[the palaverist]

[things i'd like to write about but haven't]

2011-07-07T14:48:00.000-04:00

My trip to Budapest and Vienna.
My trip to Ann Arbor. And Ypsilanti.
All the churches in Brooklyn Heights: visit each, learn about it, attend a service, blog it.
My life as a Korean dancer.
My theory of Tom Tom Club vs. David Byrne.
My trip to Ghana.
Being sick abroad.
Toilets of the world (this one's more of a photo essay).
My trip to Mexico. (Noting a theme?)
My trip to Paris.
An open letter to the mayor demanding seasonal weather changes. (This will be funnier when actually written, I hope.)

[drop the red lantern]

2011-02-02T23:50:00.000-05:00

I have just seen Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou's claustrophobic 1991 film about a woman who becomes "Mistress Four" in a wealthy Chinese household sometime in the early twentieth century. The film received a great many awards and is widely considered a classic. I hated it.

Though it presents as a chick flick, centered on female characters and chock full of fancy costumes, it's a decidedly misogynistic movie. The plot is driven by the wives' (and a servant girls') struggle for the attentions of the Master in a ritualized environment where every coupling is formally announced to everyone else through elaborate ritual. To make this plot work, it's crucial that the women have about the same level of characterization you get in a high-end porno: Third Mistress was an opera singer, Fourth Mistress is a college girl who's father was in the tea trade, and so on. As in a pornographic film, the outside world is excluded; everything takes place within the household. Clearly that's an artistic choice meant to heighten the claustrophobia, but the story itself acknowledges that the women leave the house, sometimes unaccompanied: the Master offers at one point to take Songlian out for dumplings at a place she likes, and Third Mistress manages to get caught in a hotel having an affair with the family doctor.

And that's what gives the lie to the whole thing. At the end, Songlian is driven mad by her helplessness in the face of the servants' murder of Third Mistress for her affair. She paces the courtyard, alone and disheveled. There is, first of all, sheer laziness in that. Declaring your lady character insane is much easier than imagining how she might live with her trauma, and also totally unrealistic. And there, again, is the misogyny: depicting women as fragile, with minds that snap all too easily.

And it also goes against the facts we know. We know that Songlian connives. We know that she's unhappy. We know that people come and go from the house. Why does she stay, permitted to pace about the place? Alas, we know too little of that outside world to imagine what she might fear in it. Everything is inward-focused, to the exclusion of reality itself.

OK, so is this some kind of complicated metaphor for life under Mao? Is the hothouse craving for the Master's attention, and the infighting, and the murderousness of the servants, all some kind of allegory about the Communist Party? I don't think it is, or if it is, it's just not good enough.

Raise the Red Lantern is, in the end, a stylized costume drama. And it is, admittedly, haunting and compelling in some of its imagery. But it's an overbearing film that dehumanizes its characters to no particular end.

Also, it's boring.

[how not to apply for a job]

2011-01-27T15:47:00.000-05:00

The following is an opening paragraph that I won't be using for a cover letter (for an internal position, peeps — I'm not leaving Google!).

I feel it’s important to write you and express my firm point of view that a sense of humor is not an appropriate job qualification. Those of us who were not blessed with this sixth sense at birth nevertheless deserve to be taken seriously (ever so seriously) as candidates for any and all roles that don’t expressly have ‘comedy’ or ‘comedian’ in the title. I think, for example, that we need more humorless talk show hosts, postal workers, and veterinarians, who could bring the appropriate seriousness to the tasks of celebrity chitchat, mail delivery, and cat-sticking respectively.

Yes, snow does cause brain damage. Why do you ask?

[pop is the new alternative]

2010-04-18T23:58:00.002-04:00

It's a truism that the millennial generation is a whole lot more earnest than the Gen-Xers who preceded them. Certainly they don't seem to be mired in the crippling irony that we all seemed to struggle against, and they don't have the combination of seething anger and helpless despair that fueled the whole alternative movement.

There are two relics of the Gen-X period that to me sum up what stood out about our generation and why. The first is a line from "Smells Like Teen Spirit": "Our little group has always been/And always will until the end." There just aren't a lot of us, and I think that made a difference. The boomers were marketed to relentlessly, and still are. The same is true of the millennials: movies like Look Who's Talking and Three Men and a Baby, came out when they were born, and the music industry was creating pop stars for them when they were still tweens. But for Generation X, the marketing juggernaut never really got ginned up. I think we never fully bought into corporate America because corporate America never really bought into us. The resources weren't invested, so we went our own way and listened to weird bands and wore weird clothes that were difficult to sell in any organized way. I'd like to imagine that the alternative scene was about something deeper, but I suspect that we felt like we had no real place in contemporary America simply because no one was trying hard enough to sell us things.

The other Gen-X artifact that I think of is the movie Slackers. Its various characters are all struggling in one way or another to gather and communicate information: the guy who collects TVs, the guy who keeps shouting about how people need to read the newspaper, the Kennedy assassination buff, the girl trying to sell Madonna's pubes are all trapped by their inability to connect with anyone who shares their enthusiasms. And what's remarkable about this movie is that every one of those problems is solved by the Internet. With YouTube, political blogs, social networks, eBay, you no longer need to be alone with your obsession. That devastating feeling of isolation and powerlessness that the alternative scene was meant to assuage is simply not a problem in the way that it was. Millennials have come of age knowing that they can make a difference, that they can have an impact on the wider world, whether through serious political engagement or through participation in a flashmob.

But so here's where the whole situation with pop music starts to get interesting. For Gen-X, there were two kinds of popular music: pop that was manufactured by people who didn't seem to understand us that well, and who were definitely not us; and alternatives to that pop, whether gangsta rap or grunge or what have you, that had to define itself musically against the slicked-up sounds of more traditional pop. To be authentic, music had to be uncomfortable, at least a little.

But for the millennials, that's just not true anymore. They voted for their American Idols, so it's OK to like them. And they watched Justin Timberlake grow up, so it's OK to like him. And now, there's the emerging and fascinating phenomenon of the ironically self-aware pop star. Lady Gaga is the obvious queen of this new phenomenon, but you see it in Lily Allen and in Timberlake, and I noticed in in Ke$ha on SNL this weekend. (Sudden thought: was it Eminem who bridged the gap between alternative rage and abrasiveness, and self-parodying pop stars?) They're pop stars, and they know they're pop stars, and they seem to think that the whole thing is a zany lark, akin to a YouTube video that blows up for no apparent reason. You get the sense that they genuinely realize the whole thing is a crap shoot, and that there's nothing all that special about them as people.

It used to be alternative that was the realm of DIY, where you went to see bands that made you feel like you could be in a band just like them. You could never be a New Kid on the Block, but you and your friends could totally pull off a Beasties punk number, and any schmuck could dress that badly. But now it's the guitar bands that seem kind of remote and obscure, while anyone with a sequencer and a webcam can make a video and maybe turn into a pop star. It's like Toto pulled back the curtain, and the millennials decided that Oz was totally great and they wanted a turn at the levers.

[what does it all mean?]

2010-04-18T20:49:00.000-04:00

I don't know, but it's on every hip hop record, and apparently it's New York City Mayor Fiorello Laguardia explaining the moral of a Dick Tracy comic strip over the radio during a newspaper strike (the famous sample kicks in at about 1:27).

The first use is almost certainly Double Dee and Steinski, who included it in their Lesson 1: The Payoff Mix from 1983, an astonishing sound collage.

The more you know ... Star!

[national fears]

2010-04-17T01:47:00.000-04:00

Because I know a little something about Korea, people often ask me about the Chinese government. I suppose Canadians probably get asked to explain America, so I kind of get it.

In any case, a question that often comes up is why the Chinese government is so terrified of Falun Gong. I don't know from any detailed insider knowledge or anything, but my guess is that it has to do with a vast and little-known war called the Taiping Rebellion.

At roughly the same time that some 600,000 Americans lost their lives in our Civil War, China was going through an epic struggle that cost some 20 million lives — some 30 times as many casualties. (I found one reference to China's population in 1834 as 400 million, while the US had some 31 million in 1860, so the percentage losses are closer: something like 5% in China, and 2% in the US.)

Wars on this scale leave national scars. America certainly hasn't resolved all the racial issues that lay behind the Civil War, and fear of race-based insurrection has continued to haunt the national psyche.

In China, the haunting fear is of a different kind. It's a fear of disruptive religious movements, because that's what Taiping was. Hong Xiuquan, the movement's leader, claimed to be Jesus's brother, and he led what was called the Heavenly Kingdom in a great battle to rid China of Manchu rule and spread a peculiar brand of heterodox Christianity.

So I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that when Chinese officials see a movement like Falun Gong — a religious movement with the power to mobilize great numbers of people — some national memory of the Taiping disaster kicks in. On a gut level, mass religious zeal produces panic.

None of this is meant to justify the abuse, repression, or torture of any group of people for their religious beliefs, of course. The question isn't whether such repression is OK — it's not — but why it happens, why this group in particular gets the Chinese government's panties in a bunch. And I think that maybe it's that legacy of Taiping.

[lies, damn lies, and sound effects]

2010-04-13T23:27:00.000-04:00

Like a lot of folks, I've been watching Life, the Discovery Channel series of nature documentaries in which photographers go to extraordinary lengths to bring back fascinating footage of fauna, which is then edited into anodyne snippets narrated by Oprah Winfrey, who seems to feel obligated to give clever line readings.

OK, so I'm not thrilled with the series. But here's the part that really gets me: the sound effects. And they get me because they're so utterly false.

Whatever you might say about the narratives used to frame the video of animals doing their thang, you can at least look at it and go, "Yup, that bat sure is eating that fish," or whatever. It's a picture of something real. But the sound effects are trickier. Sometimes they're presumably genuine recordings of animals making sounds: the call of a particular bird, the roar of a lion.

Or maybe not.

The trouble is, there are sounds that are evidently faked. Everything underwater, for example. We know that even if they had a mike down there, it would pick up the sound of a diver blowing bubbles, and that would be lame. But what do we hear in the show? The splishy whoosh of this or that fish darting out and eating its prey, or the burble and hiss of coral ejecting eggs. But there is no such sound, or at least nothing that was recorded in the wild for this show. Even worse are the sound effects that go along with slow-motion or time-lapse footage. The sounds aren't slowed, which is again proof that they're faked.

Why does this matter? Because it calls into question every other sound: the crack of the bones that the vultures drop on rocks to break open, the clack of monkeys breaking open nuts with rocks, even the animals' vocalizations. How can I have any confidence that the elephant's trumpet on Life was produced by the elephant on the screen at the time that the elephant was being filmed?

Indeed, and slightly to Life's credit, the show ends each episode with a segment called "Capturing the Shot," which shows photographers gathering the material for the show — and, typically, narrating the moment as they capture it. Which means that they're ruining the sound. Which means that the sounds we hear in the final version are foley effects added later.

It's disappointing. And it's not just Life, either. I was just watching a Nova episode in which a space telescope whooshed by. Did it have to whoosh? But at least there it was glaringly obvious that the sound wasn't real. With nature documentaries, I'd like to feel confident that the roars, squeaks, growls, crunches, and other animal noises are actually animal noises, not reconstructions in a studio. But until a higher standard of honesty prevails, we'll never really know.

[our pakistan moment?]

2010-04-01T08:28:00.000-04:00

For years, Pakistan made a national security bargain. Seeing India as an existential threat, and believing that they couldn't match India's military strength directly, Pakistan's intelligence forces promoted a variety of Islamist terrorist organizations as proxy fighters in Kashmir and elsewhere in India.

It was always a risky scheme, and in the last couple of years, many people, including many in Pakistan, have come to recognize that these state-supported terrorist groups are a far deeper threat to Pakistan's existence than India is.

Here in the US, since 9/11, we've had a fanatical focus on the threat of foreign terrorists. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, that was understandable: we thought they were far deadlier than they turned out to be, and we had no idea what was coming next.

Unfortunately, in the panic that ensued, a political culture was created that saw dissent as treason, and dissenters as a danger to our existence. Opponents of, say, the Patriot Act, or the prison at Guantanamo, or the war in Iraq were not just political adversaries but enemies.

Those who created that political climate were making a bargain a little like Pakistan's. A key problem with that kind of rhetoric is what happens when these supposed enemies take over the state, which happened in January of 2009. They took it over, of course, through the constitutional means of free and fair elections, and have done nothing to suggest that there won't be more elections on the same regular schedule Americans are used to. This was hardly a coup d'etat. But no matter. If you've convinced people that the political opposition is an existential threat to your country, then you've got a problem on your hands when the opposition takes over.

What makes this bargain similar to Pakistan's is that America faces significant threats from domestic terrorism. Indeed, through most of our history, domestic terrorism has been far more meaningful than foreign terrorism. The second-worst terrorist attack in our history was the Oklahoma City bombing, carried out by fanatical right-wing American terrorists. And if you lump in other forms of political violence that usually go by other names — lynch mobs, race riots (whatever the race of the rioters), hate crimes, assassinations — it's clear that home-grown fanaticism has been far more dangerous to us than foreign fanatics could ever hope to be.

Let's hope that we don't face another Oklahoma City, or another major assassination. Let's hope that the rhetoric can be brought down to a more responsible level before someone ends up dead. And let's be realistic about what genuinely threatens democracy in America.

[how to fail like an olympian]

2010-02-28T22:51:00.000-05:00

When you watch the Olympics, it can be easy to forget just how ridiculously good these people are at whatever bizarre thing it is they're doing. Take, for example, figure skating. Early in the evening of the ladies' long program, long before Kim Yu-Na and the other medal contenders took the ice, there was Tuğba Karademir, a Turkish skater who ultimately came in 24th.

Now, I have never been the 24th-best person in the world at any particular skill, as far as I know. It's an extraordinary achievement. And yet, watching her skate, it was absolutely clear why she was in a different class from the top five or six skaters in the world. So when you're watching the coverage of a medal contender in the slalom who misses a gate, or of a bobsled team that plays it conservatively and can't shave off that hundredth of a second they need to take the lead, you go, "Yeah, that was a mistake," and you forget how insanely difficult it is to do whatever it is the athletes are doing in the first place.

And after a couple of weeks of that sort of thing, today I went to my Korean dance class, and I imagined what it would mean to be the best in the world at it, or one of the top ten or twenty. For one thing, it would mean practicing more often than once a week for 90 minutes. My dance teacher is an extraordinary dancer, and part of how you get to be that way is to do it a lot. And then there's the level of detail: spending a week or a month or six months concentrating on just the right way to get your torso to expand and contract, or how to extend your fingers to draw out a line.

Beyond that, as I fumbled my way through my little bit of choreography, I started thinking about how much concentration is a part of athletic success. Sometimes, as I dance, some move I've just done half a dozen times will suddenly desert me, and I'll be shrugging my shoulders when I'm supposed to be twirling already, or my arms will be flopping at my sides because I've forgotten where they're supposed to be. Again, this is incredibly far removed from the kind of mental effort that serious athletes make, but I felt like it was an inkling, at the very least, of how it is that someone who's done a routine a thousand times in warm-ups can suddenly flub it in competition.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

[cold winters]

2010-02-17T17:53:00.000-05:00

This winter is the coldest and snowiest I remember in a long time — maybe since my first winter in New York. I was a California boy then, new to the rigors of winter, so I've sometimes wondered whether my recollections were overblown — whether perhaps the winter of '94 had grown harsher in my imagination that it actually was.

Not so.

Here's a fun little sampling of articles on just how rough that season was:

I recall the Columbia campus covered in ice sheets an inch thick that made going to class a treacherous affair. My Lit Hum class was way over in the International Affairs Building, east of Amsterdam Avenue, and getting there required a late-afternoon traverse across the howling wind tunnel of West 120th Street, a canyon between the high walls of Teacher's College and the Columbia campus's forbidding backside. There were many afternoons when I simply didn't make the trip. I had a hard time meeting people and making friends because so few people went out and did anything. But when the snow banks had piled up above the height of the parked cars, someone carved an entire life-sized automobile from snow, with a grinning grille and an icicle for an antenna.

I remember that on that arctic January 17, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, the pipes in my dorm froze, leading to a basement fire. I heard my RA pounding on my door, shouting, "Get out! Get out! There's a real fire!" — we'd already spent much of the morning waiting out a false alarm in a slowly flooding lobby — and quickly pulling on boots and a coat over my T-shirt and sweat pants before running from the building. I didn't have my wallet or my student ID or socks. It was very, very cold, and there was nowhere for me to go. I begged my way into another dorm, where I sat in the lounge and watched pictures of the aftermath of the Los Angeles earthquake.

There were ice floes on the Hudson. I could see them from my dorm room's sliver of a river view.

I was totally unprepared for a winter like this. I didn't know to get long underwear. My boots were designed for jungle combat and had air vents down by the soles. When at last the snow began to melt, deep slush puddles formed at all the corners, and you could only cross at the corners, where cuts had been made in the towering snow banks. Going to the store directly across the street meant walking to the corner, crossing, and walking back.

I recall a long, wandering, intellectually confused discussion with my Logic and Rhetoric professor, an angry feminist grad student in the English department. I wanted to know what differentiated my B+ essays from my B- essays, and she came around to the position that her methods were holistic and could only be understood once the course was complete. Along the way, she suggested that maybe I needed to experience bad grades because I had already had so much white male privilege, "locker-room camaraderie" and the like. I countered that seeing as how I hadn't actually been on any sports teams, my friend Monica, who played rugby at Wesleyan, had undoubtedly experienced far more locker-room camaraderie than I ever had. This enlightened symposium took place outside in bitter cold. We were both too stubborn or too stupid to suggest going inside somewhere and continuing like civilized human beings.

My work-study job that year was at the reserve desk in the library, another institution dedicated to purging white male privilege. I was the only white person on the staff, and I'm fairly certain that was what my boss disliked about me, though I have no real proof. In any case, whenever I was on duty, it was invariably my job to go outside in the early morning and bring in the books from the drop-bin, which involved unlocking the Master Lock, which in turn required that I hold it in my bare hand until it thawed. Then I had to scrape the ice away from the bin door so that I could open it and retrieve the books. When I suggested that we perhaps wait a bit to open the bin on days when the temperature was in the single digits, it was pointed out to me that this would unfairly enable students to get away with returning their books late by several hours. I didn't think this was such a bad thing, but I wasn't in charge.

When at last the forecast was for 60 degrees, I went alone to Central Park — I was often alone in those days — and sat on a rock, thrilling that I was outside and it didn't hurt.

That was a very hard winter. The hardest I've known. This winter has seen a fair amount of cold and snow, but it's nothing like the winter of '94.

[beatles and birth order]

2010-01-12T23:08:00.000-05:00

Does birth order affect who your favorite Beatle is? My sister is the youngest. Her favorite is George, who happens to be the youngest Beatle, who had to fight to get his voice heard, and who really came into his own as an equal to John and Paul only on the later albums.

My brother, the middle child, seems to like Ringo, the amiable peacemaker without strong opinions. Such a middle child!

As for me, I'm the firstborn, and I like John, the solitary dreamer, the one who turned his back most firmly on the fraternity of the group, and who really just wanted to settle into a relationship that didn't have the bother of outside interference.

[scattered thoughts about avatar]

2009-12-30T11:10:00.002-05:00

Spoilers galore. If you haven't seen it yet, stop reading now.

So about those big ol' robot suits. Why would you have them carry guns and knives in artificial hands, so that they can be dropped or taken by an enemy? Wouldn't you just make the weaponry integral to the suit? The only reason to carry a weapon is because it's not already attached to you. It's not advantageous. Also, why would the suit fall down when the driver is killed? Makes no sense.

Overall, not enough backstory. Jake Sully's connection to his own life is so tenuous that there's really no question of loyalties. How could he side with an angry colonel, who himself has so little depth that he seems to have come out of Dr. Strangelove, but stripped of irony? The colonel offers him legs, but those can be obtained with money, we already know. There's just not enough there.

We also don't know enough about why the mining company wants the unobtainium, what it's used for, or who's backing them. Is this like the US trying to get heavy water in World War II? Is it like our current thirst for oil? Or is it Alcoa hitting on a copper mine? We know it's expensive, but not why, and it's a relevant point. Also relevant is the general attitude back on earth towards Pandora and Pandorans. Why? Because I'd like to know whether a defeat of this small, poorly armed security detail (seriously, no cruise missiles or drones?) will be Black Hawk Down, meaning a hasty retreat, or 9/11, meaning we come back in giant numbers and invade everything in sight.

Of course, what keeps it from being 9/11, or even Dances with Wolves, is the total lack of ambiguity. Because the mining company and its security force are largely men and all adults, there's no conflict of civilizations. Regardless of the moral right of European settlers to show up and settle on Native American lands, settle they did, and that turned fights with the natives into threats to home and family. Indeed, Native Americans killed and kidnapped whole families, women and children included. That's enough to motivate serious and even disproportionate reprisals, as was 9/11, and as is every terrorist attack on Israel.

There's no equivalent on Pandora. Why is the colonel so invested in the fight? There's no reason at all. He doesn't even have Jack D. Ripper's paranoia. Nothing. He just wants to go kill. His character, and the Marines who cheer with him, are an insult to actual Marines, who generally don't want to go blow up indigenous peoples for the enrichment of corporations (even if that turns out to be the gig sometimes). Marines, or the ones I've known anyway, want to fight to defend our country by attacking and destroying those who would attack and destroy us. It's not pretty, but it's purposeful. It can turn pretty blunt, like just wanting to kill the fuck out of Muslims, but that's because they're seen as a threat to our way of life. Without that threat, I just don't see the motivation.

So the Na'vi are spared the ambiguity of the Native Americans in Little Big Man or Dances with Wolves because they never encounter a child. And the Marines are given no chance for ambiguity. This same lack of ambiguity is acceptable when the enemy is presented as a kind of implacable evil, as in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, but it falls apart when the enemy is human and identifiably ourselves.

[vienna teng]

2009-12-30T10:47:00.002-05:00

I've just discovered Vienna Teng, a lovely and powerful singer-songwriter. Her music reminds me of Noe Venable and of Fiona Apple, though Teng is distinctly her own thing (and in fact there's a YouTube video of her covering Noe's "Midsummer Night's Dream"). Visit her site and listen to "Blue Caravan." Then check out her MySpace page and listen to "Grandmother Song." It's an Americana stomp about being an aging singer-songwriter, a common enough theme, yet it manages to tie in (allusively) the whole Taiwanese-American experience, with the weight of war and deprivation that weighs so heavily on the youngest generation.

[moving]

2009-12-30T10:41:00.002-05:00

For a while now, I've been talking about moving to Manhattan. At this point, it's more a question of when than whether. Bay Ridge is pleasant enough, but it's far away, and I like to have a home that people actually visit. Plus, I'm tired of the long commute, and of feeling like once I've gone out for the day, popping back home is simply too far to go if I want to go out again. And then there's school: if I go back to school, living as far away as I do now will make things all the harder.

So I'd like to move to Manhattan, preferably somewhere very close to my office, in Chelsea or the West Village. Most of my life happens around here anyway: Korean dance in K-town, swing dance near Penn Station or Times Square, work in Chelsea, socializing in the Village or the East Village, shopping in Union Square.

As for the timing, well, I guess my life is pretty full. I'm just not going to get it together by the end of January, and anyway January is a rotten time to be going around, looking at apartments. Also, I have jury duty. So that rules out February 1. March 1 would be feasible, but I'm leaving for India on March 5, and that double stress is more than I need, nor do I want to come home to the chaos of a new apartment when I'm all jet-lagged. There's pretty much no way, coming back from India on March 21, than I'll find an apartment and get packed in that final week of the month. And so it looks like May 1 is the next really good date.

May 1.

I have until then to clean out my junk drawers, give away my old clothes, and generally scale down the stuff. That's plenty of time, but also plenty of time to worry over it.

[scattered thoughts about precious]

2009-11-29T10:59:00.003-05:00

1. OK, so who at Sunkist thought a product placement in Precious was a good idea? It's there twice: once as a can next to Precious's abusive mother as she hunkers in her gloomy apartment, then again as the label across the drink machine at the welfare office. Peculiarly, Mariah Carey's character comes back with two cans of fake-label soda, drawing all the more attention to the product placement. In fact, throughout the movie, the only brand label we ever see is Sunkist. (McDonald's and, inevitably, Oprah get mentioned, but we don't see either. Oprah had been nationally syndicated only since September 1986.) The tag lines that come to mind are not good. "Sunkist: What your incestuous mama drink while she beat you." "Thirsty? On welfare? Sunkist is for you!" This is not exactly ET eating Reece's Pieces.

2. Mariah Carey was actually very good. Mo'Nique was extraordinary. Gabourey Sidibe was just OK. Her face isn't terribly expressive.

3. There are very few men in Precious's world. I think that's probably an accurate depiction of a life like that, and it points to a very serious social problem.

4. I saw the movie with a couple of people who work in social services. It's like seeing Office Space with your cube-mates. Afterwards, one of them told me, "When I found out she was HIV-positive, I was like, 'Oh, now she can get housing!'"

5. Speaking of HIV, the film takes place in 1987, and a number of its characters are very poorly educated. When Precious tells the class that she's HIV-positive, it seems anachronistic that there's no fear, no panic, no immediate freakout, particularly considering that a number of these girls were in contact with Precious's blood earlier on. The first anti-HIV drug, AZT, was introduced only that year, so AIDS was widely perceived as an absolute death sentence. ACT UP was founded in 1987. Public understanding was primitive at best.

6. The whole welfare process, as depicted in the film, is incredibly humiliating. You're forced to answer incredibly personal questions from a case worker who has the power to take away your minimal livelihood. What's your home life like? What's your mother like? What's your father like? They're the kinds of questions it's actually illegal for the HR department of a private company to ask. It's painful to watch, and it must be painful to live through. At the same time, the process is shown to have failed utterly — Precious had never even been to a doctor — so it's largely an exercise in humiliation and enforced lying before power.

7. The teacher and her partner have a beautiful home. Was that affordable in Harlem in 1987?

[the plan, as it unfolds]

2009-11-15T00:09:00.002-05:00

For a while now I've been thinking about graduate school. Here are my reasons:

Everyone else seems to be doing it.
My brother and sister are doing it, which means I'll be the least educated member of my family if I don't (dad has an MBA, mom an MA and JD, grandma a Ph.D., grandpa a JD, sister and brother both working on MAs).
Barack Obama asked every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education, and while this obviously meant at least one year past high school, which I have, I'm taking it to mean at least one more year than I already have.
It might be vaguely useful professionally to have a higher degree, though that sort of depends what it is.

Those are my reasons for thinking about grad school. So I talked to a few coworkers who'd done the whole master's thing, and one of them told me to study something I love, because it's a ton of work, and I won't want to see it through if I don't feel passionate about it (he has an MFA in creative writing).

So that got me thinking about specifics. An MBA is right out, 'cause I completely don't give a shit. International affairs? Maybe. Central Asian history or linguistics? Off chance. Asian studies?

Duh.

I mean, look at what my plans were for the weekend: go to a lecture at the Korean Cultural Service on Friday night, by myself, to learn about traditional Korean music; meet a new Korean conversation partner on Saturday and study; meet an old Korean conversation partner on Saturday and study; meet a friend from the Korean Mission to the UN on Sunday; go to my Korean dance class.

Sure, I read articles from time to time on foreign policy. And sure, I'll slog my way through tomes on Central Asia. But I waded through nearly 5,000 pages of East Asian history and translated political and philosophical documents as a self-study program. And on weekends I study the Korean language and go to lectures on Korean culture for fun. When I arrived in Seoul in October, I was ecstatic to discover that here was an entire city completely dedicated to my hobby. For reasons I've never been able to pin down, the study of Korea has become my passion.

You knew that. I knew that. But I only just realized that this had a direct bearing on what I should study.

An obvious practical question arises: What will I do with an MA in Asian Studies? And a practical answer: No idea. Yes, it's a lot of work for no concrete result. Yes, it's expensive. But I want to do it. And the advantage of being passionate about the subject while not needing the degree is that I can drop out without feeling like the whole thing has been pointless.

My plan, then, is to do this ... eventually. I'm hoping to move to Manhattan when my lease is up, in September of next year. Starting grad school at the same time that I move strikes me as pointlessly exhausting. So I'm going to shoot for spring of 2011 to begin my studies. Between now and then, I'd like to make substantial progress on the language. I'll also need to talk to people at the Asian Studies programs at Columbia and NYU, and also maybe CUNY. And study for the GREs. And that, in sum, is the plan so far.

[memory, history, and the beatles]

2009-09-24T21:06:00.002-04:00

What does it mean to remember an experience? Sitting with my parents recently, listening to the Beatles remasters that just came out, it became clear that what my parents remembered about the Beatles — the order things came out, which songs were on which albums — was a kind of visceral memory, often inaccurate when measured against the archival record. My father compared it to the way people of his parents' generation remembered World War II versus the way he grew up learning about it: they knew better what it was like, while he knew better what had actually happened.

Time also has a way of distorting our views. I know that I take Kurt Cobain a lot more seriously now than I did when he was alive. Until his suicide brought his art back into focus for me, I thought of Nirvana as a pretty good if simplistic and overhyped grunge band that was never as cool or interesting as Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. He wasn't the voice of my generation until he no longer had a voice.

That effect is probably even stronger with the Beatles, who shaped a generation far more intensely than Cobain ever could have. In the many years since the Beatles were a going concern, we've seen Wings, and Plastic Ono Band, and the Concert for Bangladesh. We've seen The Compleat Beatles and Anthology. We've heard Let It Be de-Spectorized. We've seen John Lennon martyred, and Yoko Ono transformed from witch to hipster icon. And we've grown more familiar with the canonical materials, while the uncollected detritus of abandoned pop culture — radio and television interviews, DJ chatter about new Beatles songs, the speculation of one's friends about whether the Beatles turn on, the newspaper and magazine articles — all fade into oblivion.

Above all, we know how it ends now. We know that Sgt. Peppter's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the highwater mark, that Abbey Road is the coda. We know that no Beatle ever did anything solo that was as impressive as the Beatles together. And we know that the story was closed forever by a pointless murder.

But what was it like to here "Tomorrow Never Knows" without knowing what was to come?

Sitting with my parents, listening to their memories of these songs when they were new, I got a taste of what that might have been like. And that got me to thinking about my own first experience of the Beatles.

Until 1987, what we had were the records — the American records. I grew up with an album called Song, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles, a decidedly silly repackaging of Vee-Jay's Introducing... the Beatles that included a gatefold, drawings of the Beatles, blurbs on their likes and dislikes, and places to put heart-shaped photographs of oneself under photos of each Beatle and the words, "JOHN LOVES," "PAUL LOVES," "GEORGE LOVES" or "RINGO LOVES." It was a record meant to be bought by a schoolgirl, and it was, and that has some meaning to it.

What changed in 1987 was that the surviving Beatles and George Martin released something resembling the whole Beatles catalogue in what became canonical form, based on the British albums, with the stray bits and pieces gathered onto Past Masters I and II. I say something resembling the whole because they did away with the instrumental versions of several songs that populated the American versions of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, and because all of the canonical CDs were in stereo. To muddy the waters even further, in 1987 George Martin took it upon himself to redo the stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul, so we've been listening to different versions of those LPs than the already somewhat obscure British stereo records.

The newly released remasters are a useful corrective. The music sounds grand, which is obviously the most important thing. I don't imagine that it sounds quite like a brand new pressing of British wax played on a brand new hi-fi from 1965 — certainly not when I play it on my iPod, through quality earbuds — but it sounds clear, resonant, full, and punchy.

And the release of the mono remasters, complete with the original stereo mixes of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, makes it possible to hear something much closer to what everyone heard when the Beatles' music was new. For the first couple of albums, the stereo mix is pretty arbitrary, mostly an artifact of how the music was recorded for mono: the vocals are all in the right channel, and the instruments are all in the left. I'd go so far as to say that Please Please Me and With the Beatles are actually preferable in mono, even on headphones.

There's also the peculiarity that certain songs have different bits in them, depending on whether you're listening to the mono or the stereo version. The Sgt. Pepper that played endlessly on the radio was probably the mono version, in which "She's Leaving Home" is a faster number in a different key, avoiding some of the soupiness of the stereo version, and the reprise is noisier, layered with more crowd noise and crescendoing with some great shouting by Paul that's missing in stereo. (In other cases, the stereo versions are better. Who wants to miss out on Paul reaching for the high notes as he sings, "Every single day!" during the fadeout of "Got to Get You Into My Life," or Ringo's famous "I've got blisters on my fingers!" as "Helter Skelter" fades back in?)

Getting to hear all this music, in a variety of formats, is wonderful. And it's not too difficult to create a playlist that recreates the American discography (although you do have to live without those instrumentals).

So what's the difference? Well, often the songs were in different orders, and the whole experience of the early Beatles was shaped by the overlapping releases of Introducing and Meet the Beatles!. The latter album, which launched American Beatlemania, opens with the world-conquering "I Want to Hold Your Hand," but leaves out "Twist and Shout" (not released by Capitol until The Early Beatles came out in 1965).

Even more significant were the changes to the middle-period albums, which were my parents' favorites, and whose structure and release schedule helped to map their courtship and coming of age. The now-canonical albums aren't the ones my father remembers. Help! opened with a James Bond theme intro (not digitally available), and was full of instrumentals. It didn't contain Yesterday, which wasn't on a US album until after Rubber Soul.

And it's maybe Rubber Soul where the changes matter most. My father remembers that record as part of his experience of traveling around Europe in the summer of '66, being in love with my mother. In the US, it opened with Paul's lovely, folkie "I've Just Seen a Face," not the smirky "Drive My Car." Side two opens with "It's Only Love," a considerably sweeter number than "What Goes On." And the dark moods of "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" are left off completely. The result is an album that has a different ratio of love to chagrin. There's a different vibe.

Then there's the whole sea change that seems to come with Revolver. In the US, that change was spread out over two albums, with "Yeterday"...and Today coming first, opening with "Drive My Car," "I'm Only Sleeping," "Nowhere Man," and "Dr. Robert," and closing out with "Day Tripper" (not found on any UK album). In America, Revolver was a bit less trippy than in the UK, and provided almost a lull in the psychedelic experimentation before the summer of Sgt. Pepper and love in 1967.

Somewhere in my parents' house is a reel-to-reel recording of my parents calling in to a radio show and chatting with John Lennon while they were tripping on LSD. I'm not entirely sure whether I've actually heard this tape, or just heard of it. I can't remember what anyone said. But this sort of relic reveals the unbridgeable gulf between the canonical text and the lived experience. No one will ever release a handsome boxed set of snippets like that. But chatting with John on the radio was another kind of listening to the Beatles. I'll have to dig up that tape one of these days and find out what, if anything, they talked about.

[so what's this korean dance you're learning?]

2009-08-16T22:34:00.003-04:00

This is a reasonable question that a number of people have asked me, including my mom. A quick search for Korean dance on YouTube turns up mostly pop, and if you throw in the word "traditional," you get mostly women. And I had to admit that even I wasn't very clear on what the dance style I'm learning is supposed to look like when a man does it. (When it comes to men's dancing, I'm much more familiar with the twirly hat stuff and the 사물노리 (samulnori) farmers' dance.)

So I went searching, and I've turned up a few examples, which I will present for you here without further ado (better to link through where you can see the YouTube videos in a bigger size):

The first one is, I believe, roughly what my teacher has in mind for me. The odds of my dancing that well are not high. My parents told me about a budding jazz singer they knew who started weeping when they played a Sarah Vaughan record for her, and I kind of feel like that watching this video.

All of these dancers are impressive, and having taking a few classes, I have a much clearer idea of just how challenging it is to move gracefully through these poses. It's a beautiful form of dance, and extraordinarily foreign to me. I remember how startling it was when a crowd of people started up with a folk version of this sort of thing during the halftime of Korea's quarterfinal game in the 2002 World Cup, dancing in a circle and banging drums and cymbals there in the dirt field of the local middle school.

Bonus: For those who don't know, Korea has perhaps the world's most badass b-boy culture. Please to enjoy. 멋있다!

[visiting my congressman]

2009-08-14T10:12:00.005-04:00

This morning I went to Representative Michael McMahon's Brooklyn office to present my support for health care reform in person. I met a young, friendly staffer who's on the same side as me, but made it clear to me that McMahon sees himself in a tough spot on this issue.

McMahon is the Representative for NY-13, a district that until the last election was held by Republican Vito Fossella. Fossella was caught in a scandal and declined to run for reelection. Then the favored Republican candidate, Francis Powers, died of a heart attack. In the end, McMahon took 61 percent of the vote in a district Obama lost.

According to the staffer I met, the people coming to McMahon's office to talk to him on health care have been about 80 percent against, and this has got McMahon worried. He also said that they'd decided not to hold any town halls because of concerns that they would be unproductive shouting matches. I reminded the staffer that shouters are not the same thing as polls or surveys, and that the last time we had a major poll, back in November, we elected McMahon on a Democratic platform that included health care reform.

But I think there are two important points here. The first is that a Democratic Congressional Representative is saying that his position on health care is being swayed by the overwhelming number of people coming into his office to speak against health care reform. We need to get out there and talk to our Reps to make sure they do the right thing!

The second point, which I hope our Representatives will grasp, is that the shouters and doubters on health care were never going to vote for them in the first place. Does McMahon truly believe that if he caves on health care, these nuts will come around to the Democratic side in 2010?

If health care reform passes, the Democrats will look strong. They'll have a record of achievement. And they'll get shouted at by loonies during the next election cycle. If health care reform doesn't pass, the Democrats will look weak. They'll come into the next election cycle facing accusations of incompetence. And they'll still get shouted at by loonies.

I hope the Democrats in Congress realize that voting down health care reform is not a winning proposition.

[more dancing with the ajummas]

2009-08-10T20:20:00.002-04:00

As my grandfather tells it, he always thought of himself as rather weak and small. He's short, and as a child he seems to have been somewhat bookish (though his idea of bookishness was to run five miles to the library, get a book, and run five miles back), and as an adult he became a corporate lawyer, not a role that necessarily calls for strapping men.

Then, in his forties, he took up mime. Now, this was before mimes became a horrible punchline, before that awful time in the eighties when mimes, like the homeless, became a constant urban menace. The way her learned mime, it was a serious, strenuous art form. He lost weight, gained strength, and developed a sense of physical presence and spatial awareness that was still serving him well into his eighties, as he would dance about the kitchen, closing cabinet doors behind him with his foot.

I take after my grandfather in a lot of ways, and certainly physically. As a kid, I was small for my age, and I was never much good at sports. Compulsory Israeli folkdance at summer camp was always a horror of ineptitude and humiliation. And you might have noticed that I have certain bookish tendencies.

But in the last couple of years, I've started to dance. I was not the quickest student in my swing classes, but I wasn't consistently the slowest, either. And at this point in my life, I'm willing to learn slowly and awkwardly. It's really OK. I make a grownup living and can spell and all that, so it's not really a big deal if my Charleston is a little sloppier than some other people's.

And now I've managed to find my way into Korean dance. Karen, the resident American who's been studying this stuff for 15 years, insists that I'm learning faster than most students, that I've got great lines, that I'm a natural. I kind of think this might be similar to the way Koreans have been telling me my language skills are amazing ever since I learned to say hello, but she might also be being honest. For once, it seems, my odd little duck walk may be paying dividends. I tend to walk back on my heels, with splayed feet, and I've been told this is the walk of a yangban, or traditional Korean gentry. And my years of swing dance practice have taught me to keep my knees bent. So maybe I am better at following dance instructions than I used to be. Maybe my physical prowess is greater than it was when I was 12 and practicing layups.

[more on japanese vs. korean coolness]

2009-08-10T15:04:00.003-04:00

I was going to follow up on an earlier post about Korean vs. Japanese coolness, and wondering whether anyone in Korea would ever be doing something like this:

Yes, it's awful. But it's also cool in a way that I didn't think Korean culture would quite grasp: the cool of the avant garde.

So I went fishing on the Interwebs to see if I could find an equivalent, and lo and behold, I discovered Balloon & Needle, a Korean artists collective that does things like this:

For some reason, this gives me hope.

[make health care a movement]

2009-08-07T09:34:00.003-04:00

Sudden thought: If small groups of right-wing teabaggers — crowds of a thousand or so — are disrupting town hall meetings and shouting down Democratic congresspeople, why not show them up with some giant marches in favor of health care reform? I think that progressive activists could probably muster a few big crowds in the tens of thousands at least.

[is korea getting kinky?]

2009-08-05T22:01:00.008-04:00

"Abracadabra" from Brown Eyed Girls is the first bit of Korean pop culture I've happened across that makes explicit reference to either BDSM or female bisexuality. (It's much more common to see sadomasochism couched in a "horror" context, which makes it more acceptable.) It's a sexy video, and not just a cutesy pantomime of American sexy.

Back in 2002, Korea was not sexy or cool. It really wanted to be cool, but it just wasn't.

I had a friend who was teaching in Japan at the time, and she reminded me that Japan used to be the same way. Back in the 80s, Japan was Mr. Miyagi and the dorky car executives in Gung Ho. And then one day, somehow Japan was cool. It was weird techno and Cibo Matto and tentacle porn, and those cheesy anime shows we used to watch were suddenly part of a vibrant Asian subculture.

When I wondered whether Korea would turn a similar corner, I saw a few things holding it back, but mostly it came down to prudishness and conservatism. Where Japan has a long tradition of frankly bizarre erotica and exuberantly weird subcultures, Korea's long-reigning Joseon Dynasty emphasized Confucian values of propriety, frugality and restraint. And Korea today is home to a large and passionate community of devout Protestant Christians. Also, Korea doesn't really do irony, and irony seems crucial to finding your way into the hearts of American hipsters.

Even so, the Hallyu, or Korean Wave, has managed to spread Korean pop culture across Asia in recent years. Compared with a stagnant, aging Japan and a China where censorship still rules, Korean culture can seem downright (dare I say it?) dynamic.

Will it catch on in the US? And if it does, where in our culture will it fit? I don't know, but I do know that Korea continues to surprise me.

[dancing with the ajummas]

2009-08-03T20:52:00.002-04:00

"Body like swan: above the water, everything slow. Down below the water, fast." "Like cha-cha-cha! Cha-cha-cha!" "Everybody, Fast! In a circle! She is thief, I am police!" With these and other curious exhortations, I was initiated tonight into the world of traditional Korean dance.

I found the class on Craigslist, where people seek to enlist their fellows in all kinds of bizarre behavior. I arrived at Lotus Music and Dance, a world music-oriented dance studio whose entryway resembles a dental clinic for a dangerous clientele — I had to sign in through a metal grate before I was buzzed into the office area, where I filled out forms and signed and insurance waiver. Once that was done, I was waved down the hall to studio A, where I found myself in the company of three middle-aged Korean women, a young American woman, and our teacher, Songhee Lee, standing resplendent in her hanbok and moving with daunting grace.

Korean dance is unlike any dance I've done before. For one thing, it's slow, requiring a smoothness of movement that, shall we say, does not come naturally to me. Second, its rhythms are dauntingly alien to me. And third, it involves keeping your arms in the air for extended periods of time, which is exhausting. (Toward the end of the class, I got to thinking about CIA-administered stress positions, and how they were inspired by North Korean techniques.)

In fact, my first experience of learning Korean dance was a lot like my experience of learning Korean: confusing, difficult, fascinating, and presented with a curious combination of welcome and wariness. Lee Seonsaengnim wanted my phone number and email, and so did the American (a dedicated Korean dancer, it turns out — I'll have to get her story), and everyone was terribly impressed at my ability to speak Korean. But as is so often the case with Koreans, the question of how I learned Korean shades into the more accusatory question of why I'm interested in Korea. There seems to be a general consensus among Koreans that while foreign fascination with her gigantic neighbor to the west and her rich and sexy neighbor to the east makes perfect sense, there's something a little weird about being interested in Korea. It's like finding out your friend is really into polka, or a huge Steve Gutenberg fan.

Nevertheless, the welcome won out, as usual. People are usually flattered when you find them interesting. Lee Seonsaengnim offered to arrange special sessions to teach me "man dance," and the American woman promised that she would give me free lessons. "Have you been to Korea?" I asked her.

"I go every year."

"Then can you teach me out to dance like the drunk old men in the park?"

She says she can teach me in an hour. We'll see.

[the cup]

2009-08-01T23:05:00.002-04:00

Many years ago, I saw a lovely Tibetan film called The Cup. It has been a long time, but I finally watched it again, and I found it just as sweet, moving and lovely as before. It's the story of some monks in a Tibetan monastery in northern India — refugees, mostly — and one young monk's passion for soccer during the 1998 World Cup.

I guess I don't have all that much to say about it right now except that I would encourage you to see it if you can.

[i love my india]

2009-07-29T21:15:00.002-04:00

This video from India's Got Talent, passed on by a Facebook friend, is a great example of what I find so compelling about India: the passionate mix of high and low, sacred and profane, beautiful and silly, devout and camp, until you're completely unable to tell which is which.

[pensioner schoolgirls]

2009-07-23T11:24:00.002-04:00

North Korea retains its title as purveyor of the world's weirdest insults.

[not a christian country]

2009-07-22T18:22:00.003-04:00

There is a kind of meme among conservatives that America is a Christian nation — that the founders were Christian, that the Constitution is based on Christian principles, that sort of things. And so I thought it was interesting to discover that in our treaty with Tripoli, passed unanimously by the Senate in 1797, Article 11 expressly states that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

Seriously.

Now, this isn't a note written by Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. It's merely the expressed views of a unanimity of senators at a time when they could personally recall exactly what the foundation of our country was about.

America has, from its foundation, embraced religious freedom. This is just one more example of how basic that idea was to the founding generation.

[revivifying the palaverist]

2009-07-22T17:27:00.004-04:00

It has been brought to my attention that I did in fact once have faithful readers, and that they're kind of disappointed that this blog has slowed to the point of nothingness.

So I came rattling back around in here and found that the place had grown a bit musty. For one thing, my about page still had me working at the South Korean Mission to the UN, a habit I gave up back in January of 2008. And the picture was in need of an upgrade. I'm much cagier now.

I've also decided to embrace modern technology — blogs are so early aughts! — by creating a Facebook page where you can become a fan and pick up the feed for this blog. (The Palaverist shall not, however, tweet.)

More than any of that, however, is a renewed interest in actually producing some content. So enough of this meta-content! On to the other kind ...

[how i spend my days]

2009-03-06T14:28:00.002-05:00

The product manager was so amused by an email that I sent, he reposted it in his blog.

[it's harder than it looks]

2009-02-15T10:24:00.002-05:00

Rules: It's harder than it looks! Copy to your own note, erase my answers, enter yours, and tag 10 people. Use the first letter of your name to answer each of the following questions. They have to be real...nothing made up! If the person before you had the same first initial, you must use different answers. You cannot use any word twice and you can't use your name for the boy/girl name question.

1. What is your name: Josh

2. A four letter word: Jolt

3. A boy's name: Jesus

4. A girl's name: Jessica

5. An occupation: Journalist

6. A color: Jade

7. Something you wear: Jodhpurs

9. A food: Jambalaya

10. Something found in the bathroom: Jars

11. A place: Jaisalmer

12. A reason for being late: Jalopy broke down

13. Something you shout: Jump!

14. A movie title: Jacob's Ladder

15. Something you drink: Juice

16. A musical group: Jamiroquai

17. An animal: Jaguar

18. A street name: Joralemon

19. A type of car: Jeep

20. The title of a song: Just

[josh needs]

2009-02-14T10:29:00.004-05:00

More facebook memery:
Type in your name and the word "needs" in quotes ("[Your first name] needs") INTO YOUR FAVORITE SEARCH ENGINE and see what comes up. List the first 10 and then tag 10 or more of your friends. Google seems to think I need...
1. A holiday or just a cuddle
2. To stop lounging on here's [sic]
3. Help
4. A scolarship [sic]
5. Extra lovin' to keep mind off ScarJo
6. To quit stalking Supermac
7. To explore the idea that Trojan War was really in ...
8. Tips!
9. To visit Hawaii
10. To make me this super awesome owl cupcake for my bday!

[things about me]

2009-02-07T18:54:00.002-05:00

Yet another Facebook meme ...

Place an (x) by all the things you've done. Then send it to your friends (including me). This is for your entire life!

( ) Been to South America

(X) Been to Europe (if you count Ireland)

(X) Been to Asia

( ) Been on a cruise

(X) Gone on a blind date

(X) Skipped school

( ) Watched someone die

( ) Been to Canada

(X) Been to Mexico

(X) Been to Florida

(X) Been on a plane

(X) Been lost

(X) Been on the opposite side of the country

(X) Gone to Washington , DC

(X) Been to Vegas

( ) Been to a lighthouse

(X) Swam in the ocean

(X) Cried yourself to sleep

( ) Seen the Cherry Blossoms in Washington , DC

(X) Played cops and robbers

( ) Flown a plane

( ) Owned a boat

( ) Recently colored with crayons

( ) Been to the Kentucky Derby

( ) Been to Key West

(X) Been to a rodeo

(X) Sang Karaoke

(X) Paid for a meal with coins only

(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't

(X) Made prank phone calls.

(X) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose

(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue

(X) Danced in the rain

( ) Written a letter to Santa Claus

( ) Been kissed under the mistletoe

(X) Watched the sunrise with someone

( ) Seen the green flash at sunset

(X) Blown bubbles

(X) Gone ice-skating

(X) Gone to the movies

( ) Owned a convertible

1. Any nickname? Joshy Teacher, Rooster, Ushua, Ush

2. Mother's name? Pesha

3. Body Piercing? Left ear, now closed

4. How much do you love your job? A whole lot. A serious whole lot.

5. Birthplace? San Francisco, CA

6. Ever been to Hawaii ? Yes, as an infant

7. Ever been to Africa ? No

8. Ever eaten just cookies for dinner? Who can remember?

9. Ever been on TV? Yes

10. Ever steal any traffic sign? No

11. Ever been in a car accident? Yes

12. Drive a 2-door or 4-door vehicle? No

13. Favorite number? I dig primes.

14. Favorite movie? Barking Dogs Never Bite

15. Favorite holiday? Chanukkah

16. Favorite dessert? Chocolate with chocolate, dipped in chocolate, with chocolate sauce and chocolate on the side

17. Favorite food? Too many to choose just one, but I could eat San Francisco-style burritos forever

18. Favorite day of the week? Saturday

19. Favorite brand of body wash? Aveeno

20. How do you relax? I watch Simpsons episodes I can sing along with

21. How do you see yourself in 10 years? With a positive net worth, and maybe a Ph.D., or a nice State Department posting

[25 random facts about me]

2009-01-24T08:41:00.005-05:00

Note: This is a meme from FaceBook, thus the instructions are Facebooky.

Rules: Once you've been tagged, write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you.

At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to Notes under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people [in the right-hand corner of the app], then click Publish.)

1. I have a teddy bear named Elver, which I thought was a perfectly normal name when I gave it to him, at my cousin Louise's bat mitzvah. This bear is somewhere in my parents' house back in California.

2. Throughout much of my childhood, I was deeply concerned with war. Specifically, the war between the good people of Planet Salvania and the bad people of Planet Alto Deto over the resource-rich jungle planet of Reorilia. I made this all up in my head, of course.

3. The highest place I've ever been (outside of an airplane) is Muktinath, a Buddhist and Hindu shrine in the Himalayas of Nepal.

4. In middle school I stayed back a year, repeating sixth grade by taking a year off from Hebrew school and going to the local middle school. That year, I discovered that I was a nerd and made the transition to wannabe, buying Bugle Boy jeans and T&C surf shirts and totally failing to fit in.

5. The first time I heard "Loser" by Beck, it was on my car stereo, and I actually pulled off the highway to make sure I wouldn't lose the signal before I found out who the singer was. I felt like I had been waiting for exactly that song for years.

6. The first time I heard "Hand on the Pump" by Cypress Hill was at the Berkeley Square, a fantastically hip little club on University in Berkeley back in the day. It blew my mind so completely that I asked the DJ what it was. "Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of/Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of..."

7. The first tape I ever bought was Quiet Riot's Metal Health. The first time I heard Quiet Riot was in the car with some friends, and there was heated debate over whether the singer was a boy or a girl.

8. I'm a big fan of a local Brooklyn artist by the name of Elyse Taylor.

9. I love the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and one of my absolute favorite works of art there is a miniature sculpture of the goddess Durga killing the buffalo demon, Mahisha (Mahishasuramardini).

10. When I decided to go to Korea, I had never even tried Korean food.

11. The first time I was given a seriously grownup book to read in English class, it was with Mr. Poirier in seventh grade. We read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It was breathtakingly magisterial. I just reread it, and it wasn't as brilliant as I remembered.

12. I like that breakfast cereal that's made of oats and is super high fiber, and it's kind of like square Cheerios made out of granola dust.

13. I keep my old heavy metal T-shirts in a trunk because they simply can't be thrown away.

14. I'm an inconsistent meditator at best.

15. When I was little, I assumed that everyone wanted to write books when they grew up, and the only reason not everyone was a writer is that we need people to do other things sometimes. It was a shock to discover that there were people with no interest whatsoever in becoming writers.

16. I've always had a legalistic, argumentative streak, and for a while I thought I might want to be a lawyer.

17. My very first time on the Internet, I went fishing in Gopherspace and discovered instructions for seducing a horse.

18. I'm not sure I believe in God, but I pray a lot anyway.

19. I've always been fascinated by the exotic. When I was very little, I would imagine that my bed was a lifeboat drifting off to some undiscovered country. When I got older, I thought Ozymandias and Kubla Khan and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner were totally cool. I also really liked The Horse and His Boy, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was my favorite Narnia book.

20. I will contemplate the other desserts with due seriousness. Then I will choose the chocolate one.

21. My favorite pair of boots ever was the biker boots I got at Daljeets on Haight Street.

22. My first car was my dad's old Toyota Corona, which burst into flames early in the morning of New Year's Day, just after I'd dropped off my friend Teresa, having gone to a concert together that night.

23. I know that the battle sequence at the end of Star Wars takes longer than the time that's stated in the movie. I know because I've timed it.

24. At various times, the Beastie Boys, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, the Beatles, Metallica, Guns'n'Roses, Bang Tango, the Cult and Soundgarden have been my favorite band.

25. Briefs.

[en méxico]

2008-12-24T15:38:00.002-05:00

So we're in Mexico, my brother Effie and me. I flew into Phoenix on a delayed flight Saturday, slept a few hours, and got into the car for a long, hard drive down through Tuscon and Nogales and into Mexico. From there we pressed on to the town of Hermosillo, got lost crossing it, and finally cruised into the tiny coastal town of Bahía de Kino, driving dead on into the sunset and racing to get there before dark.

Kino is really two small villages. Kino Nuevo is a string of hotels and condos and houses for snowbird norteamericanos. It's really nothing more than a strip against the water, behind which begins the Sonoran desert. Kino Viejo, the older fishing village, is more oriented towards Mexicans. There's a small fleet of motorboats for fishing, a little pier, a few taquerías selling fish and shrimp tacos, the sole breaded and cooked over wood fires. It made a pleasant enough stopover for a day on our way further south. Amusingly, the best food in town was to be had at the Restaurant Trailer Park.

On Tuesday we took off before dawn, driving the entire day and finally arriving in Mazatlán as the sun was setting. It was exhausting, and it took a while to find our way to the beach, and then out of the Zona Dorada, a hideous enclave of package tourists, full of hulking mega-hotels and restaurant chains from America. We opted instead to stay at the Belmar, a 1950s-era behemoth on the beach in Old Mazatlán, where John Wayne supposedly used to stay, and where nobody has done any maintenance to speak of since. It's musty and absurd, but it does the job.

I'm getting by on what Spanish I can remember, dreaming now in Spanish, and wishing I could remember how to conjugate verbs in more than the present tense. In Mazatlán most folks speak at least a little English, because this is a town where cruise ships unload — we saw a group being herded into a crafts boutique, all wearing stickers saying,¨I'm ready to experience!¨ and being told by the tour guide that this place was ¨just like the West Covina mall.¨

But Old Mazatlán is lovely, and as my friend Patricia pointed out, the beach is always real. Typing on a Spanish keyboard is a little confusing, and Mazatlán awaits, so I'm off!

[¡viva méxico!]

2008-12-06T22:50:00.002-05:00

So I'm not going to Thailand. Instead, through the magnanimous gesture of canceling my ticket, I brought peace to that country, and instead I'll be heading to Mexico.

It was over Thanksgiving weekend that it became apparent Thailand wasn't going to work out. The People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) protesters — who probably don't think PAD Thai is a funny joke — were digging in at the airports they'd shut down a week earlier. Reports were saying it would take as much as a month to clear the backlog of stranded travelers. Then someone threw a grenade at the PAD protesters who were occupying Government House in Bangkok, wounding 51, and the PAD response was to give up the Government House occupation and focus on the airports. (If you missed all this, it's because it happened at the same time as the Mumbai attacks, and American news networks, like the human nervous system, can only focus on one painful sensation at a time.)

This all seemed like the ideal situation to not visit. And so, on Monday morning, I canceled my ticket and ate the change fee. That night — daytime in Thailand — the Thai high court told the government to dissolve, which it did, and the protesters announced that they would give up their blockade of the airports.

Dandy.

In the meantime, however, I hatched a different plan. Forget Thailand. Forget Asia. Instead, I would fly to Arizona, meet up with my brother, a student at ASU, and drive down to Mexico. I talked it over with him, and he seemed to think it was a great idea. Then I asked him what his financial situation was, and how much he could contribute to the trip.

"I have thirty dollars."

Ah. Okay. Well, I decided to go ahead anyway. I'll basically pay for everything. It'll still be cheaper than flying to Thailand. The plan, subject to change as always, is to fly in on Saturday, December 20; leave early Sunday morning and head east, crossing the border at Columbus, New Mexico, a tiny town whose principal claim to fame is having been sacked by Pancho Villa, and whose principal advantage as a crossing point is not being El Paso/Ciudad Juárez; drive south through Chihuahua and Torreón; and spend most of our times in the central highlands, around Guanajuato and Zacatecas and San Miguel de Allende.

I've never really traveled in Mexico before. I've crossed the border twice, once into the tiny village of Boquillas, and once to spend a grotesque evening on foot in Juárez, trying to ignore the taxi drivers who kept offering to take me to Pusi — that's the name of the local ruins, apparently — and to find someplace reasonably non-disgusting in which to sip Tecate. The sum total of my Mexican experience, then, is the equivalent to an evening in Newark and an afternoon in Antler.

I'm excited to experience Mexico as a nation, a destination, a place separate from the United States. Latin America has never been the part of the world that has most grabbed my attention, and I don't know that this trip will change that. But it will hopefull broaden my perspective and stimulate a new curiosity. I don't expect this will be my last trip to Mexico.

[chaos in mumbai]

2008-11-27T11:13:00.004-05:00

So when the situation in Thailand went pear-shaped, I started looking at other places to go. One of those places was Mumbai.

Then, of course, Mumbai was struck by a horrific series of terrorist attacks, which are still unfolding. They've targeted places popular with Westerners, which means places I've been. I've met people and relaxed in the Taj Mahal Palace lobby, even bought a shirt there. I've caught trains at Shivaji Terminus.

And Leopold Café! Friggin' Leopold's! For a New York equivalent, it's as if terrorists attacked not just the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Central Station, but also Katz's Delicatessen. It's just wrong — and yes, I know that the whole thing is about as wrong as can be, but bringing Leopold's into it is so dementedly off-script for this sort of thing. It's horrible, and I'm sad.

Meanwhile, Thailand seems to be moving towards a confrontation with the protesters who have shut down the airports. Will I still be going there? We'll see. If there's not any actual fighting, and the airport is open, I probably will. And if things suddenly get nasty again? Well, "I was trapped in a foreign land by a military coup" would be the most interesting excuse I'd ever given for missing work.

We'll see.

Update: A Mumbai Chabad House has been attacked as well, and there are hostages inside, and probably some people have already been murdered. Horrible.

[thailand in crisis]

2008-11-26T08:14:00.002-05:00

In 23 days, I am planning to fly into an airport that, at the moment, is being occupied and shut down by a protest group called the People's Alliance for Democracy.

This is not good.

I expect that this situation will be resolved in 23 days. I will almost certainly go ahead with my trip. But it's unnerving, and I'm stuck with the lingering worry that the situation will worsen, and then what'll I do? I've already bought the ticket.

I've been down something like this road before. The day after I arrived in Nepal in 2002, King Gyanendra dismissed the prime minister and dissolved the parliament. There was some tension, but it all seemed to be happening above the heads of average Nepalis.

This PAD situation in Bangkok is much more serious. And it's growing into a standoff, with no easy end in sight. And so, from an incredibly selfish perspective, I worry about my vacation.

[wheels and straps]

2008-11-17T08:34:00.004-05:00

Years ago, when I went to Ireland, there was some kind of snafu at Kennedy Airport. I can't remember the details, but I do recall that I literally ran from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3, had some kind of a discussion at a ticketing counter, and then ran back to Terminal 1. I had my backpack with me, and it would've been hard enough to run had I been wearing it. But by the time the sprinting started, helpful airline staff had already wrapped the thing in cellophane so that the straps wouldn't get caught in the baggage-handling equipment. And so I was stuck cradling this giant, slippery football in my arms as I trotted from terminal to terminal.

Since then, I've stuck mostly with a rolling suitcase for domestic travel, where the road surfaces and airport landscapes are predictable and well maintained, and where schleppage is largely from baggage claim to the trunk of a car in the parking lot.

On my international trips, though, my backpack served me well. It was necessary for trekking in Nepal, of course — hiking the Annapurnas with a wheelie bag makes less sense than heading up there in high heels. There were times, too, where a long walk from the train or bus station, over broken ground, was made infinitely easier by a bag I could heft onto my back. Still, there were times, as the bag grew heavier with our accumulated goods, when it was painful to carry, and wheels would've been a serious relief.

And so began my quest for a backpack with wheels. There are a few on the market, and they're mostly pretty expensive, but I consider this purchase an investment in my future travels. I hope to go to a lot of different places, and I wanted one bag that could go with me on all but the most strenuous adventures. (For those, I'll break out my beloved Gregory backpack.)

After looking at the Victorinoxes and the Eagle Creeks, I settled on the Osprey Meridian. As the salesman explained, Victorinox bills their bags as the lightest, Eagle Creek as the most durable, and Osprey as the most comfortable. The Meridian is easy to convert from a backpack to a rolling bag and vice versa. It has a spacious interior that will be big enough for most of my travel needs. And a big selling point for me was the detachable day pack, which is spacious and well enough designed to be genuinely useful. That means I can attach my carry-on directly to my luggage, then remove it when I'm ready to check in. Without that, I'd either have to carry two loaded bags around, which I've done and not enjoyed — wearing the day pack on the front is no picnic when you've got an overloaded pack on your back — or else stop and transfer items from one to the other whenever it came time to check the bigger bag.

We'll see how it performs in actual transit.

[dreaming of fluorescent pepsi in the night]

2008-11-11T21:09:00.003-05:00

So where were you last Tuesday night?

Seven years after the definitive where-were-you-when moment for Americans under sixty, it is with great relief that there is now a new moment to talk about. For the past week, conversations have turned to the election, which has unleashed a giddy elation in myself and countless others.

As for me, I was at a house party in a high-rise on West 42nd Street, where I stayed to watch first McCain's and then Obama's speech. At around 12:30, I headed out, planning to walk back to Times Square and take the subway home, but soon it was clear that something extraordinary was happening. Packs of people streamed by, chanting and waving Obama signs. Strangers were smiling and talking to each other, even embracing. A black woman threw her arms out and howled, "I'm goin' ta work naked tomorrow!"

Times Square was still packed when I got there. The big screens around the square were all showing the results still coming in, and Obama's picture kept drifting by on the giant LEDs. I called my sister, then my parents, then some friends, to let them hear what was going on. "YES! WE CAN! YES! WE CAN!" "O! BA! MA! O! BA! MA!" "YES! WE! DID! YES! WE! DID!" Fire trucks drove by and honked in rhythm. I talked to a man from Guinea who was texting his friends back home. They were still celebrating, though it was nearly morning there.

I bought a T-shirt that said President Barack Obama. I cheered and I chanted with strangers. I stared at the monitors and talked shop with strangers about Senate races. At last I headed home, by cab, sharing my joy with my Senegalese driver. It was a beautiful night.

*

The next day, I bought my ticket for Thailand. I'll be going on December 20, returning on January 4. At first I agonized over how I would book internal flights for when I arrived, but yesterday I decided to let that go. I'll just show up in Bangkok and figure it out. There's always a bus to somewhere.

Bus travel, of course, is unpredictable. I have been battered and bruised on buses, ridden on the roof over mountain roads, crossed the United States with Euro-hippies, been awakened by snapping fingers in my face and a man barking, "Tea, toilet!" But what comes to mind most viscerally for me are two experiences. In one, I am riding through Bridgeport, Connecticut, gazing out the window at a bombed-out husk of a city, and listening to "Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997," by Beck:

I was born in this hotel, washing dishes in the sink
Magazines and free soda, trying hard not to think

The other memory is of India, staring out the window of a night bus — god knows where — listening to Dig Your Own Hole by the Chemical Brothers and watching these islands of fluorescent light drift by, illuminated roadside bhatis with walls of turquoise and pink, hand-painted Pepsi logos, and skinny, mustachioed men with bushy hair, bushy mustaches and dhotis.

In each case, the memory mixes music, bus travel and alienation. Buses, it seems to me, are an ideal environment for feeling alienated, with none of the romance of trains or the sense of occasion that still clings to air travel even in the age of the flying cattle car. Buses rattle and bump, stop unpredictably, go off course, get stuck in traffic. And music is ideal for creating a contrast, or an emotional frame, for absorbing images that are somehow surreal and out of context.

And so I'm sorting through my music, trying to figure out what goes on my iPod for my trip to Thailand, and contemplating a bus trip up the country, from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, with stops in Ayuthaya and Sukhothai and who knows where else. What will settle into my memory this time?

My first little taste of adventure travel was on a Green Tortoise bus down from Oregon, and it sold me on the notion. I soon spent ten days crossing the Northern US with the Green Tortoise, and then another fourteen days heading back across the South. After college, when I leaped blind into India, I experienced bus travel in whole new ways: riding the roof with a couple of cackling old men on the road that winds over the mountains back into Pokhara; wrapped in a shawl, trying to sleep as the cold desert wind whips through the empty window frame of a night bus to Jaisalmer; pressed up against a man smelling of sandalwood and sweat, trying to tune out the high-pitched warble of distorted Hindipop. I have been bounced and battered in a sleeping compartment with no seats. I have been awakened early in the morning by snapping fingers in my face and a man barking, "Tea, toilet!" I have

Bus travel is unpredictable. Some of the best and worst travel experiences of my life have involved buses. My first trip, down from Eugene, Oregon to San Francisco, was a revelation: my first time jumping into a travel experience with no clear idea what it would entail. I sat on the back, on the mattress platform, while an impromptu bluegrass band struck up, and then sat by a river at the Oregon campsite stopover and shared stories with probably the most beautiful woman I've ever met.

Over the next couple of years, I twice crossed the United States in Green Tortoise buses. Then, after college, I made a grand, blind leap into India, where

[change]

2008-11-04T11:26:00.003-05:00

Sam Cooke - A Change Is Gonna Come
Parliament - Chocolate City
James Brown - Funky President

Forget about the financial crisis. Forget McCain-Palin, forget the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, forget health care. Forget about the challenges of the next four years, and all our fears and worries about how Barack Obama will do as president.

For this moment, let's savor the extraordinary revolution in American culture that took place today.

Barack Hussein Obama is not the descendant of slaves. His father comes from East Africa, not West Africa, and his mother is a white Kansan. But by the strange logic of American race relations, Obama grew up black in America. He was born four years before the Voting Rights Act was passed. He was seven years old when Martin Luther King was assassinated. He grew up with the decline of America's inner cities in the 1970s, came of age at the time of the crack epidemic, was a young man when cities across the country exploded in rage at the Rodney King verdict.

Obama is slightly younger than Chuck D.

Barack Obama may be the harbinger of a new, post-racial America, but he grew up in the old, still-racial America. His election is a stunning breakthrough for our nation, one that millions of Americans have worked, fought and prayed for through the generations.

I wish Martin Luther King were alive to see it. And James Brown. And W.E.B. DuBois, and Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. And Obama's grandmother. And Walt Whitman. And Rosa Parks.

In March of next year, the Lincoln Memorial will be rededicated on its centennial. And our president, a son of Africa, will be there.

This is amazing.

Epochal.

America is different now.

[regarding the posting of open letters in the comments]

2008-09-29T21:37:00.003-04:00

Open letter to the woman who posted an open letter to Sergey Brin in the comments, which letter I'm not publishing, which makes it not much of an open letter:

Let me make it very, very clear that I do not speak for Google. I work for Google as one employee among many. My blog is not a part of Google. It's my own space for espousing my own views. As such, I don't feel any obligation to publish views I disagree with. The Internet is big, and there's plenty of space for you elsewhere.

If you genuinely want to write an open letter to Sergey Brin, please do so in a forum that is either public or your own. And don't use Blogger, because Google owns it.

Sincerely,
Palaverist

[google pride]

2008-09-29T08:30:00.002-04:00

Google has taken a stand on California's loathsome Proposition 8, which is intended to roll back the state supreme court's decision in favor of gay marriage. I'm proud to work for a company that recognizes the importance of diversity and is willing to stand up for its employees' rights.

[mafia laundry]

2008-09-29T07:59:00.002-04:00

Here's a fun fact: Paulie Walnuts does his laundry at my laundromat here in Bay Ridge.

Okay, actually it's Tony Sirico — I saw him sign his laundry slip. He drives a black Cadillac convertible, and not one of those new Caddies, either. And he really does have those white wings in his hair.

[war ... delicious war]

2008-09-19T16:27:00.000-04:00

A century of warfare, in food.

[online chats with kim jong-il]

2008-09-18T16:12:00.000-04:00

Check it out.

[vito's coming back]

2008-09-18T15:41:00.002-04:00

I live in a peculiar pocket of New York City, politically speaking. New York's 13th Congressional District is the only one in the city that has a Republican Representative, disgraced two-family man Vito Fossella.

Vito dropped a reelection bid when it came out that he'd been driving drunk in Virginia while visiting his mistress and their child. Now, though, he wants to come back into the race — as a Conservative, opposing not just Democrat Mike McMahon, a long-serving city council member representing Staten Island, but also the Republican candidate, Bob Straniere, a former state assemblyman.

Good luck to Vito! I hope he enjoys splitting the Republican vote while McMahon coasts to victory!

[no opinion about me]

2008-09-16T21:12:00.004-04:00

Sometimes it just hurts. I was listening to Paul Simon's Crazy Love (ignore the video and just listen), and when it got to the lyrics, "Well, I have no opinion about that / And I have no opinion about me," I burst out crying.

The lyrics overall are pretty spot-on in their evocation of the grimmest, saddest parts of going through a divorce — the bewildered, deflated hopelessness, the resignation, but above all the uncertainty. And that's why that one light hit so hard: even now, more than a year after moving out and starting my life over, I'm still unable to put the whole thing into a narrative that makes any sense to me. I know the facts of the case, more or less, but I don't yet have enough distance to tell the story. I don't know yet what to believe about me, or about her, or about us. And the dust cloud of the divorce hasn't yet settled enough for me to be able to see beyond it, into the marriage itself, and understand what any of it was. Did we love each other? Was it doomed from the start? Where did it go off the rails, and why? What the hell happened?

[dfw rip]

2008-09-14T10:33:00.003-04:00

So David Foster Wallace has gone and killed himself.

Asshole.

I have maybe spent more time thinking about suicide than your average person, what with Jenny having been seriously damaged by an ex-boyfriend who killed himself. One of the discoveries along the way is that the suicide is not only a victim of violence, but also a murderer. And David Foster Wallace has stolen from us one of the most brilliant, insightful, compassionate writers we had.

We needed Wallace. Hell, I needed Wallace. I've read Infinite Jest three times now, once snce getting sober, and I've quoted it often in twelve-step meetings. I even incorporated its wisdom into a list of slogans I compiled, adapting one of DFW's insights to read, "No God minor-league enough for you to understand is going to be major-league enough to solve your problem." That line helped me get through a tough period of struggle with faith and let go of my need to understand God in some kind of comprehensive, philosophically bulletproof way before I could let God into my life.

Wallace is one of the few writers who has helped me understand the world and my life in a serious way. Most of the others are philosophical writers, usually in a Buddhist or Eastern religious vein — Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön, Michael Pirsig and Benjamin Hoff at an earlier point — but Wallace was broader, helping me to understand everything from rural America to addiction, English usage to infinity.

And now he's gone. There will be no followup novel. There will be no DFW essay on getting old, just around the time I would need one. Fuck.

Let's let it end with a passage that must have haunted Wallace:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning?

[bicycle]

2008-08-30T15:10:00.003-04:00

I'm just back from having purchased a bike. I rode it home, five miles, from the Atlantic Avenue Target back to Bay Ridge, following 4th Avenue as it goes from Mexican to Puerto Rican to Chinese to Arabic.

Buying a bike in New York City is harder than you might think. Well, that's assuming you don't want some kind of titanium, high-tech, stealth-technology-enhanced super-bike that costs more than most Americans' cars. If you're up for spending giant sums of money, there are scads of boutique shops to cater to your needs. And most of these boutiques will even cater to folks who want to spend a mere $400 or so on a bike, though the salesperson will probably look at you with a mixture of pity and disdain. Apparently one is supposed to enter these temples of bikeitude with either an extensive knowledge of alloys or the humility of a religious seeker. The reaction I get when I ask for the cheapest bike is what I imagine I'd get if I went to Bergdorf's around Christmas and said, "Show me your cheapest handbag, please."

What makes this state of affairs particularly baffling is that one so rarely sees fancy bikes actually being ridden around New York. Is there some kind of delivery-guy underground I'm just missing? Where do their thousands of lightweight, perfectly functional, obviously cheap bicycles come from? And who wants a thousand dollar bike in the city anyway? My Schwinn came from Target already broken — it won't change gears properly — and I assume this is a clever anti-theft system provided by the store for my benefit. Still, I'm semi-resigned to the thought that one day I will go looking for my bike where I left it, and it won't be there. That's what happens to bikes in the city, and I'd rather it happened to a bike that costs less than my phone.

Once you drop below about $400, you get into the realm of bikes that cannot be purchased at bike shops. These lowly vehicles must be sought out at toy stores, sporting goods stores, or big-box generalists like Target. And at Target, it's actually remarkably hard to buy a bike. I had to wander across the store in search of someone who could get on a walkie-talkie and find out how much the bike I wanted actually cost. And forget about getting it adjusted. I guess that's what you pay the fancy places for. The bike is sold as-is, and you just have to hope it does what it's supposed to.

Mine does, more or less. No, you can't change the gears very well, and I'm not convinced the handlebars are completely straight, and the rear break is a joke. But the bike cost a mere $178, and it got me from there to here.

As for the getting, it was harder than I'd like to admit. Today was muggy but not excessively hot, and 4th Ave. is not exactly mountain terrain. Still, as I came up the rise from 30th to 50th Street, my heart was pounding and I felt myself overheating. I pulled off the street, locked my bike to a subway entrance railing, undid my new helmet and staggered into a bodega to buy a bottle of Gatorade.

I remember overheating like this as a kid sometimes, especially as I hit the top of the hill on Las Gallinas, back in Terra Linda, on the way to the mall. There, I would just keel over on the side of the road and wait for it to pass, hearing the pounding of blood in my head as I lay on the sidewalk. It was a private experience, an internal crisis that I could experience alone. Riding a bike in the city is a different experience, a public activity that involves engagement with others at every moment. It's fun, though, and I hope to do much more of it. I just need to get in better shape!

[incomplete sentences]

2008-07-31T08:45:00.002-04:00

A Googler sent out this transcript (via The Memory Hole) of an actual form from the NSA called "Incomplete Sentences," which seems like an ideal blogosphere meme. Fill it out in the comments and pass it on to others. I'll do my own version soon.

DOCID: 3114399

INCOMPLETE SENTENCES

NAME (Last) (First) (Middle) DATE

FINISH THESE SENTENCES TO EXPRESS YOUR TRUE FEELINGS.

1. I always wanted to be

2. I can't

3. If my father would only

4. People think of me as

5. I suffer most from

6. What upsets me most is

7. Most men

8. My family treats me like

9. My greatest worry is

10. Some members of the opposite sex

11. Most women

12. I regret

13. The main thing in life

14. Secretly

15. If my mother would only

16. I don't like people who

17. I wish I could forget the time I

18. When troubled

19. It bothers or annoys me that I

20. What most angers me is

FORM P5590A REV JUN 2000 (Supersedes P5590A REV JUN 76 which is obsolete)
Approved for Release by NSA on 02-16-2007, FOIA Case #42877

[idlewild books]

2008-07-19T09:05:00.002-04:00

I have made it a goal to travel to at least two countries each year, at least one of which I haven't been to before. I don't expect to manage more than one country this year, but hopefully, beginning in 2009, that will begin to change.

The thing is, people tend to get the wrong idea about me. They think I'm well traveled because so many of my personal anecdotes begin with "When I was in India" or "When I was in Korea," or some variant, and because I know about a lot of different cultures and countries and histories, and because I worked at the UN. But I'm not well traveled, just oddly traveled. I have spent a year in Korea, 6.5 months in India, 3.5 months in Nepal, two weeks in Ireland, a couple of afternoons over the border in Mexico, and a couple of hours wandering around the Canadian side of Niagara Falls (where, to my eternal regret, I failed to buy one of the snow globes for sale that said, "TEXAS"), and a brief layover in Hong Kong, where I watched thousands upon thousands of Filipino ladies eat lunch.

Six countries. Four if you only count the ones where I spent the night. None on continental Europe, none in Africa or South America or the Middle East. I'm a Jew who hasn't been to Israel, a (recovering) stoner who hasn't been to Amsterdam, a (recovering) metalhead who's never seen Stonehenge, an art nerd who's never been to Paris, an Asian studies nerd who has set foot in neither Japan nor China. I haven't been to any of the hot spots, really: Thailand, Angkor, Bali, Venice, Florence, Prague, London. Not even friggin' London! I have to get out more.

But now at least I know where to get my travel books: Idlewild Books, on West 19th Street near Fifth Avenue. I just discovered this place yesterday, and I couldn't believe I'd never spotted it before. "A lot of people say that," the proprietor told me, "but we've only been open about four weeks." The genius of Idlewild is that the books are arranged geographically rather than by type: you can find guidebooks, language books, memoirs and novels about, say, Mongolia, all on one shelf, together. How cool is that?

There are limits, of course: no music, no poetry, no comics. As the proprietor said, the subject of the store is the whole world, and there's only so much shelf space. But it's a beautiful space full of fascinating books, and I encourage you to check it out.

[korean art at the met]

2008-07-19T09:03:00.001-04:00

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, coming next spring:

Korean Art under Confucian Kings, ca. 1400–1600
March 17, 2009–June 21, 2009
Arts of Korea Gallery, 2nd Floor

This international loan exhibition will present approximately 50 works of art that illustrate the height of artistic production under court and elite patronage during the first 200 years of the Choson dynasty (1392–1910), a time of extraordinary cultural achievements. The diverse yet cohesive group of secular and religious paintings, porcelain, sculpture, lacquer, and metalwork will highlight the aesthetics, conventions, and innovations of a Neo-Confucian elite and its artistic milieu. This will be the first in a series of special exhibitions at the Museum focusing on significant periods in Korean art history.

The Interview Meme

2008-07-06T10:25:00.005-04:00

Here are the rules (via Pagan Mom):

1) Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2) I will respond by asking you 5 questions of a very personal nature.
3) You will update your own blog, or the comments here, with the answers to the questions.
4) You will include this and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5) When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them 5 questions.

1) When were you happiest?

That's a tough one considering how skewed my perspective is right now on much of my recent past. But I would say probably my senior year of high school, and then maybe the first year after Jenny and I moved to Court Street.

2) What is a talent that you wish you had?

I wish I were more athletic generally. And I wish I were better at learning languages.

3) What is your favorite flavor?

Chocolate.

4) How do you handle shame?

Badly. I'm working on that. Therapy and recovery are my main tools at the moment. But shame is something I really struggle with.

5) If you had to explain yourself in three sentences, what would they be?

(For the sake of decency, I'll avoid run-ons.) I have known for most of my life that I wanted to be a writer, except for a confused period in elementary school when I wanted to be a lawyer, and this desire runs so deep that I used to believe everyone wanted to be a writer, until I learned otherwise.

I was raised in Northern California by ~~post~~ pot-smoking New York Jewish hippies who became Orthodox Jews, and this was exactly as weird and alienating as it sounds.

I am a lifelong learner on as many fronts as I can manage, and in the last year or so this has taken an especially important turn as I have begun to learn the difference between pursuing dreams and indulging cravings.

[progress in nepal]

2008-05-28T16:09:00.002-04:00

Nepal is officially becoming a republic, having abolished its monarchy after 240 years. The country is also finally shedding its status as officially Hindu, a designation that made little sense in a land with large numbers of Buddhists and a syncretic culture generally.

The monarchy in Nepal was officially divine, and until seven years ago, most Nepalis seemed to perceive it that way. But on June 1, 2001, the king and most of the royal family were murdered by (probably) Crown Prince Dipendra, and it's sort of hard to recover your image as benevolent divinities after something like that. The unpopular Gyanendra, conveniently away during the massacre, took the throne, and Nepal learned that a monarchy is just fine until you have a bad king, and then it's awful.

Well, now they've done away with the king, which is all for the good, in my view.

[how we livin']

2008-05-16T13:35:00.004-04:00

If you want to see what it's like inside Google New York, check out this music video that was put together for our annual talent show. It's not, you know, good, but it's kind of funny (funnier if you know our inside jokes, like all office humor), and it's a chance to see the office I work in.

[chris matthews makes a funny]

2008-05-16T00:29:00.002-04:00

I'm no fan of Chris Matthews, who I think is kind of a twit, but it did crack me up when The Daily Show's Moment of Zen showed him saying of Hillary Clinton, "It's almost as if she's the Al Sharpton of white people." Now that's comedy.

[massive]

2008-05-15T14:00:00.000-04:00

California Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage.

[schrödinger's cat garfield]

2008-05-12T13:29:00.002-04:00

Have you ever imagined an alternate universe in which Garfield the Cat didn't exist? The comic strip would still be around — just not the cat.

Well, Garfield Minus Garfield has done the work for you. As the site puts it:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

Definitely surreal, and definitely worth a look.

[scandal in the 13th]

2008-05-11T16:41:00.002-04:00

For those who have somehow missed it (like me, until today), Vito Fossella, my beloved Republican Representative, has been caught in a bit of a scandal: he got busted for a DWI in Virginia, where he was driving to the home of his mistress with whom he has a three-year-old daughter.

Wow.

It looks like he may run anyway, but jeez! This seems like the moment to take back the 13th District.

[cinema faux]

2008-05-07T17:39:00.002-04:00

The Korea Society is presenting three nights of happy workers: Films from the North will be shown on May 12 through 14.

I'm sure they're all stellar, like all socialist art. And who can resist any film that "took the Bulgarian box office by storm in the late 1980s"? That's Hong Kil Dong, a kung fu movie that sounds less horrible, or perhaps just more surreal, than the films about turning your town into a model socialist village and going to the countryside for emergency agricultural work, respectively.

So, who's game?

[springtime in new york]

2008-05-06T14:17:00.002-04:00

It's spring, and a lovely one. The weather is delightful. There are cherry blossoms on the trees (well, the cherry trees), and whole streets are paved in petals. The magnolias too are in bloom, and the dogwoods, and the tulips are getting slightly obscene.

My life here continues apace. All is well at Google — I've had my first guest come in to ooh and ah at the wonders of my Googley life, and if you're nearby, you're more than welcome to swing by sometime for a free dinnner on Uncle Google. And this weekend I'm finally going back to the All-Night Concert of Indian Classical Music, an annual event held at St. John the Divine's Synod Hall. I went once years ago, discovered a love for the bansuri, India's wooden flute, and left at around 5 a.m., by which time I was seeing spots. I was younger then, too. We'll see how far I get this time. One advantage is that I won't be on my own (at least for the first few hours), as a Punjabi friend of mine will be joining me. And she may even know something about the music, which would be a welcome improvement over my admittedly blissful ignorance.

See you on the other side!

[hello from ca]

2008-04-20T20:52:00.002-04:00

Just a quick note to say that I am home in Marin County, CA, with my crazy family, enjoying the lush greenery and remembering why I choose to live three thousand miles away. It's Passover, an adventure in eating, and the jet lag didn't help me get through last night's Seder, which lasted until 1 a.m. Tonight I get another chance. Ugh. All we do on these holidays, it seems, is eat, sleep and pray. I'm bored of all three, and there's another day to go.

Still, home is home, warts and all, and it's good to get out of NYC and away from the pressures of work. And mixed in with all the eating, sleeping and praying, there's also been a little walking around in beautiful Lucas Valley, and even a dash up the hill, knee deep in wild grasses, to a knoll I used to climb when I was a kid.

Tonight is another Seder to get through, with even weirder people than last night's. Wish me luck!

[googlification]

2008-04-07T09:44:00.002-04:00

This morning I arrived at work to discover that our offices had been (further) Googlified over the weekend.

Already as soon as the merger went through, we got snack carts and huge videoconferencing monitors, and our kitchen fridges started filling up with sandwiches, sushi and organic milk from grass-fed cows.

Those were nice Google touches, but the now we're into the visual branding phase. A number of our walls have been repainted in chipper primary colors, and our cubes all received Google nameplates (a CD case with a slip of paper inside, but still). And there's now a Tech Stop, one of Google's ubiquitous stations for rapid tech support.

But far weirder is the scattering of Ikea products everywhere. Google seems to have a passion for semi-disposable Swedish furniture, and especially lamps, and has kind of just tossed it wherever. There are Lyktas on the counters, Storms in the hallway, and a couple of Strannes sprouting here and there, not to mention cheery, cheap-looking tables and sofas in some of the common areas. They even took down the baby pictures that had been pasted haphazardly to a wall by the sales section, put them all in primary-colored Ikea frames, and put them back up. And of course there are lava lamps: they stuck two discreetly in our main lounge, only one of which seemed to be working when I came in.

There is something reminiscent of The Prisoner in all this, especially if you imagine this whole style translated onto a sprawling Mountainview campus traversed by golf carts. (Bizarrely enough, we were even given glowing white orbs as a welcome gift.) As in The Village, everything you need is provided for you at the Googleplex: meals, massages, a doctor, entertainment. It's lovely and a bit infantilizing.

Am I complaining? Not really. More like adjusting. Just noticing where it jars.

[google dreams]

2008-04-06T08:34:00.002-04:00

What could be more interesting than corporate restructuring? How 'bout other people's dreams? Okay, how 'bout other people's dreams about corporate restructuring? Hang on for an incredibly boring ride, 'cause this morning I awoke from a Google stress dream, about moving into the Google offices and adjusting to the Google laptops.

The Google offices were in a gigantic, cavernous version of my parents' living room in California, with the burnt-sienna shag carpeting and the dark-brown wood. On the wall were a (fictional) pair of my father's paintings, two additional pieces from his beach negative series: one of my mother, in a somewhat different pose than in the existing painting, and one of the Beatles. There were also very large Chinese vases arrayed on ledges up by the roof, and I found myself wondering whether I could ever claim them now that the house had been sold to Google, or whether Google got ownership of any items left inside.

The laptops involved multiple oddly shaped screens that you pulled out of the top, and they were floppy, so that to get them to stand up you had to attach various straps and kind of jury-rig the whole shebang.

There was then a debate over whether we should sit on the floor or at tables. "Why does everyone think we have to be like DreamWorks?" someone asked (apparently in my dreams the DreamWorks people sit on the floor). "Well," I suggested, "it's also all the Indian decor in here." Then I worried that I had somehow insulted our Indian engineers.

In the end it was decided that we would sit at the tables, which somehow made our laptops normal again. Then I woke up.

[survival]

2008-04-02T17:27:00.003-04:00

"There will be reductions in headcount." So declared Eric Schmidt back on March 11, and so it has been.

Let me start by saying that I survived. I will be staying on as a Googler.

There. Now I can tell the story.

The last three weeks have been difficult. There were rumors and more rumors, but nobody really knew anything, except for our senior managers, who were making themselves scarce. Then we were told that this week, instead of our usual monthly planning sessions, we'd have a week to work on "system stability" — a particularly absurd euphemism for sitting on our hands and waiting for a moment of extreme instability.

Last Friday, some old-timers threw an End of the World as We Know It party in a back room. Then on Tuesday — April Fool's Day — was the DoubleClick Schwag Party, at which old-timers (myself included) put our DoubleClick promotional gear on display for a sort of last corporate hurrah. (I contributed my yo-yo and slinky, and also my Camp Day T-shirts from 1999 and 2000. There was no Camp Day in 2001 because they were already laying people off that summer.)

I'd been trying to keep working, but it hasn't been easy, in part because so many others have been kind of shut down. My job involves asking lots of people for information, and many of them were just not willing to bother when they weren't sure that they, or I, would be around at the end of the week. Even so, I started my Wednesday morning doing actual work.

That quickly came to a halt as knots of people began to gather. The layoffs had begun. Word trickled to us that finance had been hit. Sales too. We began to see people walking by with the dreaded white envelopes that contained the Google severance package. (Only later did we learn that some of these were contracts, not straight-up layoffs.) The mood went from tense to grim to borderline hysterical. Emails came in from longtime veterans sending out general farewells. People were in tears — some who had been let go, and some who were still waiting to hear. I waited it out at my desk, wondering when I would finally get the call.

At last my old boss, now a VP, came by to inform me that everyone who was getting news had gotten news — that I was, in other words, a survivor. Others were learning the same thing, and a kind of shell-shocked giddiness began to steal over those of us who remained, mixed with survivor's guilt. In engineering, which is my part of the company, relatively few jobs were cut. No one on the documentation team (at least in New York) lost their jobs, though two of us were offered only contracts. Still, that made it all the more humiliating for those who had to go.

Google has for the most part been generous with both its layoff package and its contract package (for employees who will be phased out). I won't go into details there, but they've been non-evil, though not exactly milk-and-cookies fuzzy-wuzzy (Google is a business).

On Thursday we received our official offer letters, and information about orientation at Google (mine is on Tuesday). I am satisfied that I've received a very, very good offer.

I guess I'm a Googler now. For the moment, though, I have that post-finals feeling of exhaustion and emotional collapse. I have a cold, and I just want to go home and sleep.

*

It occurs to me that this post, more than most, is likely to be read by people who don't know me. There are a lot of folks out there trying to dig up whatever gossip they can about the whole Google-DoubleClick merger so they can post it on their terribly insidery industry blogs. Already I'm reading plenty of ill-informed mutterings about how DoubleClickers will be miserable at Google, how Googlers are already miserable at Google, how Google is due for a culture shift to something grim and hideous, etc.

My own experience of Googlers is that they are curious about DoubleClick, a company that theirs bought for $3.1 billion because we built something they were unable to replicate. They are also generally happy with life at Google. They are not, as a rule, snooty dickheads.

Secondly, it has somehow become blogosphere lore that Clickers had to reapply for our jobs and go through interviews. This is only half true. Yes, we submitted resumes of a sort, listing past experience and also what we'd done at DoubleClick in the past year. But I don't know of anyone who went through an actual interview. There was no ritual humiliation.

I for one am looking forward to life as a Googler. It'll be interesting. Is it a trip to heaven? Probably not. Is it a reasonable job? Probably. So yeah, if you've got fantasies that being a Googler is a cross between working for Willy Wonka and working for Hugh Hefner, then you're likely to be disappointed that it's more like working for a large tech company. If, however, you're the sort of person who could be content at a place like DoubleClick, then you can probably get along just fine at Google.

[ann taylor is not for the boys]

2008-03-26T07:57:00.003-04:00

Last night I dreamed that I went to work in a new kilt suit — a tweed skirt and matching jacket — and then began to worry that perhaps it was actually just a skirt suit, for a woman. I had to walk all the way across the office, only to discover that my usual morning meeting wasn't happening. On the way back, two medieval trumpeters, banners draped from their long horns, were performing a fanfare to welcome a lunch provided as a marketing gimmick by Boston Market, which seemed odd considering we can all go to the Google cafeteria.

Then I woke up and found an email in my inbox about a pregnant man (in Australia, though, so it kind of makes sense, because hanging upside-down all day does weird things to those people).

Oh, and I promise not every post from now on will contain the word "Google." Really. Eventually I'll be able to think of something else.

[misreading korea]

2008-03-25T11:54:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine sent me a link to a Salon story titled A Taste of North Korean Beer Propaganda, which is centered around a bizarre claim that North Korea's beer brand, Taedonggang, has a picture of a historically significant American schooner on its cap.

One does not even have to read Korean to work out that Taedonggang is named after the Taedong River — it's mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the beer — and from there, it's not hard to do a little Googling and find out that the picture on the bottle cap is of the Chongryu Bridge, which crosses the Taedong in Pyongyang.

Why Salon so completely missed this is beyond me. It smacks of pure laziness. I expect we'll be hearing from them any day about the Marlboro-KKK connection.

[drinking the kool-aid]

2008-03-14T22:39:00.003-04:00

"Don't drink the Kool-Aid!"

So warned one of my colleagues on Tuesday, when Google workers arrived to install our lavish new snack cart, just hours after our CEO had emailed us to say the acquisition was complete, and then their executives had emailed us to say welcome and warn of headcount reductions.

There was, and is, a great deal of fear and uncertainty at what used to be DoubleClick. But four days in, I'm learning to stop worrying and love the Googlebomb.

For one thing, Google is making it very clear that it has no intention of decimating DoubleClick:

The day after the purchase went through, Google not only gave DoubleClick's New York employees access to its gourmet cafeteria, but also began running shuttle buses to take our San Francisco employees to lunch at their San Francisco offices — not a one-day stunt, but an ongoing interim solution until the San Francisco people can be moved into Google's offices there. There was a fancy catered cocktail party in our New York office on Wednesday night, and Wednesday also saw the arrival of a huge number of vast, mysterious pallets that turned out to contain videoconferencing flatscreens and cameras for every New York conference room.
On Wednesday, the head of engineering for North America spoke to all of us in the engineering department, assuring us that valuable people would be valued and that he had no specific number of jobs he was seeking to cut, and could in fact choose to cut none. We were also told that our management would have significant say in the process. I know that we've got a strong advocate for documentation — my old boss — involved in the discussions, and I feel pretty confident that we'll come out just fine (and that even if we don't, I am relatively low down on the hit list).
On Thursday, Sergey Brin came in to talk. He was wearing Crocs with no socks, which is what you get to do when you're worth $5.8 billion. I asked a question during the Q&A, about keeping the good aspects of DoubleClick's culture. Brin is the richest man I have ever spoken to. He came across as basically a lot like the Russian Jews I went to middle school with, if they were worth $5.8 billion.
Starting next week, there will be learning sessions given by Google employees. I'm signed up to learn about search, maps and ads.
Today they sent out non-disclosure agreements and similar stuff for all of us to sign and send back by inter-office mail. (That's paper, in case you're wondering.)

These are simply not the kinds of things you do if you're planning to cut big numbers. Nor is my position the least bit redundant: I'm the sole tech writer on one of our leading products, which has a big release on the way. And I know I have the support of my managers.

That being the case, I am doing my best to set aside whatever fears I have and embrace this exciting change. During the Q&A, Brin said we should think of ourselves as Google employees, and so I shall. Tonight, on the way home, I picked up The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle.

I'm excited about this whole thing. The uncertainty about job security is difficult, but that will be over by April 4, and I'm confident it will turn out all right. The uncertainty about everything else — benefits, career direction, etc. — will take longer to pass, but I will be a part of one of the greatest, most innovative, most successful companies in the world as I figure it all out.

[googlesnack]

2008-03-13T23:35:00.001-04:00

The arrival of the snack cart.

[feeling the fear]

2008-03-12T21:21:00.003-04:00

I really want to work for Google. Really. Really I do.

The integration of Google with DoubleClick is proceeding apace. Yesterday they rolled in snack carts, and today we ate lunch in their cafeteria, as we will be able to do from now on. This afternoon we had a lavish cocktail party with fancy hors d'oeuvres and excessively rich pastries. Certainly we are being well fed. And this afternoon, numerous giant pallets appeared: new wide screen monitors, goes the rumor.

I am trying very hard to stay optimistic and assume (as seems likely) that I will continue on as a Googler. According to the New York Times, "while Google has let go small numbers of workers after some earlier acquisitions, it has never had sizable layoffs." There is no reason to think my position will be redundant.

Still, the uncertainty is difficult. We will know, they say, by April 7.

[google acquires doubleclick]

2008-03-11T11:28:00.003-04:00

It's official.

Update: Okay, so here's the Google press release, and it's a little scary. Key graf:

As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the U.S. and possibly in other regions as well. We know that DoubleClick is built on the strength of its people. For this reason we'll strive to minimize the impact of this process on all of our clients and employees.

Oy. I would like to think that I'm safe, but who knows?

[lunch and luchadores]

2008-03-04T23:39:00.006-05:00

Your intrepid Palaverist has been busy!

Eats, Learns and Scratches

Last Wednesday I attended Discover DoubleClick, a day-long orgy of corporate catering and team-building exercises, occasionally interrupted with bursts of useful information: lots of detail on all the training opportunities available to us (my boss later declared, "What's cool about all that stuff here is that it's actually real," which is different from, say, STV, where we had a tuition reimbursement program we weren't allowed to use), an overview of the business, a history of DoubleClick that included a reference to Mahir (the discovery of viral marketing on the web) and described 2002 simply as "Grown men cry."

But so the food. We arrived to find breakfast burritos in steam trays, and on our tables were piles of mini-candies. Then, at a mere 11:45, we headed downstairs to the Google cafeteria for the monthly DoubleClick lunch they've been letting us have (at which we do not mix with the Google people). The cafeteria lived up to its reputation. It is not the best food I've ever had, but it is by far the best free institutional food I've ever had. There was seared tuna and marinated steak and fried chicken and tacos, not to mention a raw bar, a vegan bar and chipotle chocolate mousse. Then it was back to more Discovering DoubleClick, with the soft pretzels and the cookie trays arriving by 3.

DoubleClick is interested in enhancing not just our skills, but our skillz: after work, we Discoverers were taken out to Scratch DJ Academy, founded by Jam Master Jay, for a one-hour lesson in scratching, which was seriously fun. I now know the baby scratch and the scribble. I asked the head of my department about using the tuition reimbursement for more DJ lessons, but I accept her judgment that perhaps DJing is not entirely applicable to my job as technical writer.

Semi-Ironic Spandex

I am not, it must be admitted, a wrestling aficionado, Mexican or otherwise. But when my friend Leah invited me to her Lucha Libre-themed birthday, I felt this was an occasion not to be missed. And when, after dinner with a friend earlier in the evening, I found myself trying on an absurdly apropos (and reasonably priced) hat/mask at Search & Destroy on St. Mark's, it seemed fate was on the side of my inner luchador.

What I didn't realize was just how serious Leah was about the wrestling. In her tiny apartment near Union Square, she and her friends got into some pretty serious pitched battles (tons of pics here). I didn't join in, but pledged to dress more appropriately for battle next time. (And yes, that is a unicorn behind me in that picture.)

It may not surprise you to learn that a number of these people are Burners, or that I ran into one of them the following night when I went to see a friend perform at the España-Streb Trapeze Academy in Williamsburg.

The performance — an impressive show of aerobatic skill set to a campy nautical theme — was quite impressive, but it gave me the familiar heebee-jeebees I get around the hippie sports (for lack of a better term). I have a hard time putting my finger on what freaks me out about it, but it seems to pull together a number of threads of childhood alienation: my own physical awkwardness, the sense that hippies should but don't embrace me, the feeling that I'm in a subculture that devalues my own particular gifts (verbal acuity, encyclopedic knowledge, trivia, intellectual rigor), the fear that I am going to be chastised over some poorly thought out moral stance I dare to disagree with ("Really? You use anti-bacterial soap?").

I'm glad I stuck around and sat with those fears instead of letting them ruin my night. After the show, my friend invited me out with a number of the performers to a vast German beer hall (I hoisted my stein of die seltzer vasser), and they were really cool people. I had a lovely chat with one woman who is not just an acrobat, but also an opera singer and a former ESL teacher.

Then I took a cab home, which is something I can now actually afford. That too was exciting.

So life is good right now, and I'm doing my best to enjoy what's good in it.

[many legs of destruction: a haiku]

2008-02-25T07:16:00.001-05:00

Mighty terapede
Coming to destroy Tokyo
I, in terror, peed

[in space, no one can hear you stink]

2008-02-24T09:05:00.003-05:00

When Korea's first astronaut, Ko San, is launched into space by the Russians, he will have his kimchi with him. According to the New York Times:

Three top government research institutes spent millions of dollars and several years perfecting a version of kimchi that would not turn dangerous when exposed to cosmic rays or other forms of radiation and would not put off non-Korean astronauts with its pungency.

The latter may have been the greater challenge, and I wonder whether it will be adopted by Korean expats.

And then there's this:

Ordinary kimchi is teeming with microbes, like lactic acid bacteria, which help fermentation. On Earth they are harmless, but scientists feared they could turn dangerous in space if cosmic rays and other radiation cause them to mutate.

Mutant kimchi! The South Korean government was actually worried about mutant kimchi! For some reason this fills me with glee.

Update: BoingBoing noticed it too.

[reconciliation in korea]

2008-02-22T11:48:00.002-05:00

It's a long time since their civil war, but Koreans still have a hard time talking about it. Indeed, I have often felt that the vehemence of Koreans' resentment of Japan is a kind of displacement of their deep shame, guilt and anger over what they did to each other — to themselves — during the dreadful period of warfare that tore their country apart.

Yesterday the New York Times ran a fascinating story on reconciliation efforts in the Southern Korean village of Kurim, noting that even as recently as 2006, people rarely spoke of wartime killings.

Sooner or later, Korea will have to look squarely at their own past, and Koreans are good at doing what needs to be done. It will not be an easy process, but it's good to see it beginning, and beginning at the grass-roots level rather than as a top-down government project.

[minor updates on a minor life]

2008-02-18T17:02:00.005-05:00

I have been kind of busy and overwhelmed of late — mostly in a good way — but this has meant a dearth of blog posts. Dearth! Dearth dearth dearth ....
Ahem. Excuse me.

So, tidbits:

On Saturday I joined New York Sports Clubs, which has gyms near my work and near my home. I have so far worked out twice. This is good: it's been nearly a year since I've regularly exercised.
My attempts to cut out caffeine went nowhere. I have, however, cut back to half-caff in the morning, and this has helped my stomach considerably.
At work, I was having a conversation with Ken about a document I'm updating, and he pointed out a section that he didn't like because it was full of redundancies and repeated phrases. "Yeah," I agreed, "It reads like Chinese philosophy." Ken reminded me that he does not regularly read Chinese philosophy. Oh, right.
In another conversation with Ken, I made the comment that while much at DoubleClick was the same as it had been, that it was no longer the nineties, with everyone zipping around on Razor scooters. He turned around and pointed to the Razor leaning against an office door. Okay, so in DoubleClick it is still 1999. Wanna go see The Blair Witch Project?
Is Bay Ridge going hip? The Chipshop has moved in, purveying the finest in British cuisine: fish and chips, Scotch eggs, and of course those decadent deep-fried candy bars. The food makes perfect sense around here, but the punk aesthetic and heavy whiff of irony are innovations. I expect it'll do fabulously well here, but is it a vanguard or an outlier?

Okay, that's all for the moment. I'll try to update a little more often now that I'm settling into new-jobness.

[a clicker's life]

2008-02-14T22:43:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I got lost in Google.

From DoubleClick's offices on the tenth floor of 111 Eighth Avenue, there's a back way that lets you out on Ninth Avenue, by Chelsea Market. To get there, you go down a stairway to the eighth floor, where Google has offices and its vaunted Hemispheres Cafe (a sign on the door says "Watch for Tailgaters"), and along a series of hallways to a bank of elevators.

The way down was fine, but on the way back up, I couldn't remember which stairwell led back to DoubleClick. I tried one and then another, climbing until I was out of breath. Back on the eighth floor, I fell in behind three casually dressed people who were talking about "python code," hoping they were Clickers, but when they turned into the stairwell, they headed down.

Thoroughly disoriented by now, I decided just to take the elevators to the lobby and walk around the block, and I was about to press the button when around a corner came Chealsea, who used to be a technical writer when I first worked at DoubleClick, from 1998 to 2001, and is now a product manager. She duly guided me back to our offices — "It's stairwell D for DoubleClick is how I remember it," she said — and suddenly we were back.

Coming back to DoubleClick after six years away has been something like yesterday's experience over and over: alternating waves of disorientation, bewilderment and welcome familiarity, garnished with tantalizing glimpses of Google.

Much has changed at DoubleClick since I jumped ship in the early waves of the dot-com collapse, back in September of 2001 (before 9/11). DoubleClick became a highly profitable company in those lean years, but for the technical side of the business, it was a painful period of stagnation. In 2005, DoubleClick was purchased by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, and its founders, Kevin Ryan and Kevin O'Connor, quietly left the company. The infusion of cash and the new leadership injected new life into the organization, and it was around this time that my former boss, Karen Delfau, began to implement Scrum, an innovative methodology for developing software.

Traditionally, software has been developed according to the waterfall method, in which each phase is completed in its entirety before cascading down to the next: the product managers talk to the clients to find out what's needed, then they pass on their detailed specifications to the engineers, who work in isolation until they finish and hand everything over to QA for testing. Once the testing is through, the product moves down the line again to customer support, and then out to the clients, and by this time it usually looks nothing like what the clients originally thought they wanted, and anyway it's now three years later and the clients want something else entirely.

Scrum takes a completely different approach: cross-functional teams of product managers, programmers, testers, interface designers and technical writers work together for "sprints," which are 30-day efforts to build something. You obviously can't build a whole new product in 30 days, but you can usually add a button, clean up an interface, smarten up some back-end logic, speed up a process — in other words, produce actual, working business value.

Scrum is a big part of why I decided to come back to DoubleClick. For someone who remembers the old days, when it felt like the tech writers were the only people who ever talked to anyone outside our own group, the idea of getting all these different experts into a room together all at once — daily — is actually pretty thrilling. I've started to learn how this new process works, and as good as it is in theory, it's even more impressive in action. Astoundingly, working software really does get produced every month. Even more astoundingly, the whole process is driven by specific customer demands, and even the engineers seem to have internalized the idea that if the customer doesn't want it, there's no point in building it.

Another change — still potential rather than actual — is the purchase of DoubleClick by Google. The Federal Trade Commission has given the merger its blessing, so now the final hurdle is European approval, which looks likely. If the deal goes through, we'll almost certainly get access to Google's food (yes, the software industry is at its heart a hungry teenager playing video games at 4 am), and most likely to their other benefits as well, which are legion and legendary, and include things like on-site massages and a philosophy that says workers should devote 20 percent of their time to personal projects.

These differences from the DoubleClick of yore are balanced by the many things that have stayed the same. My cubicle is right outside Karen's office, bringing back memories of my awkward early days with the company, when I tended to fool around too much, and Karen moved me close so she could keep an eye on me. This is decidedly not why I'm sitting there now, and it's actually nice to be able to talk to her regularly. When I moved in, Karen gave me back my old name-plate, which she'd kept all these years. And when I logged into the employee intranet, I found my performance review from 2000.

In fact, a lot of people I used to know are now vice presidents like Karen, or running various departments. At first I worried that this would be awkward — that they would see me as beneath them now — but in fact it has turned out to be a great asset, and I find that I have sources of information and assistance available to me that are hard to come by for some of the other writers.

The culture, too, remains much as it was. I wore a suit my first day, and was told by several people not to do anything like that again. Karen told me her New Year's resolution was to wear jeans to work more often, and my manager, David, claims that one of the best things about his job is not having to shave every day. On the weekend before the Superbowl, I asked Ken, my other manager (he's transitioning out), if I could come in a bit late on Monday. "You remember what it's like here on Mondays," he said. "Nobody's here." People come in when they come in, leave when they leave, and often work from home. There's still a game room, now outfitted with a Wii, an Xbox 360 and a PS3 (a full Rock Band kit is available and frequently in use), along with the more analog pleasures of ping pong, foozball and billiards. There is a meditation group that meets daily for 15 minutes at noon in a conference room. There is pizza on "Two-Slice Tuesdays" and bagels on Friday mornings, and other food regularly appears and then quickly disappears. This afternoon, admittedly a Friday, my conversation with Ken about the ad-serving methodolgy white paper was interrupted by a remote-controlled helicopter, which came crashing down in the next cubicle over.

DoubleClick is still ethnically diverse, with a particularly high number of Indians and Chinese. We have our Indian parterns in Pune on the phone each morning at our daily scrum meeting, and I was tickled to hear one of our own engineers here in New York refer to "257,000" as "two lakh fifty-seven," in a meeting (no one seemed to notice). One group that is notably scarce is Koreans, although a Korean-American user interface designer spotted my name and title written in Korean on the whiteboard in my cubicle and has begun to ask me the occasional question in Korean.

Along with the culture, there are continuities in the documentation that are both pleasing and a bit daunting. To get myself reacquainted with DoubleClick's software, I went to the customer support website and began reading through the white papers — only to discover that they're still largely as I wrote them six or seven years ago. The style guide and procedure manual is still the one I wrote, and still in use. I'll admit to feeling flattered that my writing was good enough for DoubleClick to coast on for all this time, but it also suggests a certain laxity in the update cycle.

These continuities make my return to DoubleClick feel like a homecoming of sorts — one of my former colleagues even scheduled in Outlook a "Fatted Calf Lunch: Return of the Prodigal." Indeed, I am coming to realize just how foreign the environment was at the South Korean Permanent Mission to the UN. The daily effort of cultural translation had become so ingrained that I had lost sight of the energy it took, and of the ways in which it was isolating. It's nice to be back among people who are my peers, not only professionally but socially. Example: I had some dealings with a guy in internal support who was wearing a sparkly storm trooper shirt and has "THERE IS NO TRY" scrawled on his whiteboard. When I brought him my inherited laptop to be wiped clean, I asked him to take this R2 unit down to Anchorhead and have its memory flushed, and he knew what I was talking about!

I have really, really needed this. I have needed an environment where there is flux, possibility and challenge, where there are lots of interesting new people to meet, where there's room to be ambitious and to grow. I'm still finding my feet, but I'm excited and interested and happy. It's good. I'll keep you posted.

[groggy]

2008-01-24T11:59:00.000-05:00

Today is my second day without caffeine. Yesterday I also ... snore ...

Wha? Who? ... Oh, right. Blogging.

So, a day without caffeine, I am discovering, is like a ... like a ... like a nap? grumblesnoozegrumble ...

Oops! I'm back. Really. Uncaffeinated, but conscious. Sort of.

Will The Palaverist stay caffeine-free even into his new job next week? We'll see how the next couple days go.

Update: Okay, so a cup of tea this afternoon seemed wise once the headache got serious. Cold turkey may not be the way to go. I don't know that I even need to be off caffeine at all, but I thought it might help me to sleep better — I wake up a lot in the night. So we'll see.

[crossing the border]

2008-01-17T11:17:00.000-05:00

It has been a curious fact of my life that leaving a full-time job has generally meant leaving the country. My first real job out of college was a proofreading gig with a graphic design firm, the whole point of which was to save up money for my four-month trip to India and Nepal. My next permanent job was with DoubleClick, which I left in 2001 to go to Korea. From there, once my year of teaching was up, I was only too glad to hop on a plane and head for Kathmandu.

One could even argue that I crossed a national boundary to take my current job, as speech writer for the South Korean Mission to the UN, which I will be leaving at the end of work today. I work on Korean territory, under Korean law, with Korean colleagues, and saying goodbye feels a lot like leaving Korea did, right down to the inscrutable calculations that have gone into my final paycheck. Once again, I find myself wondering whether I will ever see most of these people again, what role my Korean experience will play in my future, and what it will be like to readjust to the American workplace.

My final week here has been punctuated by overeating at lunch and back strain in the evenings. On Monday I was taken to an Italian restaurant, Tuesday was Japanese, Wednesday was a final visit to the Delegates Dining Room inside the UN and its dangerously tempting buffet (why not have a second dessert?), and yesterday was Greek seafood. I think I'm actually going to wind up buying my own lunch today, but there's some sort of party in the afternoon.

The back strain is a result of three and a half years of hoarding: a ridiculous number of books, including a pair of Korean-English dictionaries with terrifying heft, along with extensive paperwork, notebooks, a pair of dress shoes, a space heater, my STV mug, posters, two spoons, a cell charger, headphones, CDs, etc. I've twice filled a small suitcase, and a couple of time hauled home an overstuffed backpack — last night was two bottles of wine destined for regifting. I was a little disappointed when someone came into my office today to return a book I had lent him long ago, and also to give me a new one: two more to carry home tonight.

The amount of junk I'd accumulated is to some extent a symbol of how much at home I'd come to feel here. I have never been happier at a job or more reluctant to leave it. One of my colleagues asked me if I was going to go out and party tonight, and I told him that I am, in fact, planning to have a study session with my Korean conversation partner. I am not so much rejecting the old as welcoming the new.

As far as that goes, I think it'll be good for me to come home again to an American workplace, and to be surrounded by colleagues who are genuinely my peers. Where will it take me? Who knows? If past history is any guide, probably to some other country.

[double doubleclick]

2008-01-07T15:17:00.000-05:00

Back on December 24, I told you I'd be joining Invision. Turns out I'll be going back to DoubleClick instead.

When Invision called my old boss at DoubleClick to check my reference, she sent me an email:

You're still coming in here to talk with us, right??
We'd love to see if we can come up with something to interest you.

Interest me they did. For one thing, they offered me a higher salary. Beyond that, though, there are a number of factors that make DoubleClick attractive. It'll be nice to go to work for people who already respect me and know what I'm capable of. There is a real possibility of taking on formal management responsibility, particularly if I work for it. And DoubleClick has implemented a very interesting development methodology called Scrum, which is something I'd love to learn.

Another factor the old dot-com atmosphere, which DoubleClick still cultivates: there's pizza lunch once a week, free drinks, and a game room with a Wii.

And then there's that whole Google deal, which, if it goes through, would make me a Google employee. I have no idea what the human resources arrangements would be like or whether Clickers would inherit the lavish benefits enjoyed by the Google-nointed, but even the possibility of being a part of Google is pretty enticing.

I'll still be leaving the Korean Mission on January 18, but I'll now be taking a week off and starting at DoubleClick on the 28th.

[i am privileged]

2008-01-02T15:53:00.000-05:00

Don't know where this meme started, but I picked it up from my cousin Louise. If it's true for me, it's in bold. Feel free to post your own.

Father went to college
Father finished college
Mother went to college
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children's books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Your parents paid for the majority of your college costs
Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
You and your family lived in a single family house
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
You had your own room as a child
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
Had your own TV in your room in High School
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Went on a cruise with your family (fam trip because Dad worked for travel agency types)
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

[it's my new york again]

2007-12-28T15:58:00.000-05:00

Somehow I missed the news, so when I walked past East 33rd and Third Avenue — Toidy-Toid and Toid, to those from the old school — I was overcome with awe and delight. I had to go in for a closer look, just to make sure I wasn't dreaming. But it was real: the Second Avenue Deli is back, with a line out the door.

I have always believed that living in New York City means accommodating yourself to change. I have heard mourned just about everything good or bad that has ever come to pass here, from Ebbets Field and the old Penn Station to porn theaters in Times Square and a lawless Alphabet City on fire, and I've thought, hey, that's life in the Big City. I've been here long enough to see a few of my own beloved landmarks go, and to see neighborhoods change character completely.

But when the 2nd Avenue Deli closed, somehow that was different.

Growing up in California, I was taught by my transplanted New Yorker parents that there were no proper baked goods west of the Hudson and that there was a right way and a wrong way to prepare and eat a deli sandwich: mustard on rye, with none of that bullshit lettuce and tomato or (chas v'shalom!) sprouts.

My Great Aunt Sylvia had lived since the 1950s at Second Avenue and 10th Street, so my father's family had been going there since he was a kid. On trips Back East, and even years later, stopping in at the Deli felt like visiting my parents' childhoods. I remember Abe Lebewohl once greeting my Cousin Roberta, then in her fifties, as if she were still the little girl he had known decades earlier.

New York can be a hard town, and sometimes I wonder what I'm still doing here. Too many of the funky places I fell in love with are gone, and too much of the city is chain stores, tourist crap and stuff I can't afford. The resurrection of the 2nd Avenue Deli reminds me of what I still love about Gotham.

Now to go and stand on that line.

[new starts]

2007-12-24T14:10:00.000-05:00

Just in time for Christmas, I got a present: a job offer from Invision, Inc., a company that provides software for cable TV ad management. I'll be a Documentation Specialist, doing a mix of tech writing, editing and project and team management.

The offer is the culmination of a six-month search. It's bittersweet: I'll be glad to be making more and achieving financial independence, but I'm quite sad to be leaving the South Korean Mission to the UN. I've never had a job I liked more, or found easier, or that sounded better at parties. I love the people, the culture, the environment, the engagement with world affairs.

Still, the work here has become repetitive, and it's time for me to take on new challenges, even if they scare me. Can I handle the new job? Will I work hard? Will they like me? Will I like them?

I don't know yet. I don't know how it will be or where it will lead. All the signs are good: they have growth, low turnover, a mellow atmosphere. The offer, a 60% raise over my current salary (more in real terms because of some complicated tax issues) is serious business. And when I miss the Mission, I'll be just a short distance away, in the Graybar Building at Grand Central.

Two things I do know: 1) I plan to keep studying Korean, and 2) I'm about to take off early from work and enjoy the 80GB iPod Classic I bought yesterday to celebrate.

[living in interesting times]

2007-12-13T16:18:00.000-05:00

Last week, on Monday night, I went to sign the divorce papers. It was devastating. It was a freezing night with bitter winds, which seemed to fit. I went separately from Jenny, but on my way out I stopped in at a McDonald's for a suitably grim dinner, and Jenny bumped into me afterwards on the subway platform. We were both very sad, and there was little to say.

It didn't help matters that I had a cold. On Tuesday I dragged myself to a job interview with a very nice company that isn't hiring. This did not lift my spirits. Exhausted, I took Wednesday off. It was my first time being sick while on my own — ever, really, except for one bout of serious illness in India — and it scared me. Afterward, I made sure to talk to a couple of new friends in the neighborhood, who said that of course they would help if I needed it. Learning to ask for help is good.

Saturday I went to a dance concert at Juilliard, then a much more ramshackle dance concert put on by a composer friend of a composer friend. Afterward, we all went back to the organizer's apartment in Brooklyn for a party, at which I discussed Korean and Finnish folklore with a Finnish folklorist. I left just before the microtonal orchestral music began. I'd been suffering from my arrhythmia all evening, and I almost couldn't walk the three blocks from the subway to my apartment. I had taken too many of the beta-blocker pills that are supposed to fix the arrhythmia, and I ended up staggering to the curb and throwing up in the gutter. I realized that to anyone passing by, I must have looked like a drunk, which was funny because I hadn't had a drink in nine months to the day.

On Tuesday night, as I was heading to a 12-step meeting, I saw a pickup truck start backing up just as a small Hispanic man darted into the street looking the other way. I shouted — "Yo, yo, YO!" and the truck stopped inches from the pedestrian, who never noticed any of it. I then made an incomprehensible gesture at the driver and walked on.

Yesterday morning I went for a job interview and was kept waiting in the lobby for 40 minutes because of a miscommunication. But at least they're hiring.

Last night, after a very interesting evening out, I was walking home from the subway and heard a rustling in the bushes in front of an apartment building. I turned around, expecting a cat or something, and was startled to see the wide-eyed face of a young woman who was lying there, bundled in a coat and mittens. I turned around and kept walking.

Today at lunch, the diner on 49th and First was shaken by an explosion up the block. A manhole cover had been blown off, smoke and steam billowing into the street. A few minutes later, the fire department showed up and taped off the street. As we left, we saw the shards of the manhole cover lying a few feet away from the hole. Fortunately no one was hurt.

I feel today as though I've somehow stepped into a Murakami novel, where the world is off-kilter in a way that may or may not be ominous, and my role is simply to live in it as normally as possible.

I'm tired.

[giving thanks]

2007-11-21T11:59:00.000-05:00

This year has been a very, very difficult one for me, but there is still a great deal I have to be thankful for. I am thankful for my friends, old and new, who have helped me through the crisis. I am thankful that I have a home and a job and a loving family. I am thankful for hope, even in great sadness.

There is more — much more — for which I am thankful, but that I don't want to talk about here.

Instead, it's time for my annual reposting of I Am Thankful for my Wear: Celebrating Thanksgiving with Korean Kids.

Yesterday for reasons having nothing to do with Thanksgiving and everything to do with inept management, Jenny and I had middle school classes for which the lesson was not pages from a textbook, as usual, but "ACTIVITY." When I asked our boss, Yu-jin, what the ACTIVITY was, she sort of laughed and said, "You make." So among other things to fill the hour, Jenny and I decided to teach our kids about Thanksgiving and have them write what they are thankful for. It ain't as good as eating turkey and stuffing, but reading the results was good fun, and here are the best of them.

In the category of family relations:

I'm thankful for mother.
I'm thankful for father.
I'm thankful for brother.
I'm thankful for sister.
I am thankful for my cousins
I'm thankful for uncle's son here.
I'm thankful for my dog here.
I am thankful for my parents because they help me for grow up and they care of me.

In the category of the religious:

I'm thankful for GOD.
I am thankful that I can go to church
I'm thankful for God Almighty.
I am thankful for my zezus.

In the category of the undeniably useful:

I'm thankful for my pen.
I am thankful that I can buy things.
I'm thankful for oxygen.
I am thankful that I can walk
I am thankful that I can eat
I am thankful that I wear clothes.
I am thankful that I can speak Korean
I am thankful for house
I'm thanksful for my air
I am thankful that I can learn
I am thankful for weather forecast
I am thankful that I was born, I have family and I live in Korea.
I am thankful that I can take a shower.

In the category of things yummy:

I am thankful for foods.
I'm thankful for eat many food.
I'm thankful for I eat past food.
I'm thankful for chicken.
I'm thankful for pizza.
I'm thankful for ice-cream.
I'm thankful for cookies.

In the category of the (accidentally?) poetic:

I'm thankful for my favorite thing.
I'm thankful for my hate thing.
I'm thankful for moon
I thankful for my life
I thankful for earth.
I thankful for many scientist.
I'm thankful for HOT.
I'm thankful for many trees and many rivers.
I'm thankful for mountins.
I'm thankful for earth.
I'm thankful for windy.
I'm thankful for a red sky.

In the category of fun:

I'm thankful that have good time
I am thankful that I can see B.S.B.
I am thankful that I can watch TV.
I am thankful that I can play computer games
I am thankful that I can run.
I am thankful that read a books.
I am thankful that I talk with my friends
I am thankful that I can listen to music
I am thankful that I can play the piano.
I am thankful that I can go to the beach
I am thankful that I can swam in the ocean
I'm thankful for Christmas.
I'm thankful for my birthday.
I don't thanful that I have to do my homework

In the category of things that warm a teacher's heart:

I am thankful that I study English
I'm thankful for go to the academy.
I am thankful for that my teachers are give a knowledge
I am thankful that my English teacher are teach me.
I am thankful that I can study
I am thankful that I have to do my homework
I'm thankful for Josh teacher

And in the category of silly English, which reminds me how much work there is to do:

I am thankful that I can see anythings
I'm thankful for many money.
I'm thankful for born in 1990.
I'm thankful for my wear.
I'm thankful for car, because we ride a car, we go fast.
I'm thankful for shoes, because we don't wear shoes, we hurt our feet
I'm thankfor for telephone, because we say hello for our freinds for telephone
I am thankful that pencil because write a English and Korean letter
Because I learned a lot with they.
Because I can see anything.
Because I learn at books.
I'm thankful for air, rice, head, eye, computer, clothe, money, my house, Korean, pencil, brother, glasses.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[the interregnum]

2007-11-12T11:52:00.000-05:00

The Interregnum was a dark time. How dark? Your help is needed in figuring that out.

The Interregnum: Its Multiple Causes, Various Personages, and Glorious End is an important scholarly website devoted to the true history of the Interregnum, and it sorely needs people who are willing to make that history up.

[μ (sic)]

2007-11-08T12:26:00.000-05:00

I've decided to break out my music posts into a new blog, [μ (sic)]. Enjoy.

[are suburbs the new bohemia?]

2007-10-30T16:00:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reported recently on the decline of gay enclaves. Places like San Francisco's Castro District, New York's West Village, West Hollywood and Key West are gentrifying. High real estate prices and a changing ethos are transforming these neighborhoods from bastions of wild nightlife to comfortable places to raise kids, and there is attendant hand-wringing over the disappearance of a vibrant culture, along with soul-searching about whether there's even a reason for gay neighborhoods anymore.

There is a long discussion to be had about the mainstreaming of homosexuality in America, the consequent coming out of a more diverse group of gay men and women, and the ongoing debate over gay assimilationism. But I'd rather talk about hipsters and real estate.

To understand what's happening to America's gay neighborhoods, it helps to look at how they were formed. America's gay community more or less began with the Stonewall riots and their aftermath. Though usually not presented as such, these events were part of the larger 1960s embrace of counterculture and individual freedoms. It's no accident that both hippies and gays were into free love, drugs, leftist politics and bikers (though the fascination with bikers remains something of a mystery). Like the hippies, the founders of America's gay communities tended to be white middle-class baby boomers, and they colonized many of the same neighborhoods (the Castro is just blocks from Haight-Ashbury).

The changes in America's gay enclaves mirror the changes in formerly bohemian neighborhoods that are not specifically associated with gay life: it's not just the Castro and Greenwich Village that have seen skyrocketing housing prices, but also the East Village, SoHo, the Mission District, SoMa, and pretty much every other patch of once-hip ground in America's major cities. For the first time in memory, there is no bohemian frontier in Manhattan.

This connects with another recent Times story, this one noting the discovery by bohemian types of Staten Island's North Shore. I've long believed that the best way to tell what's going to be incredibly fashionable in three to five years is to look for whatever is most egregiously unhip now (which means, among other things, that you should be preparing to grow your hair out and unmothball your flannels) , and it's hard to think of anything less cool than the suburbs.

But will hipsters who are priced out of the city really start moving to little houses in Jersey and Staten Island? Hard to say at this point, though I will raise the possibility that a generation raised on Facebook and Craigslist may feel less compelled to form hipster neighborhoods than their forbears. What made the suburbs so awful was isolation, and the Internet provides a way to overcome that isolation without spending $1300 a month to live with rats and roaches. And there is much ironic fun to be had in a lifestyle that embraces garden gnomes.

I now live in a perfectly nice neighborhood that has yet to be discovered by hipsters. Down in Bay Ridge, we have trees, houses, lower rents and safer streets than in Bushwick, and I can still get on the subway and go to Manhattan. Am I part of a vanguard, or just out in left field? Time will tell.

[mctatorship]

2007-10-18T10:23:00.000-04:00

Recently I had a conversation that turned to politics: specifically, we began to wonder exactly how Mayor McCheese achieved his mandate.

Well, now I know. And it's not pretty.

Based on this commercial — a rare look into the Hermit Kingdom that is McDonaldland — it appears that the McCheese regime went through the motions of an election, sort of the way the old Soviet Union used to do, and with about the same sense of fair play. Mayor McCheese seems to be running unopposed, but even so, the Hamburglar is busily stuffing ballot boxes. And the real power behind the throne, of course, is Ronald McDonald, Father of the Nation, who tells McCheese what to say, counts the ballots and announces the results.

Actually, this bizarre pastiche of banana-republican politics is one of a series of old McDonald's commercials that are all deeply bizarre and well worth viewing (via Slate).

[living alone]

2007-10-06T17:02:00.001-04:00

The other night I came home from work, went into the kitchen, noticed that the sink was empty of dirty dishes, and felt a wave of gratitude to the person who had washed them all. This was followed by a fleeting instant of panic over who had washed them all, because no one else should have been in my apartment. Then I immediately realized that I had washed them all.

It was maybe another fifteen seconds before I realized that I could still feel gratitude to the person who had washed the dishes.

[gowanus + art = agast]

2007-10-04T11:09:00.000-04:00

It's once again coming to that wonderful time of year when the leaves fall into the toxic soup we know and love as the Gowanus Canal, and the artists in the neighborhood open their studios to share their fume-inspired creations. This is the Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour (AGAST), of which I am a devoted fan. The tour is actually a really cool opportunity not just to see lots of inspired and interesting art — everything from conceptual installations to marble sculpture to a stained-glass studio — but to get inside those weird, funky, fascinating old industrial buildings that dot the landscape. Plus, you will surely consume your fill of Goldfish, mini-KitKats and cheap
chardonnay.

The tour will be taking place from 1 to 6 on Saturday and Sunday, October 20 and 21. As usual, I'm going to try and visit as many of the galleries as I can. Hope to see you there!

[nuclear progress]

2007-10-03T09:03:00.000-04:00

Excellent news.

[korea? i hardly know ya!]

2007-10-02T09:04:00.000-04:00

Last week was a hectic one here at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the UN. A quiet lull, during which most of our staff seemed to be out at JFK to meet Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, gave way to an unusual burst of activity, as I spent the better part of a week going back and forth with the Minister's team as we revised and refined his statement to the General Assembly, as well as his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. At one point, I was even invited to a breakfast meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Whether all this work resulted in anything worthwhile, I leave it for you to judge (PDF/webcast), but I certainly enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of it.

Now that the Foreign Minister has gone home, things have settled down considerably, though there's still plenty of work to be done. Tonight, though, we'll have our annual reception in honor of Dangun, the legendary founder of the Korean people, whose heroic act is mysteriously commemorated according to the Gregorian calendar. What this means for me is free hors d'oeuvres tonight, as well as an opportunity to check out a bunch of ladies in hanbok, and then the day off tomorrow for what is officially termed National Foundation Day.

[answer meme]

2007-09-25T09:29:00.000-04:00

Answer Meeee!

I'd like to know 27 things about you. Simply post a comment to this post with the answers. Thanks in advance!

1. Do you have a tattoo?
2. How old are you?
3. Are you single or taken?
4. Eat with your hands or utensils?
5. Do you dream at night?
6. Ever seen a corpse?
7. George Strait or Jay Z?
8. How did we meet?
9. What's your philosophy on life and death?
10. If you could do anything with me, and have no one know, what would it be?
11. Do you trust the police?
12. Do you like Country music?
13. What is your fondest memory of me?
14. If you could change anything about yourself what would it be?
15. Would you cheat?
16. What do you wear to sleep?
17. Have you ever peed in a pool?
18. Would you hide evidence for me if I asked you to?
19. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together?
20. Which do you prefer - short or long hair?
21. Do you sing in the shower?
22. What's your favorite color?
23. If you could bring back anyone that has passed, who would it be?
24. Tell me one interesting/odd fact about you?
25. What was your first impression of me?
26. Have you ever done drugs?
27. Will you post this so I can fill it out for you?

[the fighting 13th]

2007-09-24T11:15:00.000-04:00

I posted recently about the upcoming Congressional race in my district, NY-13, and got a comment from the author of NY13 Blog, who gave me a nice shout-out.

I'll be keeping my eye on this blog as we move closer to campaign season. Oh, and here's the comment, in case you missed it:

Hi! Found your post after searching for news on Fossella. Recchia has formed an exploratory committee and has some big backing (Rep. Jerry Nadler and even McMahon). Cusick and McMahon are not going to jump into this race unless there is some massive scandal and the DCCC comes throwing money at one of them to take out Fossella. So expect to see a Harrison v. Recchia primary race although I am not sure both will stay in through September.

Good stuff.

[swastika hysteria]

2007-09-22T08:47:00.000-04:00

Fashion house Zara has gotten itself into trouble by accidentally selling purses with swastikas on them in the UK. Denis Fernando, national secretary of Unite Against Fascism, responded forcefully: "Fascism and racist symbols are sometimes legitimised in popular culture, this is one of those times."

Except it's not. As a nice Jewish boy with a swastika on my living room wall, I'd like to explain.

Like most people in the West, I grew up associating the swastika strictly with the Nazis, and I was appalled by any display of it, in any form. It had a kind of radioactive power that compelled disgust — an entirely appropriate response to any attempted glorification of Nazism, however crude. When my German-descended high school classmate drew them on his desk (in pencil, crookedly and backwards), I took it as a personal insult, and that's how it was intended.

It was my trip to India in 1997, just after college, that changed my perspective on the swastika. Again and again during my four months in the Subcontinent, concepts I had never thought to question turned out to be completely contingent on cultural context, and swastikas were no exception. In Nepal, I was amused to find that the swastika was included with the hammer and sickle in a pro-communist graffito, a juxtaposition unimaginable in the West. In India, I saw swastikas branded on camel's butts, put on goofy stickers for kids, painted on people's faces. I even saw snacks arranged into swastikas. Three years later, in Korea, I became even more used to the ubiquity of swastikas, which tended to mark Buddhist gathering places or shamanistic fortune tellers' shops in otherwise nondescript streets of three-story brick suburbia.

The swastika on my wall is on the palm of the Hindu god Ganesh, in one of four extraordinarily beautiful posters I picked up for a few dollars on the street in Mumbai back in 1998. It's a symbol that can mean death, horror and destruction, but also means welcome and good luck to millions upon millions of people in our world. (In this respect, it's not unlike the cross or the crescent.) Ganesh's swastika is not the Nazi black outline on a white circle in a red field. It's red, trimmed with gold, hand-painted with affection. Likewise, the Zara swastikas were a cheerful green, enclosed in a red sunburst.

What interests me in all this is the way this fundamental shibboleth of Western culture makes absolutely no sense in the context of a globalized world. This won't be the last time some Asian swastika sneaks its way into the West. At the same time, the whole Danish-Muhammad-cartoon crisis makes it clear that these kinds of misunderstanding can run in every direction. What is necessary on all sides is a ratcheting down of the knee-jerk rhetoric, a consideration of context before the declarations of outrage.

I recognize that this won't be easy. Some jackass is always willing to scream bloody murder just to get attention. But we should remember that any symbol sent from one culture to another is in need of translation. A swastika from India is no more an obscenity than a Vietnamese person named Phuc.

[don't forget congress]

2007-09-20T17:07:00.001-04:00

There's a lot of attention already being paid to the 2008 presidential election, but let's not forget about Congress!

In 2006, I campaigned in New York's 13th Congressional District to support Steve Harrison's scrappy but unsuccessful bid to unseat Conservative Republican Vito Fossella.

Now that I actually live in the district, I'm even more anxious to see Fossella taken down. Steve Harrison has announced he'll run again, but the New York Times mentions three other potential candidates: City Council members Michael E. McMahon of Staten Island and Domenic M. Recchia Jr. of Brooklyn, and Assemblyman Michael Cusick of Staten Island.

I know next to nothing about any of these guys, but in the coming weeks and months, maybe one or more of them will declare, and it'll be time to do some research.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine is backing a friend of his, one Tom Perriello, in a campaign to unseat Virgil Goode in Virginia's 5th CD.

Goode is a former Democrat who voted for three out of four articles of impeachment against Clinton, then became a Republican in 2002, becoming the first Republican to serve in the district since Reconstruction. He came to national prominence by loudly criticizing Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison's to be sworn into Congress over a Koran rather than a Bible. (In a delicious irony, the Korean Ellison used was once owned by Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello home is in Goode's district.)

I don't know much about Perriello yet, but I'm going to a fundraising party tomorrow to find out more. What I do know comes from his Res Publica profile:

Before co-founding Res Publica, Tom served as Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a United Nations tribunal, and as a Yale Law School/OSI Teaching Fellow in West Africa. He has worked for the US State Department, the International Centre for Transitional Justice and others on human rights and legal reform efforts in Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Argentina, Chile, India, and the United States. Prior to law school, he worked as Assistant Director of the Center for a Sustainable Economy (now part of Redefining Progress) and as a consultant on youth and environemental campaigns ... Tom is also a founder of the Catholic Alliance for the Common Good. He holds a BA in Humanities from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School and is a member of the New York State Bar.

It's all good stuff, but not exactly the kind of good stuff that's going to wow Virginia voters. Hopefully there's another side to his story. I'll keep you posted.

[mattress purchased]

2007-09-07T23:27:00.000-04:00

As an update on the mattress situation, I took the plunge and bought a Sealy Posturepedic something-or-other from Sears online for what seems to me a not insane price (Labor Day sale, comparison shopping, testing beds at Macy's, etc.). Of course, it's impossible to know whether the thing I bought cheap from Sears is or is not the same as the thing I tried out at Macy's, but what the hell. It appears to be flat and full of springs and I can sleep on it. And it's not one of those obnoxious pillow-top dealies, which inevitably wind up with divots. If I want cushions on top, I can put cushions on top. And then, when those cushions get compacted or stanky or whatever, I can take them off again, and replace the $30 foam instead of the $400 mattress. Genius.

It'll be delivered next Saturday, and I will sleep on it.

Oh, and thanks, Miriam, for the suggestion on an organic mattress. I would've considered it seriously if I hadn't already made my purchase, but now I just hope it's something I have absolutely no reason to think about for a very long time.

[birthday blues]

2007-09-07T17:26:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow is September 8, my birthday. It's been a very tough year, to say the least. I'll try to think of this as a new beginning. Another year, and life goes on.