Snap, Jesus!

With my GMail account I rarely see spam anymore. It is immediately filed away and automatically deleted thirty days later. I miss the unintentional comedy of it. Like I miss getting that Playboy junk mail that I used to in college.

But after taking the LSAT and applying to law schools, I get lots of what could be considered spam yet bypasses my filters because it is sent through the LSDAS. Email is fun again.

Take Regent Law School. They sent an email asking me to consider them. Let's!

Regent tries to rub my erogenous zone with a falafel [playing Bill O'Reilly to my Andrea Mackris] by telling me theirs is a Christian school. Are they Mormon? Because Mormons are hot. Short sleeve shirts with ties are hott. And little black name tags are hottt. No, Regent is evangelical. With "a committment to biblical integration in the law school classroom." I see big stone tablets with words like "thou" and "shalt" on them.

I thought there was a certain box I checked on my LSDAS biographical profile that would scare off these people. Maybe they want to redeem my soul through big hair and terrible music.

Regent's mission statement: To "raise-up Christian leaders." That phrase sort of caught my attention. Like a Gnostic Gospel, I think it is saying more that it appears. "Raised-up" like Christ was "raised" to heaven? Or "raised-up" like Jesus was "raised" upon the cross? I would either be saved or crucified at Regent seems to be the implication.

I am reading too much into it? That is what these people do: they read too much into everything. "9/11 happened because of Mary Cheney and the 9th Circuit Court!" and so forth.

Just for fun-sies, what kind of bar passage rate does a school get through the "integration of biblical principles?" Forty-four percent. Snap, Jesus! What, weren't there enough questions about the Tribulation? Or does the Virginia Bar ask too many on evolution and the age of the earth?

I'm not anti-religion. But I am anti-religious. I may or may not have deeply held religious beliefs, but if I do, I am certainly not going to prostitute them, that is, expose them to strange people who get off on such things. To me at least, religious beliefs are so fragile that even to mention specific ones out loud would be enough to make them disappear. To hawk them in Sam's Club-sized chruches is obscenity bordering on pornography.

"We deal in wholesale and pass the salvation on to you!"

Nadir '04!

I'm not a rally person, really I am not. But I am going to one. Typically affiliations embarrass me, but for a Kerry rally in downtown Detroit on the day before the election, with Stevie Wonder, I will make an exception. Must make exceptions! Being "resolute" and "never wavering" can be bad for national security.

Not to mention boring.

It was Drew's idea. A good egg, that Drew! He got the tickets and hooked it up. But no loyalty oath to be signed, unlike a Bush rally. I like the vintage 1950s charm of a loyalty oath.

This is progress for Drew, though. He supported Nader last go around and has since become a Nader Hater like me. In fact I was with Drew when I first started to hate on Nader's game. That was four years ago when we went to a Nader-Michael Moore joint appearance. Nader's "people" really put me off my chowder. "Passionately confused" I described them at the time. I mean we all love the romance of a big red socialist banner, like the one the kids hoisted outside the Aud. But a state university in 2000 (coming off the longest period of peace and prosperity in the 20th century) was not the Sorbonne in 1968. The Nader-niks gave me the same feeling I had at a Belle & Sebastian concert (curiously enough, also with Drew): I like the band, but the greasy emo kids annoyed me.

"It's a band! Not a wardrobe!" I wanted to say...

I've Got Tucker's Back, Um, So To Speak

Lunar eclipse tonight! If we still sacrificed virgins to mark astrologically significant events, I would suggest Tucker Carlson.

But ten -- no -- five minutes alone with me and he'd no longer be eligible...

[awkward silence]

The Burning Sensation When I Pee: Venerial Disease or Libertarianism?

Yay! I got polled today! But not in the fun way...

If you plan to vote for John Kerry,
press 'one.'

11111111111111111111111111111111.

E-minus 7 days...and like 3 months.

Another political post--I know!--but I read something last night that has me spitting battery acid. It was Reason magazine online. What a self-righteous title, right? Reason. See, our arguments are reasoned because our magazine is titled Reason. No, thats not a tautology, its perfectly reasonable, see, I write for Reason magazine. It's a libertarian outfit. Actually, now it is all perfectly reasonable. No one can do self-righteous like a libertarian can do self-righteous, because a libertarian party don't stop! Hyuh!

The offending article asked various intellectuals to endorse a presidental candidate. Their responses must've sucked all the oxygen from whatever room they were in at the time. Yes, sucked up all the oxygen and released it in the form of flammable methane gas from their knotted anuses, which they then passed off as considered opinions.

Some sample endorsements:

Wendy McElroy, Fox News Columnist, " i
feminist ":
I’m voting for No One for at least three
reasons: 1) As a Canadian, I am spared the insulting process of punching a
ballot to express which power glutton should prevail; 2) as an anarchist, I
refuse to legitimize the process that puts anyone in a position of unjust power
over people’s lives; and 3) as a practical matter of value returned for effort,
the time is better spent enjoying family or working.

Hey! That's 1) typical smug Canadian self-satisfaction, 2) intellectually untenable (anarchism? precious) and 3) complacent idiocy couched in pretentious market rhetoric. What do they call that in hockey, Wendy? Oh yeah, a hat trick! Really, taking twenty minutes to choose your "oppressive overlords" is a waste of time? Well, maybe for you it would be. But don't pretend that regardless of whether or not you punch chad that you don't vote all the same. You vote even by not voting, voting to endorse the status quo (or whatever greater of evils you must to choose from). You can't escape your freedom Wendy!

This is the problem with libertarians. They claim to have dispensed with dogma, religious or otherwise. They claim to believe in the pure rationality of free markets, free minds and individuals using their freedom to pursue their self-interest. But they have really replaced one dogma with another: the apotheosis of the market. And this dogma, like many others, depends on the Myth of Purity. That only if markets were completely free, government as small as possible, people like little economic "rational actors" who at all times know and are able to pursue their self interest, that everything would be as perfect. Well, like Marx waiting for the "historical inevitability" of the "withering away" of the state, this ain't gonna happen. We live in a very diverse world, a very imperfect world, we need structures in place to manage this diversity and imperfection. And we need to make choices. Constantly. Choices between competing valid yet perhaps irreconcilable ends, and choices between the lesser of evils. Wendy is a political Holden Caufield and she needs to grow up.

Another?

Jeff A. Taylor, writes for Reason, endorses...

George W. Bush, pathetic bastard that he is -- and has made me. The only
thing that I am certain that John Kerry would do is raise taxes.

Again, with the taxes. You like low taxes? I know which country has low taxes: Afghanistan! You like minimalist government? I know which country has minimalist government: Somalia! Why don't you vote with your fucking passport and move to Khandahar. Now I see why the lot of you libertarians were against the assault weapon ban extension, it's not about Red states and Blue states, it's about a State of Nature. Can you name me an advanced democracy with our economic vitality that has lower taxes and less government than the U.S. ? Even if not a western-style democracy, can you name one that you would like to live in? Go ahead, don that Rawlsian veil of ignorance, assume that you will be in one of the lower quintiles of that society....Free markets and democracy require money through adequate taxation. How long do you think you'll have your rights to free speech, association, expression, and privacy to indulge in your socially-liberal mores if the society you live in is ignorant and uneducated? If its judiciary and law enforcement are not professional, well paid, well trained and kept honest?

This is how libertarians reproduce. They provoke apoplexy and outrage among other members of humanity, leading us to say: "Fuck it. If they want to live in this Madd Max Beyond the Thunderdome post-apocolyptic world, let them. They deserve it." I'm not quite there yet. I'll offer the liberal solution to the problem of the libertarianism: prescription drugs.

Emotional Parapalegia! Yes!

Just came back from the grocery store. I hate when random people inadvertently out my weirdness. An enthusiastic and attractive college girl, along with her enthusiastic and attractive friends, were all competing in a photo scavenger hunt. One item on their list: a picture of her hugging a complete stranger. Decked out in my characteristic gray and olive, sporting a week's worth of facial scruff, I imagine I looked the archetype of the "complete stranger." Mine is a cultivated anonymity that I use to avoid gratuitous social contact such as this.

A "complete stranger!" I've never received a greater compliment in my life! In honor of "Derrida," a little deconstruction, perhaps? Start with the adjective "complete," it means "entire," "absolute," "total." No room for pansy-ass relativism there! Now the noun, the celebutaunte in our little sex-tape: "stranger." Dictionary defines as "an outsider," and "syn...queer." From the Middle English, which was from the Old French estrangier. Because you know the Saxons didn't know strange, or queer for that matter, until they met a Capetian.

Nevertheless.

I hate hugs. Any sort of non-sexual physical touch makes me shrink 20% in volume as I try to minimize the surface area of contact. Cold as "the Night's Plutonian shore!" quoth Edgar Allan. Even if not in danger of being touched, I still require at least a foot an a half buffer between me and the "Other." I have my own personal NORAD in my head jealously guarding personal airspace. Here I was at Defcon 4.

But I am not a misanthropist. And even though there is no hormonal reason for it, I can never say no to beautiful women. So I relented. Playing defense, I opened my arms slightly and at least not did not resist the embrace. She nestled in, while I could have lived and died in the time it took for the flash.

Wasn't so bad really. On an subatomic level, I could tell myself, we weren't really touching. We are, afterall, mostly empty space. Rutherford could have shot alpha particles clear through the both of us.

I'm a bit surprised that my high school physics is coming back to me. Mostly I remember giggling with Priya in the back row with a naughty Tesla coil...

October Surprise

It's 2:00 in the a.m. Here are some nocturnal emissions.

I had my own little October Surprise, courtesy of the Law School Admissions Council. The dirty sausage-making that was studying for the test was evidently worth it. But as so often happens when I get what I want, I felt empty, barren. Like Bea Arthur's uterus.

I needed some perspective. To get that, I had to put some distance between myself and my computer, where obsessive midnight Googling indulges and enables neuroses. I started walking. In which direction, it didn't matter. North, east, south, west: my patch of suburbia is the middle of nowhere and every place you've every been to at the same time.

Which isn't to say it can't be beautiful. Beauty is almost everywhere you go and the ability to see it is more dependent on you, yourself, rather than anything external.

I walked the dark for hours. Over by the public golf course, wading through leafy pools of blackness and the scent of cut grass. The trees hissed. No street lights in this area--again, just shifting masses of darkness. But cloud cover trapped the city lights, evenly diffusing a bright pink across the sky. I wanted--and have frequently wanted--for someone to be able to be behind my eyes and in my hollow chest, to see what I see.

Terribly mawkish I know. Just terrible. Perfect communication would be to share all that is interior without the profanity of words.

A cell phone would have to do for the time being. I called my friend Alissa, in Thrilladelphia, PA. Her neighborhood is one that a realtor might call "eclectic." She lives next door to a black Baptist church and behind a crack house. The crack house has recently partnered with a whore house and is now, appropriately enough, a crack-whore house. Merger pending approval of the SEC I imagine.

Conversation ranged from movies: we loved "Maria Full of Grace." I abstained from commenting on Michael Moore (I sympathize with his politics of course, but one doesn't need creative cropping, editing or an ironic soundtrack to expose Bush. Just put a microphone in front of his face and let him talk. Even his best performance is its own counter argument.) Books: she is reading Azar Nafisi...which makes me one of the only people I know not to be. Music: she has made peace with the fact that she is just a classic rock/ glam rock kinda girl e.g. the Stones and older Bowie stuff. "Where was the moral crisis here?" I thought.

She also brought me down from some high-altitude spazzing. Earlier that night I saw one of those anonymous people you see everywhere and develop the inevitable love-jones for. I wanted to pull whatever card I may have had. I've relayed our exchange elsewhere, but here is how it went.

"At the bookstore, I saw this person I had the urge to jump. I wanted to say: look at this LSAT score! Have sex with me!"

"That would substantially reduce your chances of having sex."

Very true. But the odds were never great to begin with.

I Will Write My Apps in a Pleather Mini

Today I will begin to write personal statements for law school apps. I don't know why I feel so defensive every time I mention law school. Have you seen how stuttery and angry lawyers make George Bush? Defense rests.

Writing a personal statement is cleaning a loaded gun. A personal essay is liable to go off at any time, and pointed in the wrong direction, will leave a gaping, bloody hole through the writer. The statement must be carefully calibrated. Confident, yet not narcissistic. Moments of levity, but not glib. Purposeful, but not pretentious. Honest, but not too earnest.

Ugh. I've got to "sell myself": an expression that makes me think I should write the thing in fishnets and a tube top.

"Ignore your calculations, write from the heart!" Bad advice. My heart is a dark, Scandinavian thing. Written from the "heart," my personal statement will metastisize into a suicide note.

The reason for the personal essay is not to fill lacunae left by one's resume and transcript. It is so that the Admissions folk have something to blackmail with. My personal embarassments are all a matter of public record. J Edgar Hoover would have nothing on me. Well, he would have plenty on me by 1950s standards, but nothing that I would'nt openly admit to. But a leaked, schlocky, personal statement could extort thousands in blood money from this turnip.

I'm really not not looking forward to writing this. Essays are fun. Maybe too fun. In college I got consistently high marks on them. Though for one class, as the semester wore on eventually written in the margin of one of them was the comment: "Too flip!" I reeled myself in. Maybe I should channel Ingmar Bergman. Wait. I just IMDB'ed him. He's still alive. He's such an eminent director and such a mordant one, that I thought he was born a dead eminent director.

* * *

The continuing story of my friend, Belle: Our girl was wasting away in the world of non-profs. A "501 (c) 3 office B..." she called herself. So girlfriend made some phone calls. Now she is in Florida, working as a real-live Kerry-Edwards campaign operative! Paid, natch. And free car, free room. I bet those MoveOn kids are hott too. Jeal jeal jeal. Because you know shit's not ending in November.

She should rent a couple of mini buses advertising the Perkin's Early Bird Special then Hover Round-jack the Lawrence Welk set to polling stations. Fair's fair: they can be taken to gum their surf n' turf after they vote.

I Get Bent Over by the Police and at the Car Dealership, but Alas, There is No Money Shot

"You seem a little nervous, son."
"Uhhh...."

His utility belt and holster were just about eye-level. All leather, studded with buttons and snaps like rhinestones. Oh please let this be the start to a bad porno and not real life, I thought. But no, all he asked to see was "license and registration."

Yes, I had been speeding, and yes I was a little nervous. I had been driving 10 hours--up since 5:45 that morning--and rode herd through oblivious-as-bovine Wisconsin drivers and Chicago traffic, before being pulled over, on the first street after the I-96 off-ramp, just minutes from home. Coursing through my veins: cortisol, a thermos of coffee, and high-fructose corn syrup from those Twin Cities confections known as "Nut Goodies."

The cop sauntered back to his car where he sat, did nothing, and played those mind-games that cops are wont to when they pull someone over. The cruiser's flashing lights made a scarlet 'A' of my car.

Then there were two sets of flashing lights and my entire rear-view was a mirror-ball of shame. The Village Person called back-up on me! Me! Evidently this was because he discovered that I had expired plates, which he only discovered several minutes before I did. [I had the car's title transferred in August, and had thought I took care of the plate then too, but apparently did not] So I have two tickets. The latter being a misdemeanor. If I had known I was going to get a misdemeanor I wouldn've made sure it was for something a lot more fun, outre, or at least anecdote-worthy.

District Court 54-A, you better begin to prosecute a lot more home-design divas with my $205.

Car troubles continue (well, technically, the above was more of a 'me' problem). My Honda--'Karen O' I call her--was making some hungover sounds whenever I turned her off or on. And the steering was throwing up some pretty stiff resistance at times. I recited 'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell...

Had we but world enough, and time
This coyness, lady were no crime...

But Metaphysical school poetry written in Petrarchan format is utterly useless. Even for do-it-yourself auto repair. This is something I sometimes forget. So this morning I drove to the Honda place.

And it was here I came to realize why red-staters hate John Kerry, why despite empirical evidence that Bush and Cheney are liars, Kerry is not seen as a more 'trustworthy' or competent alternative. It is because of his manifest intelligence. When in a situation where one party obviously is operating on higher plane of knowledge than the other, say me vs. my auto mechanic, or an 'undecided' voter (mouth-breathers, all) vs. wonky-pants Kerry, that side which feels comparatively nescient is likely to be suspicious of the other. So it was with me today with my car, eyeing every mechanic with Nixonian paranoia, so it is with many voters and Kerry. While I would prefer my Commander-in-Chief to be smarter than me, the need for candidates to "empathize" with voters is something their handlers obsess over. Our leaders should be better than us, primus inter pares, but increasingly campaigns are a limbo-contest with the bar set at the lowest common denominator. This will figure someplace in democracy's obituary.

Please rise for the Benediction. Coffee and cookies will be served in the Fellowship Hall.

J'aime Ikea

So I struck out into the town on my own. Since I was last there several months ago a new Ikea store opened up in Bloomington. My anti-big-box retail-ism comes with the caveat that Scandinavian modernism doesn't count. Riding the escalator up to the showroom, the smell of leather, pine and linoleum opened my sinus passages. Once at the top I was momentarily paralyzed, while different parts of my body wanted to make for different directions. Which first: livingrooms, bedrooms, studies, or kitchens? Wandering the floor, I began to act out little domestic scenes to myself. "Oh, what a hard day at the ACLU--stretch--I think I'll beach myself on my $349 Allerum sofa--beige, naturally--and see what Charlie Rose is up to..." And " Uff-da neimen! My buffed aluminum fridge is empty! Time for a Gjetost run!" That's the way I would speak In an Ikea outfitted environment: all exclamation points, like a Rex Morgan, M.D. strip.

As if that wasn't indulgent enough, from there I went to the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, near the Powderhorn neighborhood, where I first lived. I went to the museum twice actually, such was my jones.

My parents went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design which is afflilated with the Institute. They hid this fact from me until I had recieved early admission notification from the University, lest I decide they had lost all moral authority to dissuade me from going to art school. It probably wouldn't have changed my decision.

At the MIA I have a routine: start in the lowest floor to get past boring folk objet d'arts (antique metal piggy banks? Man-purse notwithstanding, I don't think I'm that bad) and work my way up, climaxing at the German expressionist art on the third floor. Standing in front of one of the Chuck Close paintings, my cell vibrated.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Grant? Where are you?"

"Um, M.I.A."

"You're Missing In Action?"

"Well...yes, and no, I'm at the Mpls Insitute of Arts."

"Oh, okay. Howabout you meet us for dinner when you are done, then?"

I hadn't thought of it that way, Missing In Action. I am a casualty of museum culture.

When I approached the second floor, terror struck. Most of the South Asian galleries were closed. I hurried past the jade collection and found, much to my moksha, that my favorite sculpture was still on view: The Gandharan Buddha. Gandhara was a region in what is now Afghanistan. It marked the furthest extent of the conquests of Alexander the great. After his death, his empire quickly disintegrated into fiefs held by his Greek generals. Gandhara remained an outpost of Hellenistic influence through the Roman empire, when it served as a trading corridor between eastern and western cultures. This Buddha shows the mutual penetration of Helenistic and Asian traditions in this region. The sculpture is beautiful, not only aesthetically, but sexually, even. His nose is aquiline, and his eyes stare laconically from under long, hooded lids. His lips are cupid-bowed like you would see on any Greek or Roman sculpture and his ushnisha or "special Buddha brain" that shows up so often as a lump atop his head like a birth defect, is treated here as a top knot for a Greek do.

Beauty is the thing. But, I also like the metaphor of the statue. It shows the instability and human constitution of all things in the social world. Here the Buddha takes on the form of the people who created it, as all gods and political theories invariably reflect the identity of those who created them. This isn't some masturbatory Po Mo argument, facts about the natural world may indeed be objective, but no human institution ever is. Human institutions, whether politics, religion or the definition of marriage, can be and constantly are being redefined. Those who gesture at essentialism and say "America is inherently this" or "Marriage is inherently that" are simply defending the status quo. Nothing is inherently anything. "We are condemned to be free" dammit. Human institutions can be reconstituted by us to mean whatever the hell we want them to mean, so lets make them work for us and not be uxorious towards the prejudices of dead men.

How could I let my description of a granite sculpture descend into such bathos?

When the Taliban fell in 2002 suddenly I noticed many Gandharan Buddha heads turning up on the auction market. Even at $200k, they seemed to be asking for too little. It would be terrible to see them fall into the mort main of private ownership.

Staring at certain paintings does things to me. I get a welling feeling under my chest, and it pushes up against my solar plexus. I try to be detached and distant from so much, but I cannot maintain this pose around, say, a John Singer Sargent.

So I walked on a cushion of air, two inches above the ground, back to my Honda and made for 394 to Minnetonka for dinner with the Grand'rents. I love them and am normally an attentive conversationalist, but when the Grandparents from both sides of the family (two on Dad's one on Mom's) get together, the convo becomes completely incoherent, full of non-sequiturs and sweeping generalizations. When this happens I frequently disengage, listening less to the actual content of the conversation, than its rhythm and tone, so I know when to offer my "mm-hmms" "reallys?," and "interestings."

"That Helen Keller is overrated, don't you think?"

"mm-hmm."

I was practicing this rhythm method when I noticed the waitresses sort of laughing at me. I realized what I had been doing. I had been staring at the sole male server the entire time. One flip of his wrist on this, an otherwise strapping lad, and I was an anthropologist, deconstructing his every move right up until I noticed the wait staff noticing me. My conclusion: Yeah. Minority? Who's a minority?

Life, Approximately

The past several months of my life were devoted to studying for the LSAT. That five hours of standardized testing on a random Saturday morning is so determinative is absurd, no argument there. I was tempted to bubble in "Gregor Samsa" as my name on the Scantron sheet. More absurd is that the LSAT allegedly tests logical thinking. By that score one should fail by merely taking the test in the first place. Joseph Heller would agree, no? Shrug. I'll play the game. Besides, it's been so long since I've been last quantified.

But now I have to wait several weeks to be bell-curved. Being American, I want closure dammit. Preferably within 30 minutes and punctuated by a laugh track and Gap commercials. I typically hold up under pressure though, only to lose my shit afterwards. Well, so far I have remained continent, but I do have ants in my pants. (Incidentally, I used that in a pick-up line once, not because I was even necessarily attracted, but just because the line worked in that situation. Him: "Boy, I've got ants in my pants." Me: "Maybe you would like Grant in your pants instead?" I'm an idiot? What an insight. You should be a Russian novelist.)

So I had to chill out. Perscription drugs could do the trick, but the more I learn about PharMA the more pissed off I get. Girlfriends say we pay twice as much for pharmacueticals than any other developed democracy because pornographically high prices needed in order to finance their Messianic powers of life-saving innovation. They've been doing too much of their own product. Thirty percent profit margins and they spend vastly more money on marketing than research. And what research they in fact do is pimped off of progress made by the NIH and major US research universities. Oh, I feel a rant coming on, where's that 'scrip of Xanax?

No. Instead of popping muscle relaxants, I went back to the Old Country--Minneapolis. I had idly told the fam in the nadir of my test prep that I may come back home to visit for a while. In the meantime, I had forgotten about that trial balloon, but they hadn't and held me to it.

While I love my time in Mpls, it is the drive out there that is most cathartic. Ten hours of threading through rust-belt highways, using the centrifugal force of the Chicago turnpike to sling into Wisconsin, and riding up and down those amber waves at a cruise-controlled 75 mph. I have to say though that Wisconsin let me down. "Wisconsin is Bush Country" campaign signs (what is he, an occupying power?) marred the otherwise dignified landscape.

This changed upon entering the Twin Cities. Kerry signs were in mating season or something. And the ubiquitous Wellstone! stickers made me sentimentally-retarded. Then angry. Y'all could've had Fritz Mondale and you chose that oleaginous Norm Coleman. The man makes me throw up in my mouth a little. I witnessed him in action while I was working on Haiti at the State Dept. last spring. He was debating Chris Dodd on the News Hour with Jim Lerher. Dodd--long time Latin America hand--could speak cogently and extemporaneously on any topic relating to the Haiti debacle and integrate them coherently. Coleman, however, clung to talking points printed off the White House website like a kid on out-sized monkey bars, dangling and thrashing in the air.

This is unattractive of me, right? Politics makes my butt look big.

I feel like ending this abruptly. I was lying about that whole closure thing. Truffaut is my (second) favorite director, after all. But I have binged on the details of decidely un-blogworthy life enough for now. I'll post tomorrow, wherein I haunt art museums, stalk the floors of the shiny new IKEA store, cultivate some bad habits and let my eyes roam a bit too far....