. I have since been taken in by the ease and versatility of digital photography, and I have had to admit that her old camera is going to stay right where it’s been, in the back of my closet, for years. While considering whether and how to get rid of it, preferably to give it to someone who would actually use it, otherwise selling it on eBay, I sent out a cursory email to the immediate family asking if anyone minded if I got rid of it, and was greeted with a flurry of impassioned replies arguing that it should stay in the family.

One reasoned thusly: “There are things I have I wouldn’t worry too much about giving away. But this is mom’s camera. This was something which had a lot of meaning and importance to her, something that made her feel as if she had a life of her own outside of her kids and husband. It’s not just an object, it’s something of an heirloom: at least that’s how it feels to me.”

I understood, and it made perfect sense. I am not a heartless unemotional robot, and I understand how heirlooms work. I have my dad’s wedding ring—which he bought when we was in his 50s, because he had been too poor to afford one for himself when they first married—and some other odd trinkets that belonged to him. And I feel a soothing familiarity upon seeing how their nicer furniture has been assimilated into a new context at my brothers’ and sister’s houses when I visit them.

But isn’t it strange? How do these objects absorb significance from the people who owned them? Is it simply association? Looking at this thing reminds me how much I loved my parents? What if I found the same model camera, or the same set of dishes? Of course it wouldn’t be the same. It has to be the same one they had. But why? Is it something about tangibility? Is my father’s letter opener significant to me because I saw him hold it in his hands at the table every night when he came home from work as he sorted through the day’s mail? What about the bad art that hung in his den, given to him by some distant friend or another one Christmas, a print called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” featuring James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Humphrey Bogart sitting around a diner with Elvis as their soda jerk? He never held it, never touched it except to hang it once, and probably didn’t really even like it very much. Why did I hesitate when it came time to decide how to dispose of it? Is it tied into ownership? Things owned by the people we love absorb something of them? It sounds ludicrous. If it’s not ownership, then it comes back to simple association, and I have to wonder why I don’t feel a surge of sentimentality driving on I-90 into Chicago because that’s the highway my dad sat on in traffic every morning for the last ten years of his life. Or why I don’t feel any particular attachment to silver Ford Tauruses but I do feel like I’m eating a lime-green popsicle in my father’s lap whenever I touch a brown velour shirt.

I’m asking the question because the whole thing is so sub-rational, so gut-level, but I suspect there are some rules, or at least guidelines, to how it operates. And I also suspect that the particular relationship between the person and the object, the relationship that somehow infuses the object with identity apart from its membership in the genre of things—no, don’t throw those out! Those were my mother’s dingy gray canvas shoes—must also somehow be primary. Or am I being too logical?

Autumn has always been one of my favorite seasons, because it comes at just the right time. (If it came in April, it just wouldn’t be autumn, would it?) But really: We’ve all noticed that time seems to pass more and more quickly as we get older. Where weeks used to fly by, now it’s months, and I can actually envision a time when it’s in danger of being years if I’m not careful. There are many possible contributing factors: the acceleration of time in general in these crazy modern times, the busy schedules we tend to keep, the routine of adult life, and so on. But one that often gets overlooked, I think, is that ever since we left school we’ve been becoming slightly unhinged. Adult life loses its seasonality.

Admittedly, holidays come along at the appropriate times, and we find that Christmas cannot be taken out of its seasonal context any more than Labor Day barbeques can be taken out of theirs. Trick-or-treating wouldn’t be the same if there weren’t so many fallen leaves to kick on your way from house to house.

The cyclical comings and goings of the seasons provide a very necessary anchor to a larger pattern. Think of what summer meant when you were in high school, how the elusive and infinitely far-off the approaching summer seemed in mid-April, the first day someone asked to open the window in the classroom, and then soon enough the windows became more often open than closed, and the smell of the first lawns being mowed would drift in, accompanied by the far off sounds of mowers and leaf blowers and occasionally bicycles. And how it progressed: The last day of school, the reckless frantic pursuit of fun in all its forms, the long warm June afternoons and the evenings that just wouldn’t end. And how July felt so much different from June, and August from July, and as the end of August approached you had to start pyschologically preparing yourself for the end of all this freedom. Only 14 more days ’til school starts, only 6 more days, only, man, it’s tomorrow! Where did this summer go?

And soon enough, always sooner than you expected, fall arrived, accompanied by sweaters, and collectively we bundled ourselves against the impending winter in the nostalgia of flannel and the melancholy of wool sock. Clear fall days, as today was in Washington, DC, when the air is clear and cool and even the weakest of breezes untrees bushels of leaves, there’s a feeling of transition in the air, and glances between strangers passing on the street at two-thirds their usual hurried pace confirms that these serenely beautiful afternoons are so precisely because we know what’s coming next. We know how ephemeral this beauty is. Things will soon become softer and darker and colder. We will hide indoors for months, and the light will continue to angle its way in obliquely.

I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for five years. Every Santa Fe day’s clear blue sky makes even the winter feel pretty summery. People are often surprised to learn that it snows there (I think they get it confused with Arizona), but at 7500 feet, it gets surprising extremes of temperature. Blizzards blow through from the neighboring mountains, and then the next day if the sun is out you can walk around town in a flannel and shorts if you choose and watch the snow melt. I wore my sandals for a good part of most winters. As Santa Fe approaches late September, the distant yellow of the aspens in the mountains suggests that autumn may be near, but the nearby juniper and piñon, ever-green, stay mysteriously tightlipped about the passage of seasons—if they have managed to survive the summer drought.

I moved to Santa Fe in part because I could no longer bear the long, miserable, gray and frigid Chicago winters I had endured for my whole life. And it was a fine choice. The hopelessness that had lurked in the dark hours of every January during every winter I could remember did not follow me there. It didn’t know where to look, and could not avoid drying out in the perpetual sun. But at the same time, in clear serene sky-blue New Mexico, where you could count on 330-odd cloudless blue skies a year, I came just a bit unhinged. The long slow slide into winter by means of kaleidoscope never happened. Winter was summery, and every day was a variation on the same theme. After a couple of years I began to miss the sense of closing and reopening that the rest of the world had to go through every year.

So it has been that, after a long absence, autumn and I have been reunited. Ephemeral or not, these days will ease me into winter well.

Having a hit counter occasionally affords me an interesting glimpse of my audience’s psychology. Not only can I tell when and how often certain loyal members of the audience stop by, but I am also informed about the key words of the search that has ushered strangers to my door.

For instance, just yesterday a thoughtful citizen was wondering about whether or not the Bush tax cuts are conducive to economic growth, so he opened the MSN search engine and typed, “Are the Bush tax cuts conducive to economic growth?” Knowing that Strange Proportion would be an excellent place to find the answer to that and many other questions, MSN took that poor lost soul’s hand and brought him here. And since I haven’t specifically given an answer to that question in this forum, I should be clear and blunt about it now: No, thoughtful citizen, Bush’s tax cuts are not conducive to economic growth. That’s just an ex post facto justification during an election year. The rich are out there spending money no matter how the economy is doing. And if the extra $500 in your pocket from the child tax credit is enough to buy your vote for global imperial domination, then we need to talk.

Then there’s the woman who has a rectangular sunroom and can’t quite figure out how to decorate it. (Is it sexist to assume it’s a woman? I thought long and hard about it before I chose the word, and in the end I decided to use the feminine because the likelihood is so low that I or any of the other male creatures I know would even think to look for decorating advice on the internet.) But I can understand her frustration. Unfortunately, my sunroom is perfectly square, and the decorating guidelines are completely different. In fact, if I had a rectangular sunroom, I probably wouldn’t even know where to start. It’s really hard to get a feel for how the feng shui is going to bounce around in a rectangular room. It tends to collect in the corners, I think, but I’m not an expert. In fact, I would probably have to resort to opening up a Google page and typing “decorating a rectangular sunroom" in the search field. Unfortunately, Google would bring me right back to Strange Proportion and I would end up learning nothing.

Last week, a lonely tourist, in Prague for a weekend or maybe just a night, perhaps a little randy and looking for company, went to an internet cafe and typed “Prague whore” into a search engine. But, having discriminating tastes, he didn’t click on the first, or even the five hundredth, escort service site he found. He scrolled way way way down to the bottom, below all the Prague Post classified ads for prostitutes, and found Strange Proportion. He didn’t stay for long.

I’m not sure what yesterday’s search for “coitus clips,” was about, nor do I particularly want to know. But I do feel honored and privileged to have the top Google rank for “dysorthographia,” my favorite disability.

Update (10/28): My new favorite search engine query referral of all time came last night. “What are somethings [sic] that i can do when watching supermodels?”

Well, I finally did it. I joined a gym. After cracking untold numbers of jokes about people who line up to sweat on cue, I am among them, sandwiched between the fat and the vain. This is not the first time in recent months that I have found myself a member of a club that wouldn’t used to have had me as a member, or rather, it’s not the first time lately that I will have become one of those people fun of whom some former incarnation of myself that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember always used to make. This is one of the pitfalls of having a memory like a small sand pail with a hole the size of a large sand pail in the bottom: As one changes and progresses, as all people do (or at least should) in one way or another over time, especially those for whom change and progress are such important components of being alive—whether they take the long and winding road, as I have, from one identity to another by means of yet others as they search and wander, often forgetting where they came from or who they were intending to become by the time the next crossroad approached—I’m reminded now of one of my favorite Talking Heads songs, from Remain in Light (which was produced by Brian Eno and thus had a sound much different from most of the Talking Heads albums which might come to mind when the name is first mentioned) in which David Byrne sings

He would see faces in movies,
on TV, in magazines,
and in books.
He thought that some of these faces
might be right for him.
And through the years,
by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in his mind,
or somewhere in the back of his mind,
that he might,
by force of will,
cause his face to approach those of his ideals.
The change would be very subtle.
It might take ten years or so.
Gradually his face would change its shape:
A more hooked nose,
wider, thinner lips,
beady eyes,
a larger forehead.
He imagined that this was an ability
he shared with most other people,
that they had also molded their faces
according to some ideal.
Maybe they imagined that their new face
would better suit their personality,
or maybe they imagined that their personality
would be forced to change to fit the new appearance.
This is why first impressions are often correct,
although some people might have made mistakes.
They may have arrived at an appearance
that bears no relationship to them.
They may have picked an ideal appearance
based on some childish whim, or momentary impulse.
Some may have gotten half-way there,
and then changed their minds.
He wonders if he too
might have made a similar mistake.

—as I was saying, as one changes and progresses, it’s difficult, even with a perfect memory and a mindful approach, to get a clear view of the series of incarnations through which one has passed and thereby deduce just a bit about one’s own overarching, lifelong development of self that is never quite apparent except perhaps at best as a symptom or a shadow in any particular phase of one’s life. ‘Incarnations’ may be too strong a word, but ‘personas’ is too weak, and ‘selves’ is too cliché, but there’s a real question there, and we all have to wonder from time to time: Who was that high school poet with a predilection for hallucinogens? Who was that naive girl who married the jerk? Who was that man who wanted so badly to become a photographer? There’s a tendency, after we grow up, change directions, or trade in old stale dreams for new ones, to write them off as immature or ignorant. But to dismiss with a wave of the hand and a “What was I thinking?” someone you used to be—someone whose only real fault is a lack of the hindsight that allows you to sit in such comfortable judgment now—is an ineffective attempt to pack the past up in a box, label it, shove it in the attic, and pretend that it will stay in the past. Those old misguided selves don’t disappear in the transition, and they shouldn’t be allowed to. They continue to hint and whisper and offer necessary advice as you continue to make silly decisions you may later regret. But then you have to wonder: Is there some culmination of self, toward which people work—drift? evolve?—or is it just a series of isolated events? You know what I’m getting at. Is there a main course? Or is this just one long hors d’oeuvre table? (“Ooh, the salmon plate is coming out. I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since the mini-wieners.”)

This is not the first time I’ve joined a gym. I tried it once before. I plunked down some embarrassing amount of money for three months of unlimited use of the Genoveva Chávez center (the first word of which, until I called there once, I did not realize is actually pronounced HEN-oh-vay-vah in Nuevo México. I’m sure I went at least five times during the first two weeks, and then suddenly I became very busy—frightfully busy, if I remember right, superhumanly busy. Busy men with much to do, important men rushing from place to place like the wind on a really windy day, or a recently-decupboarded cockroach in a tap dancer’s kitchen, cannot make time for exercise when the rest of the world demands so much of them so often.

But this time things are different. The shoe is on the other foot. I can feel it in my bones. Because it is quickly becoming apparent that the life of a research analyst is not one in which the heart beats regularly, if at all, in the course of an average day (nor do the eyes blink, but that’s not a condition for which exercise is an appropriate remedy), and possibly more important to the motivation of this particular research analyst, because there are only so many hours in the day that one can spend writing code and scrolling through data tables, some with literally 50,000,000 rows or more, something must happen in the middle. Don’t get me wrong: The job is interesting, challenging, and cool, on a level more abstract than that to which I have become used, as the accomplishments now accomplish themselves (with my help) on a scale of weeks or more, rather than in hours or minutes as it has been with previous jobs.

It also helps that this particular gym is more like a “health club” than a “gym.” At times I find myself worrying that they’re going to figure out soon that I snuck in and am using the whirlpool, but then I remember that I’ve paid for it, and that no one is coming to kick me out. Long gone must be the days when my friends and I would pack a backpack with swimsuits and six-packs, tuck our least crappy shirts into our least crappy pair of jeans, stroll confidently into the El Dorado hotel, acting very much as we imagine four-star hotel patrons act, and immediately take the elevator up to the rooftop pool, to which we would gain access using a key card stolen years before which had been passed down through numerous hands as carefully as the last frozen embryo of an extinct species.

The floors at my new health club are made of marble, and there are lots of plants and executives strewn around. And so it is that I now spend half of almost every lunch hour running on the running machine that’s not quite a treadmill, but nor is it a Stairmaster—because I have quickly deduced, from curious glances thrown my way when I did use one, in combination with my own observations, that only women use Stairmasters. So many rules to learn in this new and foreign world with its gender-specific exercise equipment! After spending some time trying to read the daytime TV closed-captioning as I bounce up and down on the gender-neutral running machine I chose in the end, I move over to the weight room and work out the pecs, abs, and lats for another half an hour or so until I hit the steam room, the showers, and then return to my computer and spend the afternoon finding new and clever ways to kick the data’s ass. It’s a nice existence, but one that I never before really considered would be mine.

But there’s some bad news, too. I had my first of three complimentary consultations with a fitness trainer yesterday, and can you believe it? He told me, after pinching me here and there with some device that supposedly measured my body-fat percentage, that I’m “out of shape”? In fact, he said, judged by body-fat percentage, my health is “poor” (the worst of the five possible health categories). He even showed me a chart that laid out the various health categories, and pointed to my position at the bottom. And so I have to ask, as one whose trade is in tables and charts: Isn’t health too esoteric and nebulous a concept to be shoved into rigid categories such as “good” and “poor”? Isn’t that just one more example of arrogant monkeys thinking they can dissect the knowable world into little chunks that their puny little monkey brains can digest? I think so anyway, and I’m sure you agree.

Fall was here. C. was here. Now it seems that both are gone. Well, one of them is actually gone. That’s not really something about which much speculation is necessary. The seeming goneness of the other is simply due to the frigid cold (I could see my breath!) today. The cold damp leaves are stuck to the pavement like fish scales.

We went hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains last weekend. Having no car, we had tried to arrange a small rental one for a day. It was the only autumn weekend C. could manage here before returning to the autumnless desert she calls home, so we planned a trip. The rental company, however, ran out of small cars and we were upgraded to a black extended-cab pickup truck with tinted windows. We were headed into rural Virginia, so to be safe I donned my faded black “United States of America” tee shirt. Those camo-clad guys with the beer guts who lined the highways with their wives and their yard sales can spot a commie pinko like me from miles away. Clad in patriotic garb and driving a huge made-in-the-USA pickup, I almost felt like I could fly under the radar unless I had to open my mouth for some reason. (My voice sounds so flat and dry in response to a deep nasal drawl rumbling from beneath hick jowls.) Then again, the nerd glasses and abstract forearm tattoo probably give me away long before my polysyllabic and abstruse vernacular.

I applied for a job at Akal security after I graduated from college because I saw an ad in the paper which simply read, “Writer/Editor wanted, $52,000 a year to start.” Hey, good deal, I thought. The ad said nothing about the company nor the kind of work they did. I didn’t really know what I was getting into until I drove up to Española for my interview. I followed the directions I had been given on the phone and they led me right into an enormous Sikh compound with a huge golden gate around it. I almost turned right around at that point, but in the end I did not, largely because I had just blown $250 on a suit for the interview. I admit I had certain preconceptions about the Sikhs, largely because there is a huge Sikh community in and around Santa Fe, almost all of whom are white, almost all of whom are filthy, filthy rich. The turbans and the robes led me, in my naivete, to assume that they would be ascetics, but the white Mercedes and Jaguars they drove suggested otherwise. They seemed to enjoy going to movies, eating in restaurants, shopping for trinkets at expensive stores, in other words, doing everything that regular folks do. Their religion seemed to impose no restrictions on their behavior or their quest for material possessions. Whatever their beliefs, though, getting paid that much to be a writer certainly sounded pretty nice.

Anyway, I stumbled upon an article in today’s New York Times about the company where I applied, in which I found the man who interviewed me, Daya Singh Khalsa, speaking about ‘spiritual net worth’.

Among Sikhs “there is no stigma in being financially successful,” Mr. Khalsa added. “Prosperity does not take away from spiritual net worth. You can have both.”

I have never heard of this concept before. Can anyone explain? It does go a long way toward answering my questions about why all the Sikhs in Santa Fe drive very nice white European luxury cars and own million dollar houses. White cars, always white cars. The writing sample I took for the interview was an anti-war editorial for the college newspaper that I had written on the night of Bush’s inaugural War-on-Terror speech in mid-September 2001. I wonder if that had anything to do with my not getting the job?

For those of you who have been staying abreast of the cubicle drone story, there is some news. It has been a very busy week, and there hasn’t been much time to post. But do not worry: During my silence in this forum, many data have successfully been analyzed. I have found the outliers and I have banished them. I have successfully determined the accuracy rates and the data coverage. I have irrefutably and with much gusto kicked the data’s ass.

But there’s far more than mere data domination to report: I have finally left my diapers and training wheels behind in the intern room, the one I mentioned previously, the one with the fifth floor view of the tree-lined streets of our fair nation’s capital. I traded them for a nice cubicle of my own, one with bare and barren walls that just beg for Aerosmith posters or soft-focus photos of Venice in spring. But I may instead decide to line the walls with motivational posters of poignant golf course scenes or air-brushed waterfalls above business-inspirational slogans.

“Attitude: What happens to a man is less significant than what happens within him.”

Such posters remind me of my favorite Miller ad of all time, a foot-stomping anthem with a chest-heaving chorus:

What do you say to a man
Who walks head-first into the wind?
What do you say to a man
Who never turns his back on a friend?
You buy that man a Miller beer.
Nothing but the best will do.
You buy that man a Miller beer.
The best comes shining through.

The hair on my back stands up on end just humming it. One well-versed in the art of poetics might also be able to deduce the accent in which the song is to be sung, given that the author rhymes wind and friend.

“Perseverance: Keep your face to the sunshine and you can not see the shadows.”

I have, nonetheless, begun to suspect that, even with the people whom I know best, the best expression of my sense of humor is often a subtle issue of which jokes not to make. I used to claim that, under certain circumstances, certain jokes demand to be uttered, that the joke is somehow inherent in the nature of the moment, and that, furthermore, it is simply inevitable that the humor will come to light and some responsible citizen will uphold the duty of making the necessary comment. Yet many times I have found that no one takes the initiative. No one steps up to the plate. No one takes the lead in giving voice to the spirit of the moment, to lift it up on eagle’s wings and allow it to soar. And so that responsibility falls on my humble shoulders. I have often been faulted for this, but what is one to do? The joke has to be said, and if no one else is going to say it, then I have very little choice.

As I said, I used to claim that. It has been suggested that a little restraint goes a long way. And so I suspect that it may be best to conceal my sense of humor from my cubicle neighbors, who can’t be faulted for not knowing any better. My training wheels are gone now, and I am no longer insulated from the real cubicle drones by the other interns, many of whom are young and straight from college. They are still fun, enthusiastic, and sarcastic. They make unprofessional jokes and use profanity. They make me laugh out loud, and make conversation about things other than the content of the latest memo or the newest version of the database software. They occasionally show up later than they should because they were out having a good time the night before.

“Opportunity: The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, the optmist [sic] sees opportunity in every difficulty.”

My cubicle neighbors probably wouldn’t see the humor in these posters, and I don’t know what I'd say if someone walked past and gestured to my nicely framed ‘Attitude’ poster and said, for instance, “Ain’t it the truth?” What’s worse, I imagine myself, say, lining every inch of my cubicle walls with photographs cut out of Cat Fancy magazine—cats draped over each other in baskets, sleeping kittens in vaguely anthropomorphic poses, slightly cross-eyed kittens nuzzling ducklings—you know the ones. I imagine someone walking past and saying, “You must really like cats, huh?” And I wouldn’t be able to explain without sounding condescending, and even if I did explain, that poor person would just walk back to his or her cubicle and perhaps toss in a comment at the coffee machine or waiting for the elevator about that new weird guy down the aisle in cubicle 1024-B.

In order to be in my finest data-kicking form tomorrow, I must leave you to ponder the state of your own cubicle. Is it tidy? Is it conducive to efficiency? Does it stimulate the imagination? Does it inspire greatness in others? While you’re thinking about that, you might also want to spend a moment thinking about fascism.

During the autumn after I graduated from college, I took a Spanish class at the local community college, as much to improve my Spanish as to defer my student loans. For my final essay, I wrote about how I was about to move to the Czech Republic to teach English. I was spending most of my free time in those days making plans and arrangements for the move, emailing embassies only to learn the extent of the red tape we would have to wade through, trying to find jobs for my girlfriend and I in the same town, researching airfares, and so on. The plan to move to Europe to teach English seemed like an unreachable golden glow ever beyond the horizon, so when it came time to write this final essay for Spanish class, I wrote about the Czech Republic as la tierra de la leche y de la miel (the land of milk and honey), a thinly veiled reference to Exodus 3:8:

And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good and spacious land, unto a land flowing with milk and honey: unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

(Many such passages in the Old Testament seem to chronicle the Israelites’ well-established propensity to take land that doesn’t belong to them, but this is not the place to delve into that. My only comment on the matter is that sometimes it is best not to trust everything God tells you when you’re dying of hunger in the desert. Remember how Jesus got all confused from hunger in the desert? And he was way smarter than you.)

There is very little in the Czech Republic that makes one think of milk or honey. It is true that both are available there, but neither “milk-like” nor “honey-like” really does justice to the character of the Czech nation. Be that as it may, I could not help but interpret our Czech destination as the reward that lay at the far end of much sweat and toil. In fact, right before I left I was telling Pharoah to let my people go.

Fast forward about a year, and picture me at the front of a classroom assigning an end-of-year essay to a class of in-service teachers who are attending classes one day a week working toward a master’s degree. All dairy- and hymenoptera-related images have fled my mind months ago, and I am just looking forward to the end of my stint as a teacher of English as a foreign language. In fact, I may at the moment in question be wondering why I would assign another essay to all my classes when reading the 250 essays from the previous semester had been such a disaster. Then again, I may not be wondering that. It depends on when you let go of the fast-forward button.

One of the students in that class was Tomaš P., whose essay made me laugh quite a bit. Out loud, if I remember right. It was about what he hoped to be doing ten years hence, and what he could be doing now to ensure that it happened. In ten years, he related, he hoped to be married to the girl with whom he would be spending the upcoming summer in his own land of milk and honey. In this case, though, that land was more commonly known as Wildwood, New Jersey. He went on at length about how wonderful it would be, about how in his 30s it was difficult to remember how to be dashing after having outgrown the need to feel dashing so long before, but how essential it was that he remember, and quickly.

Tomaš visited me last night at home, accompanied by Eva, his woman of milk and honey. (That metaphor makes so much more sense in reference to a woman than to land—though now that I think about it, perhaps the land-of-milk-and-honey thing is actually a double-action recursive slingshot metaphor, in which the milk and honey refer to Israel, which in turn stands for woman. This, of course, would go a long way toward explaining why it is that so many men are willing to fight and kill over it, and why whoever is in possession of it guards it so jealously. It would be unfair just to blame the men, though. If Israel didn’t go all weak in the knees every time some two-bit prophet wandered past in sandals and loincloth, the world would be a much safer place today. I’ll stop there, but if you end up writing your PhD thesis about this idea, throw me a bone in the footnotes, okay?)

When they arrived at my house, Tomaš and Eva had just finished their summer adventure on the Jersey shore, and they seemed mildly disillusioned. Eva’s English lagged behind that of Tomaš, and she had been stuck scooping ice cream eight hours a day for the past three months. Tomaš had scored a slightly better retail job on the boardwalk, though that was offset by the eleven hour days, he said. But they had saved a lot of money, which was the point, and were on their way to spend a month hiking around Costa Rica. They visited my house because I had told Tomaš months before that they could store some things here when they left. Their flight was out of a local airport, so it was actually convenient for all involved. They even gave me an inflatable dolphin as a thank-you present.

When we talked about their return to retrieve their stuff from me in mid-October, I suddenly remembered that Tomaš, in his real life very far from here, is a middle-school teacher. So I asked him, “Um . . . Tomaš, don’t you have to teach at the end of this month?” And his smile broadened into an enormous grin: “No, I quit my job when we left Brno. After we go to Costa Rica, Eva and I will trying to move to Australia, where we will find new jobs and study English. If that is not possible, we will move to New Zealand, where we do not need visa, but is more hard to find a job. But what is a job?” And then he paused for a moment and looked down. “Maybe you remember an essay I wrote for your class. . . .”

His grin lingered on his cheeks for a moment longer than he meant to allow, but he quickly brought it under control. In that moment, though, it was obvious that his essay had not been just a clever way to satisfy an assignment. With the promise of Eva, Tomaš’s whole world flows with milk and honey. Jobs and geography are disposable. The world is nothing but yet-untapped potential spiralling upward and outward, and if in the process of following that potential one occasionally has to quit a job, or move to a foreign country, or abandon everything he thought he knew about his safe and predictable future, well, it’s a very small price to pay in the end.

History is a plaster cast of the yeti’s footprint, by which the prurient, prodding fingers of science try to quantify the impossible. If every moment is the culmination of prior ones, rather than just a link in a sequential chain of events—that is, if cause has effect—then the present is far more than just the intersection between the utterly possible and the totally inert. It is an inevitable train wreck of a moment, the unavoidable crash of millions of unknowable dynamic futures headlong into each other in mutual self-annihilation. Exactly one emerges intact and, of all that could have happened, history is in sum the one that did. In this way, it is a mere line transcribed. Since we can never know what will happen, and can barely agree on what has happened, endeavor never to lose sight of breadcrumb trail: By whatever unimaginable and roundabout means and for whatever hidden reasons it may have led from there to here, it is sure to return.

I find various ways to entertain myself in the evenings. It has been a difficult transition from the “nonstop live-with/commute-with/work-with my girlfriend” days to the “intermittent transatlantic 6:00 a.m. phonecalls from my girlfriend” days, but I have begun to reintroduce myself to myself. For instance, I’ve been acquiring lots of new music lately, and it takes some time to listen to it all. There’s no way around it—there’s no way to compress the songs or microwave them or inject them directly into your skull. The act of listening to music happens—can only happen—in real time.

So I wasn’t at all embarrassed when one of my roommates finally asked me straight out, “So what exactly do you do in your room so much of the time?” It was simple to explain. “Well, I’m usually reading the news on-line and listening to music.” He can hear the music through my wall perfectly well, so he didn’t really need to ask. But I guess many people don’t consider that listening to music can be done in the same way as watching TV, where it is the sole focus of the attention. That’s how I like to do it. It was easier when I smoked. With a cigarette in hand, the experience was fully absorbing, occupying enough senses to seem like an activity in its own right. I have a harder time sitting in my chair, just staring at the speakers, without a cigarette in hand, which I think is where the news comes in handy.

This week I finally decided to try Interpol, having read a bit about them here and there. I came across one of their CDs at work and slid it into the CD drive on my laptop. The first song was one of those forever-droning semi-atonal dream-guitar numbers with lyrics so simple and repetitive that I actually described it as an instrumental to the guy who loaned me the CD. The actual lyrics alternate between: “I will surprise you sometime, I’ll come around,” and “Surprise me sometime, come around.” Perhaps it’s that they’re disposable; my hunch, though, is that they just fit so well that they disappear into the melody. It was simple and beautiful, meditative and floaty, reminding me of a song by Lungfish from a couple of albums back whose lyrics consisted solely of “God’s will, not yours, not mine.” In fact, that one I think I’ll share:

Yes, that’s Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye doing backups. I’m excited to know, now that for the first time in six years I again live in a place where you can find live music worth watching, that I’ll be standing in the audience in a dark and smoky club next Friday night watching Lungfish play. The last time I saw them was in 1994. They’ve been around for a long time, always playing for five bucks a head, playing the same songs about forever they’ve always played, though I think they change the particular lyrics and tunes occasionally. Part of what I love about seeing them is that one could easily mistake the singer, Daniel Higgs, for a tattoo-covered Abraham Lincoln belting out pantheistic anthems until he’s hoarse.

So music is a fine and worthy endeavor. You couldn’t convince me otherwise. It’s all the reading of the news that has led to so many vitriolic diatribes in this forum recently. But the more I read, the more I realize that the most frightening thing in the world is what Bush will do if he thinks he has a mandate, if the American people get together and collectively say, “Yes, what you have done to this country is good, and we collectively want four more years of you jamming your fist so far up the world’s ass that you can brush its teeth.”

One day a while ago, I drank just a bit too much coffee at work, and when I got home I had lots of energy and couldn’t think of how to use it up, so I got on my bike and rode down to the White House. Of course, you can’t get anywhere near the place. It’s fenced off and guarded by cops and soldiers for blocks around, but I at least saw it. It’s not actually that big. I prefer Maria Theresa’s old pad in Vienna. What I was secretly wishing for, as I pedalled slowly enough past all the cops that they put down their papers and watched me pass, was that I’d see Bush on the lawn somewhere. I fantasized about what I’d say to him if I could get close enough to communicate anything. My two favorite options were “We’re keeping an eye on you, sir,” and “There’s nothing more dangerous than a zealot who thinks he’s doing God’s work.” Had I actually had the opportunity to say anything, though, we both know I’d just have been hauled in for questioning and followed by the FBI for the next 8 years. Not really worth it, especially for stuff as unfunny as that. How come I don’t get a speechwriter?

It was a nice bike ride though. I had OK Computer playing on my iPod at full-volume-minus-one-click, which lent itself very nicely to my perception that I was floating through the city streets, despite that I was riding as hard as I could for most of my journey. I was passing up cars at quite a few points, dodging in among parked cars and squeezing at full speed between stopped traffic and parked cars, looking both ways and then not stopping for red lights. I felt infinite and invincible, an impression that would have ended quickly had someone opened up a car door unexpectedly right in front of me or clipped my shoulder as they passed me, but nothing of the sort happened. Getting hit by a car once is enough.

Some days I have a hard time coming to terms with my new cubicle drone identity, and I don’t even work in a cubicle. (Hey, if I didn’t invent the phrase, at least I can beat it to death.) Four other interns and I share an enormous corner conference room with a 20-foot stretch of fifth-floor view, and my desk is twice the size of the desk of the VP I work under. I certainly can’t complain about the setting.

Nonetheless, returning from lunch today I caught my reflection in the shiny metallic elevator doors and I realized that, in complete seriousness this morning, I put on a striped polo shirt and tucked it into my beige pants. Furthermore, I had forgotten to take off my ID badge when I left the building and had been wearing it around on the street. Jesus Christ, I used to laugh almost out loud at that guy. Granted, we all know that the men’s business casual palette is limited, so not all the blame lies with me. It’s almost impossible to compose a biz-cazh wardrobe without some shade of brown in it. If it’s not tan, something’s going to end up being khaki, or at least beige.

Whatever. I can get used to the uniform. I may possibly even be able to learn to find satisfying ways to spend the two or three hours each day when there is no work for me to do. But I can’t get used to one thing that seems to come with working at a huge company: the waiting in line, the filling a chair until the promotion comes along, impressing the right people, shaking the right hands and knowing the right names, remembering who owes you one, or who you owe, always looking back over your shoulder, or peering over the shoulder of the person ahead of you in line to see what’s coming up next and who’s already jockeying for it, the callous recognition that mediocre is good enough except when someone’s watching. Shouldn’t we demand excellence of ourselves at all times? If not, what’s the point? This is a horribly unhip and unfun notion, sure, but it’s a nagging feeling I just can’t shake. This particular place definitely seems better than most, in that the majority of people seem genuinely to care about what they do and take pride in what they’re working toward, but I suspect pockets of that political undercurrent still exist.

Certainly not everyone who tucks in his shirt and works in an office is so lazy and self-serving. I’m exaggerating for effect, and I’m infant-new in a world that I have emphatically and consciously avoided for my entire life for exactly this reason, so my biases may be clouding my vision. But I hear that mentality every so often in small comments that fall unthinkingly from people’s mouths as it imperceptibly and incrementally creeps into their lives. When young, brilliant, energetic people, weeks out of college, who could do anything they want talk about “putting in a few years in such-and-such department,” or “doing some time under so-and-so, who’s really tight with the CFO,” as if it’s prison, what I hear is that they have chosen instead to hop onto a conveyor belt that ends much sooner than they realize in middle-aged disillusionment and regret. It is not always so, but often enough that it should frighten everyone who does not actively choose anew every single goddamned day to live consciously and deliberately with the whole scope of her actions and their consequences in mind. I’m not talking about the corporate world in general; I’m talking specifically about the attitude with which we approach our work, whatever it is, whatever aspect of our lives we choose to call “work,” for it can be much broader than it sounds at first. Of course there’s the personal ineptness caveat: by no means have I yet figured out how to live properly, but if you had state the goal, in a perfect world, wouldn’t that be it?

I assigned my Czech university students an essay each semester. First semester we worked on formal writing: the five paragraph essay, dreaded beast of freshman rhetoric students the world over, or so I thought. The Czechs had never heard of it, and knew not wherefore to fear. They objected most indignantly to the constraint that they not use the first person pronoun in any formal writing. These essays, however, were painful to read, and ‘painful’ might even be a euphemism for what they really were to read, which was excruciatingly, mind-numbingly, castratingly dull. While reading the first hundred or so, I developed an unfortunate nervous tic: pulling out the hairs at the edge of my forehead one by one. Over the course of the three weeks it took me to read all the essays during my evenings and weekends, I developed a noticeable bald spot at the top of the my forehead which took a few weeks to grow out. I learned such respect for all of my past teachers after that experience.

Can I share a sample? I hate to make fun, and Jesus, if any of my students had heard my Czech they would have seized with laughter. Nonetheless, the history of mankind thus far apparently begins, in someone’s mind, like this:

From the very beginning of the human age people traveled.There used to live so-called pickers who began it. After them came hunters.

Then first farmers went on, behind them people from the Iron and Bronze Age came. Nobody knows how many people in bondage of thousands kings and gueens there were on the world and all of them traveled. We must not forget a big move to the new world behind the ocean. Kings and queens have gone and people still travel. There are so many places waiting to be discovered. It is peoples naturalness moving around lookig for something no one can surely say what exactly it si .

But let us start from the beginning.Small,poor maybe happy pickers. Whole day consisted from picking food. Everything could be eaten. Every little animal, no berry was safe from them, if nothing else was around even the little tiny rootlet was good enough for empty stomac. The time they realised that everything was eaten was the right time to move on.First travelers were born.

Tribes of hunters had not more difficult way of living. Their only thing to care about was how to hunt as big animal as possible. It surely took a lot of time to keep whole tribe well fed. Not only plenty of time but also plenty of animals. As soon as the animals saw something is hunting them they moved.No mammuths, no supper. So the people moved too. Some moved, some started to cultivate land and plant first corn and plants. When the ground stoped to give good food they went to find another good place to make new fields.

So second semester I decided to lighten things up a bit, hoping that if I assigned essay topics that were enjoyable to write about, they might be more enjoyable to read, and they were. One of the topics from which the students could choose was “What do you hope to be doing in ten years, and what could you be doing now in order to make it happen?” (Note the use of the present continuous in the second part of the question. We use the present continuous in English to indicate a current, ongoing action, in this case, doing.) It proved to be one of the most popular essay topics, though students often told me as they handed it in that they regretted choosing it because it had seemed so easy at the outset, but required not only some difficult introspection, but a thorough understanding of English conditional structures as well, which are very difficult and counterintuitive if you didn’t actually grow up speaking English natively.

What surprised me were the number of responses that involved something along the lines of “I have never considered this question before, but . . .” and after reading several in a row I began to suspect that introspection just isn’t a Czech cultural value. But that, of course, is a ridiculous assumption. And then I thought about all my American friends and wondered how many of them had thought at any length about where they want to be in life in ten years. And by “where they want to be” I don‘t mean at what job, at what point in their career, but who they are progressing toward being, and how far along they expect to be. Are they all just on a conveyor belt too?

What’s more likely is that I am in fact overly concerned with the future, I who, at an unspecified age between 27 and 35, have not yet really decided what I want to do when I grow up. Whenever I choose one thing, I feel overly constrained and can only obsess about all the things that I will then not be able to do. I feel like my sister, who admitted to me one day sitting on our brother’s front porch that, sadly, she has had to face up to the fact that she will never work in metal. I, too, will probably never work in metal. Nor will I ever be an organic farmer, a truck driver, an engineer, a publishing tycoon, a magazine editor, a rock star, a recording engineer, a political activist, a diplomat, an artisan of any kind (including cabinet maker, ceramist, or graphic designer), a research linguist, a mathematician, or a cognitive scientist, all of which I have considered and even worked toward to some degree or another. Instead, thus far this life, I have had 29 jobs and 23 addresses, if you count various dorms and a brief stint when I lived in my van (but hardly ever actually slept in it), all in the name of exploration and keeping my options open. After a while, your options become so open that they in fact disappear.

Nonetheless, if I may return to the tone of emphatic proclamation I copped in paragraphs 3–4, I would say this with an additional note of conclusionary table pounding: If I had to distill the manifold lessons taught me by the deaths of my parents into one sentence, whether or not it sound like trite Robin Williams seize-the-day crap, the truth seems incontrovertible that this life is simply too short to underestimate the moments that in sum make it up. There will not be nearly enough time to spend with the people you love and the things that matter, and time wasted waiting for things to happen is just heaved onto the one-way conveyor belt into the irretrievable past. Said another way, in the words of impeccable rockers No Means No, “I got tired of waiting because I found out there only a fine line between biding one’s time and wasting one’s time. Know what I mean?”

I once interviewed an aging economist for the English Department newspaper at the university where I was teaching English. I was asked to interview him by the editor, who just didn’t have the time to do it herself. He had recently had an article published in Vital Speeches of the Day, and was at the university to present the paper in a Q and A session. When I walked into the room to interview him at the scheduled time, he greeted me coolly and made some pleasant conversation, just long enough not to appear rude, and then he invited me to begin the task of asking the questions so that he could get down to the business of answering them which, after all, is the sole purpose of an interview.

We talked for a while, and I tried to ask the most thoughtful questions I could about his paper, which was entitled, “Quality of Life? The Emergent Critique of America’s Work-centered Culture.” I knew from reading his paper that I agreed with almost everything in it, but having thought a lot about the subject myself, I had some ideas about the causes of the situation that differed from his presentation in the paper. It was clear, however, that he had very definite opinions about everything he was telling me. As the interview progressed, he would occasionally glance up over his reading glasses at me, trying to gauge my understanding of his responses, and he began to grow testy when I continued to ask if perhaps there might be another way of getting to the root of the problem. After twenty minutes or so of questions and answers, though, we began to realize that we saw eye-to-eye on many issues, and after I acknowledged that I also thought Adbusters was a very insightful magazine (which seemed to serve to him as some sort of litmus test of my political stance), he began speaking to me much more frankly. Soon this very conservative and mild-looking economics professor was espousing radical theories of a neo-feudal world order with multinational corporations at the head of the power structure, and he could cite references and research to back up every outlandish claim he made. It was a very interesting interview. (The Adbusters website, should you choose to click the link, looks rabid and amateurish compared to the magazine, which is actually beautifully and thoughtfully designed.)

At one point, while musing about the amount of political sway enjoyed by the tobacco lobby, he uttered a sentence that caught me completely off-guard. “Bob Dylan, you realize, was one of the most powerful forces for political change in the twentieth century.” Suddenly it came to me: an image of this balding man in his tweed coat, looking at me over his reading glasses, with long hair and bare feet, wearing bell bottoms and perhaps some garment with a leather fringe. I didn’t ask, but in that comment I heard a syllable of unadulterated nostalgia for the time long ago when he was an idealist and acted out his beliefs with no regard for adult responsibilities. We forget sometimes that the kids in the video footage of the sit-ins and the ones in the photos at Kent State and Berkeley are now passing middle age and heading for retirement. And it was precisely because I always forget that fact that his comment about Bob Dylan came out of left field. Don’t get me wrong: I like Bob Dylan a lot. In fact, I was listening to the first side of Blood on the Tracks yesterday morning on the bus to work, which is probably what got me thinking about Dylan in the first place. (The album side is, of course, a theoretical concept on an iPod, but it still persists as a fundamental unit of musical dissemination). As I type this very sentence, in fact, I’m listening for the fourth time in a row to the several layers of Daniel Lanois’ other-worldly pedal-steel guitar on “Not Dark Yet” from Time Out of Mind. I like the drawn-out drawl of Dylan’s voice, and his clever rhymes and obfuscated lyrics. His backup bands, also, are usually exquisite. Nonetheless, I never really think of him as a political force, at least not of such magnitude that he would rank among the most powerful of any century.

So do I underestimate Dylan, or perhaps the effects of the sixties in general? I do know that we all tend to become a bit myopic about our own lives, and we tend to overestimate the importance of the movements with which we associate and identify ourselves. When I was playing in a band and running a tiny recording studio in Chicago in the mid-90s, I was convinced that we in particular and the whole indie scene in general were going to shake the musical foundations of the world. Classic rock guys who grew up in the seventies talk about Steve Miller or the Eagles as if they’re prophets (“Fly like an Eagle, man! To the frickin’ sea! If that’s not poetry, I don’t know what is, man. Hey, pass me another Bud Light, will ya?”) But it’s not just the music scene of the day—it’s everything to do with pop culture: social movements, philosophical trends, fashion, advertising, you name it—all these things that change over time, whose changes themselves come to describe the character of a particular generation. I’ve heard my own contemporaries talking about Friends and South Park in such terms, and that honestly frightens me. In a similar way, this aging economist had become convinced over the years that Dylan, that clever songsmith of subversive ideologies, had led a revolution. In some ways he had, it’s true, and obviously to a far greater degree than any of the soy-and-ramen-eating slackers in my band, but to unthinkingly call him a political force seems almost an insult to the many people who have offered up their lives and/or livelihoods in the name of social change since, say, the beginning of the industrial revolution, folks who did far more than draw stoners to stadiums by the thousands.

Sometimes I get to thinking about a particular time and place, mine perhaps, or the particular time and place that constitutes the life of any one of us. All these ephemeral things that identify us, those that will seem so ridiculous to subsequent generations, and will be completely forgotten sooner or later, have such weight, don’t they? Whether it’s Chandler or Homer, Dylan or Brandon. I remember my father asking incredulously if I’d really never heard of Tommy Dorsey. I could barely identify Clarke Gable in a line-up. What will they say about Eminem? Or Matt Damon?

Let me just mention what two of my favorite things are these days: Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens . . . no wait . . . that’s Julie Andrews. I get confused easily. The version I have in my head when I think of that song, however, is (I think) from an Anne Murray 8-track that my mom listened to all the time when I was a kid. What I meant to say is that Godspeed You Black Emperor!, a nine-piece Canadian anthemic experimental rock band currently playing at top volume in my headphones, have recently been elevated to this week’s favorite band. Epitonic has this to say about them:

Listening to Montreal nine-piece Godspeed You Black Emperor! is a bit like opening up the face of a clock and trying to make sense of its works. They’re fascinating in their shiny metallic complexity, beautiful in their technical sophistication, yet ultimately unknowable for a mere layman, representing a prototype for a strange world with a different physics more than a functional machine. In other words, true understanding takes work and effort, but true understanding with respect to Godspeed, unlike a clock, is always a matter of subjective interpretation.

What Godspeed You Black Emperor! actually presents its listeners are dense, epic instrumental compositions, which tend to start small and stark and build inexorably towards intense climaxes, swaying and bending as they go under the weight of so much accumulated instrumentation. Strings, in varying shapes, sizes, and degrees of distress, are their pieces’ most dominant element. These include guitars which rarely sound like guitars—some bathed in layers of feedback and fuzz, some prepared and painful sounding, almost all broodingly dolorous—as well as achingly pretty cello, viola, and violin parts which often sound almost as if they’d been plucked from some forgotten backwoods folk tune. Complementing all this stringed noise are brassy waterfalls of French horn, repetitive organ and synth parts, heavily processed machine noise, found sounds, and a lot more. As the pieces build from delicate sound poetry to frenzied eruptions, martial percussion rhythms—often featuring glockenspiel, chimes, and nontraditional percussive instruments in addition to the drum kit—emerge, underpinning the rest of the instrumental mix. It all adds up to varying degrees of incredibly nuanced, repetitious hum, the sound of an alien life force, its heartbeat and breathing, expressed through music.

You can find two songs from their 2000 release, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, at epitonic.com.

The second one of my favorite things is my new 20GB iPod, which I bought in order not to go crazy on the three-day drive out here. It worked well for that, since I also bought Griffin Technologies’ iTrip, which broadcasts on the FM frequency of your choice and allows you to pick up your iPod on the U-Haul truck radio. I thought it a pretty clever solution. My new iPod, Alyosha, now accompanies me while I wait in the mornings, for up to 20 minutes sometimes, for the bus to arrive. And as I walk down the street, my feet in lockstep rhythm to whichever soaring and/or richly textured music I’ve chosen to escort me into wakefulness that day, my otherwise nondescript getting-to-work routine syncs up to the beat, like in that Jetta ad from the mid-’90s. (You remember it, don’t you? This one.) The world is a beautiful place when you’ve got your iPod in your pocket, especially when you have the little remote control clipped onto your pocket so you can adeptly change songs or turn down the volume when somebody’s looking you in the eye and his lips are moving and you realize that he’s probably trying to ask you a question.

It sometimes makes me feel better, when I’m sitting on the bus in my dorky business casual get-up with my shirt tucked in, that I’m secretly listening to loud fast punk rock music that has its middle finger raised haughtily at the Man I’m working for. The funny thing is how many other people I see on the bus in the morning, their shirts tucked in, their tan chinos ironed smooth, with those tell-tale white ear buds, spinning the little virtual song chooser dial with reckless abandon.

It’s good to know I am not alone.

I would like to apologize for my negligence in posting for the past week. I’ve been in transition, beginning with the drive for three interminable days across humid and twang’n’drawl-soaked regions I’d never otherwise frequent. If you want an idea of what it was like, play the movie and then multiply what you see by about 16,000:

After I finally arrived here, I spent far too long unpacking and sorting, sleeping in spurts, and I had to devote a whole afternoon to buying a couple of pieces of respectable looking clothing. Before the big shopping day, my footwear collection consisted solely of one pair of sandals, and I owned only two pairs of jeans, one without holes.

I’ve been spending my allocated computer time migrating the blog to a new server. Neither of my readers will have to look at ads anymore, which I’m sure they’ll appreciate. More importantly, I’ve got plenty of storage space to spare, and new services like PHP/MySQL support and streaming Quicktime, so you can look forward to an ever-expanding array of goodies from yours truly, depending on how long it takes me to make friends here. If past experience is any guide, you can expect a lot of goodies. Please bookmark the new location, your home away from home, your shelter from the storm: http://www.strangeproportion.com.

I once wrote a panegyric to coffee. It was for a college language class, and I was required to write a persuasive speech. I decided to persuade the class that everyone should drink more coffee. Who could argue with that? Piece of cake. The relevant excerpts went like this:

Coffee. Mystical black beverage. Hot, thick, and bitter—steaming, filling the room with its unique scent. Coffee. A swarthy pirate returning home victorious from a battle at sea. Or a quick-tongued serpent in a damned big hurry to get wherever it is that serpents go. Jazzy, yet serene, slithering along to its own internal groove and rhythm and rhyme.

But leaving aside for a moment the poetry of the drink, let’s come to the matter at hand: Everyone should drink more coffee. Now, as self-evident as that statement sounds to me, I realize that I have spent more time thinking about this particular subject than most. And I hope in the few minutes I have to share with you some of the wisdom that this, as I said, mystical black beverage has imparted to me.

When I sat down at my desk to begin writing this speech, my pot of Sunday coffee was brewing itself, gurgling like a neighborhood gossip with too much to say. You should realize that Sunday coffee is different from weekday morning coffee is different from evening coffee spent with friends is different from post-dinner lethargy-combating coffee. This is due to the various ways that the ritual of coffee can unfold itself. Granted, at times, one just grabs a cup of coffee as a pick-me-up on the way to somewhere to be. Sometimes those not prone to reflection fall into the habit of assuming that this is the sole role of coffee in our lives, but that is cubicle-drone mentality. To cubicle drones, coffee equals functionality times efficiency. Now, this is true, and not to be underestimated by any means, but it doesn’t stop there. For coffee doesn’t just counteract the negative; it fosters the positive.

At the time, I was quite proud of the speech. There was some other horribly clever stuff in there from which I've chosen to spare you. I have dragged it out of the archives tonight because I remember explicitly making fun of what I referred to as “cubicle drones.” Today I began my first day as one of them. It may be nothing but Stockholm Syndrome, but I have to say that it wasn’t too bad. In fact, it was a bit boring, and I literally did nothing all day long, which is only slightly less surprising to me than the fact that the other, more experienced cubicle drones did little more than I did.

Can I mention my sadness at realizing that there are 308 Google references to that phrase? ’Cause here I was thinking I was all clever, only to be slapped in the face yet once again by my own overwhelming lack of originality.

To get back to the point: My position is an internship at a very large company, and the nature of the internship consists almost completely of training in things that I yet know nothing about, so I didn’t expect to be solving problems and cranking out theorems on my first day. Nonetheless, neither did I expect to spend two hours of my morning on the phone with tech support getting my log-in and password. Nor spending an hour of my afternoon on the phone with the network administrator resolving an issue with my home directory, nor two hours waiting for our instructor to finish something else he was doing in another office and come back to teach us something. In the end, I finally received my first UNIX factoid at 4:30 p.m., and that UNIX lesson continued for almost 20 minutes uninterrupted until someone stopped by the office and announced that he was the ride for another one of the interns and that he was leaving now, and did the other intern want to come with? All that momentum lost, a sigh and a hanging of the head, and we decided to call it quits for the day and try again tomorrow.