A Prized Possession

I think one of the greatest feelings in the world is when you open up a new package of bar soap—you know, when it still has the brand logo imprinted on it and all of the edges from the mold are still there—and you use it for the first time. And then when you start to lather up and all the edges start to fade away and the logo is just barely visible, you feel like, "Hey, that's my very own bar of soap. It's mine."

Porcelain Waltzer

So in the grand tradition of holiday togetherness, my family and I took the opportunity to revel in the movie-going festivities of Christmas Monday. After all, what better way to enjoy real quality time together than to spend two hours watching the same colorful flashing images in lieu of actual conversation? It seems to be my family's social gathering of choice, and who can blame us? Conversation is hard work!

We decided on Fun With Dick and Jane, starring Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni, respectively. During the movie, I found myself in need a potty break; luckily it wasn't one of those posturing Tom Clancy thrillers that injects a pretense of plot complexity by flooding your senses with irrelevant details and if you even miss one second or word or gesture the entire movie will be lost on you because it's so complicated and you have to know every detail and oh my god what jargon are they speaking gosh it sounds so complex! Yeah, it wasn't one of those.


Thankful that I could make my way to the restroom with a clear conscience, I stepped inside and realized I had a decision to make:



Any veteran of urinals can appreciate the situation: You've gasped your way to the restroom. You stop. You stare down the line of urinals in trepidation. You could choose the first one because that's the closest, but it's also the short one for those incontinent brats who make you avert your eyes when they pee 2 feet away from the urinal. That one definitely gets the most spatter. You could choose the second one because it's not the short urinal and it's also pretty close, but it's probably also the most frequently used since everyone else is undoubtedly thinking the same thing.

So you think, what about the last one? The last one, hm, it's a tempting choice. But then you think, "Wait, every OCD case in the world probably picks that one." Everyone thinks the last one is the cleanest, but in reality it's the dirtiest one that the janitor never bothers to clean cause he's probably itching to get out of there by the time he reaches it. The last one is out. The situation is getting desperate. You have not yet chosen. You are getting nervous, and Oh No! a toilet just got flushed and you hear the trickling water and the urge is greater than ever. You are afraid.




Blink.





You hurriedly choose the second-to-last urinal. Free of OCD patients, incontinent children, and impatient spatterers, it is the ideal urinal. Success.



You head back to the sink and carefully wash your hands. Back in the movie, Jim Carrey is belting out R. Kelly in a corporate elevator. All is well with the world.

Why Gap, Hollister, Abercrombie, et al. can shove it.

So I was out gift-shopping this past Christmas Eve, regretting every second of the time spent power-walking in wild-eyed desperation with the rest of those last-minute holiday shoppers. My little brother, 19, had indicated that a new belt would be nice, leaving me scrambling around looking for an appropriately hip clothing store. Now my brother is very much a Hollister kind of guy (mostly because he works there and gets good discounts). However, even during the mad rush, I realized I couldn't countenance the idea of actually entering one of those stores and buying something.

For one thing, I feel like there is something inherently wrong with a clothing store that uses more floor space on showcasing their wood floors and their lighting than on the clothing itself. Funny, when I go into a clothing store, I look for clothes. I realize that their goal is to highlight the finer points of their merchandise and draw attention to each individual item, but I don't like feeling like I'm paying them to waste potential shelf-space. Every square foot of empty space is extra overhead that the consumer, which is you, subsidizes. The same goes for interior design gimmicks like Hollister's beach shack image. I'll allow that this sort of contrived originality may help sell the brand, but it doesn't mean I'll be getting duped too.

Which brings me to my second point: the voracious appetite of today's suburban youth is satisfied only by dishing out contrivedly unique products for their exquisitely nuanced sensibilities. That is, and I suppose this is necessarily true of popular culture in general, it's not really unique anymore when everyone's got that shirt. So what's a pitiable suburban youth to do? Well, there is no shortage of options, but there is something to be said for the franchise phenomenon in American consumerism. Aside from a handful of our major metropolises, we Americans seem infinitely more at ease when patroning a well-known franchised establishment than an unknown independently-owned alternative. Why go to Emiliano's Café or Las Margaritas when you've got TGI Friday's and The Olive Garden? Or, if you'd prefer, Chili's, Flinger's, and Chotchky's?

I guess I'll have to expand more on this franchise phenomenon later, but back to the original point: Why Gap sucks. And it's not because of sweatshops in Bangladesh or wherever; hey! that's valuable foreign capital investment there. No, they suck because their products are uniquely unoriginal and cheaply overpriced; because their decor is distinctly inefficient and studiedly stultifying.

That said, I ended up finding a belt for my brother after all. I got it at PacSun. Hey, at least there were clothes strewn all over the place.


"Hey what are you doing for lunch today?"
"Well, our specials are barbecued chicken - it's actually right over there on the board. Excuse me."
"I was asking what you were doing for lunch. Would you like to have lunch with me?"
"Oh, are you serious? Yeah, I don't, I don't think I'm supposed to do that."
"Oh. I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go next door and get a table and if you'd like to join me, no big deal. All right? And if not, that's cool too. Okay?"
"Uh, when you say 'next door', do you mean Chili's or Flingers?"
"Flinger's."
"Okay."

The glass is half-what, bitch?!

In the interest of avoiding silly psychoanalyses based on mere semantics, I propose that the glass be said to be "half-empty" if at the halfway mark it is in the process of being emptied, and "half-full" if it is in the process of being filled.

That is: at V(t) = (1/2)*Vfull, if dV/dt < 0, then the glass should be said to be "half-empty;" if dV/dt > 0, then the glass should be said to be "half-full."

Jumbled Rock n' Roll

Once upon a time, you dressed so fine,
Sexy Sadie, what have you done?
Well, they said you was high-class,
Wanna whole lotta love?

Oh won't you take a ride on the flyin' spoon?
The boulevard is not that bad.
We always take my car 'cause it's never been beat;
If you start me up, I'll never stop.

Ninety miles an hour, girl, is the speed I drive;
I'm on a highway to hell.
Eight miles high and falling fast...
I have become comfortably numb.

The Great Soap Dilemma

One of the greatest dilemmas I face in my life is a very familiar one that occurs in the twilight of a bar soap's life: whether or not that bar of soap has exhausted its cleansing utility. You know what I mean. It's always a tough choice; after all, how small is too small? There are those among us who do not believe in waste and will use the slippery bar until the last remnant has been surrendered to the calcified water. Others use that familiar benchmark—the small bar's fracture into two equally worthless pieces. How do I resolve this quandary? I dunno, I guess I just get out a new bar of soap.

Holy Omelet! A Pax Republicana?

--Why the GOP leadership might not be so clueless after all.

Faced with the recent befuddling decisions by the Republican leadership, it would be quite easy to dismiss its headliners as clueless halfwits altogether indifferent to our nation's future. Led by the usual suspects, Republicans under President George W. Bush have been responsible for such policy gems as: 1) unprecedently cutting taxes while fighting a costly war, giving American citizens no personal stake in the war while discouraging consumer saving; or 2) nominating to the Supreme Court a woefully underqualified fawning crony who vacillated on even the most basic constitutional issues; or 3) publicly opposing anti-torture legislation at a time when America desperately needed a credibility facelift in the "War of Ideas;" or 4) passing a budget bill so laughably laden with earmarked pet projects, you wonder if those much-vaunted Republican budget hawks actually exist.

However, and I ask for your indulgence, what if: the plan all along was to establish not a sprawling compassionate conservative hegemony, but a small-government conservative dynasty? What if: the GOP was cutting taxes while increasing expenditures and creating a huge deficit so that future conservative administrations will be "forced" to cut government spending and shrink the size of government in the name of fiscal responsibility? Given the inherent unpopularity of spending cuts, the GOP probably knows that it must persuade voters to accept the cuts as absolutely necessary measures for our national fiscal well-being (and for our national security, they might even add). So perhaps they plan to starve the government of funds, then cut off a couple of its limbs to compensate.

We already have examples of this-- two of last century's towering monuments to social liberalism, Social Security and Medicaid, have been systematically hacked away in recent years. Whether or not we would be better off with a more privatized system is a matter for another debate. Nevertheless, it still stands that the GOP has been attempting (none too transparently, I'll add) to dissolve the responsibility of the federal government to maintain a social safety net. In short, the current debate among Republicans over whether to cut taxes or social spending is not a matter of which to do, but which to do first.

Regarding the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, maybe Bush knew that she would split the Right and would be ultimately unconfirmable. But he needed to get a strong firebrand conservative on the Court. After Miers stepped down, Bush could then nominate a highly qualified, but highly conservative judge to the bench. After having unloaded so much effort on the Miers nomination, his critics wouldn't be up for a bloody fight, he might have reasoned. To critics of his new stalwart conservative pick, he would say something like, "You wanted someone qualified, didn't you? You've already conceded that Miers' views weren't as important as her underqualification." Indeed, compared to Harriet Miers, practically any thoughtful federal judge would look like the next Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

As a result of the Miers tactic, he was "forced" to appeal to his evangelical Christian base and nominate Judge Sam Alito, a far more conservative nominee than would have been otherwise possible. Aside: I think Alito will be confirmed in the GOP-controlled Senate; a recent bipartisan compromise restricts the filibustering of judicial nominees to "extreme circumstances" that would be difficult to prove here, despite Alito's disturbing tendency to treat grown woman like girls. What's more, Bush will probably enjoy more support from social conservatives in the long run, now that he's served them up an abortion-slayer. Both evangelicals (who were lukewarm about Miers anyway) and conservative Beltway intellectuals (who hated her) have rallied around "Scalito."

It is true that the Republicans have paid a political price for their excesses, in the form of a newly emboldened Democratic party. The pervadingly negative image of the administration's handling of an Iraq war that produces little news of concrete progress, together with the loud cacophony of corruption scandals back at home, has continued to frustrate the administration's efforts to spend its political capital. I'm not saying that these difficulties fit into some grand Republican power scheme at all; I think they are simply political miscalculations. True, meticulously planned strategies for victory have never been strong suits of the current administration. But no matter-- the trick is to win before you plan.

Regardless, concluding that "Republicans are a bunch of idiots!" doesn't give them enough credit. After all, they're politicians-- you might not want to invite them to housesit for a month, but they can be generally trusted do what is in the interest of themselves and their party (and occasionally their constituencies). Along the way, it makes sense that Karl Rove and the GOP would have to break some eggs in their quest for the Holy Omelot: their dream of a Great Republican Majority.

Traffic signals? Seriously, wtf?

So what's the deal with pedestrian crosswalk signals? Are you supposed to hit the button or not? Is the button even necessary? Will the signal last longer if you hit the button? For that matter, do intersections REALLY have detectors that monitor traffic flow and regulate signal changes accordingly? Is the button sensitive to the needs of pedestrians? Do traffic signals have feelings?

Metaphors? Pshh, who needs them?

What is a metaphor, anyway? It's just a circuitous way of arriving at what you really could have said by pure exposition. It's so long-winded and unnecessary. Society would get along much more smoothly if people did away with all of this metaphorical doublespeak. Doublespeak is how the government controls you, anyway. Everyone should just say exactly what he or she means in the most precise terms possible.

You know, when you think about it, this duplicitous speech is really what launched Hitler and the Nazis into power. They told everyone they were going to kill the Jews, introduce a new world order, and have Aryan domination everywhere.... but noooo, no one believed them; they all dismissed it as pure hyperbole. And you know why that was? People had gotten so used to this metaphorical doublespeak, that's why. Face it, people... Metaphorical language killed the Jews.

Do you want to face another Holocaust? I didn't think so. You had better not use any damn metaphors then. As for me, the blood of innocents will most definitely not be on my hands. HAH! And there you are now, a fiend cackling with capricious delight! I'll have you yet! You all and your metaphors... SHEESH!

The first post! ::cue dramatic chord::

So some of you may be surprised to learn of my nascent blog-writing interest. Others who have endured my AIM diatribes may be wondering why it took this long to get one of these things going. At any rate, seeing as my life is bound to get more interesting next semester (between traveling, interesting classes, and life-changing decisions and all), I'd might as well write some of it down. Allons-y!