The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover

"The secret to being a bore is to blog everything."
--Voltaire

It's been a while. Less blogging means I have been doing more living. But living is overrated, even lichen does it.

I wont give a full account. Like J. Alfed Prufrock, I am in danger of "measuring out my life in coffee spoons." And little drink umbrellas. Life has been a swirl of scenes viewed through second-hand smoke, refracted through wine glasses. I've made some new friends, caught up with old ones and had a bit of sport.

Eye-sex is a pasttime. Survey the room and begin to cull the herd. Isolate several promising cases. Collect data, gather intelligence. Note the cocked wrist. Does he appear to be laughing wryly or with the blunt, underdeveloped sense of irony of a frat boy? The table is obscuring his shoes and manner in which his legs are crossed, if at all.

If caught, do not break eye-contact with your quarry. Like pleading the fifth, it is a denial that only incriminates. Like staring down a dog, it shows weakness! We're mature about this; besides no harm can come. At best you now have a whole new set of options in front of you. At worst, you have given someone a compliment and increased the net amount of delightful analyzable nuance in the room. Hold for two beats then look away, back at your friend you are talking with, as if you were paying attention to her the entire time.

If you happen to be on the recieving end of this attention, say at a State Dept. Foreign Service recruitment function, by a guy graying in his twenties (nice!), don't queer the deal by disagreeing with everything he says. Even if he is ostentatiously wrong, wrong, wrong. Priorities, Grant!

Out of the gutter and into the empyrean. Salman Rushdie came to town several weeks ago. Seeing Rusdie in person, much less sitting just feet away from him was a trip. There he was, in the stale old Wonders Hall kiva, under the same oppresive flourescent light that crushed many a freshman lecture. But with Salman the light shone off his bald scalp like a halo. He, Our Lady of Militant Secularism.

When he said essentialism was all bosh and described Saleem Sinai as a "cultural minority of one" I poked Drew sitting next to me and relayed a note: I love this man. Yes Salman, testify! Gender, religion, nationality, orientation: even if identities do fracture along these lines, these fractures themselves split further--like cracked paint--in ways entirely unique to each individual. Insofar as hyphenations tell us anything, they don't tell us much worth hearing.

There. From hormonal shallowness to masturbatory abstraction in just ten short paragraphs.

Which Do Love More, Chris or El Azteco? Luckily, I Never Have to Choose

I'm at the library. Rode my bike. Fought the puddles and the puddles won. Now my back is spackled with mud. Feeling an expansive love for everything. That includes you. Especially you.

I show my love by wasting your time. It's just my way. So here goes, some news that did'nt happen. At least yet.

Iraqis Vote "Moral Values" In Historic Election

Gay Marriage Banned, Ayatollah Al-Roberston Triumphant

Karbala, Iraq (AP)-- Iraq's first free elections in the past fifty years are being hailed as a major success for this nascent democracy with only many dozen dead at the hands of insurgents, rather than many, many as expected.

What motivated an estimated 60-70% of Iraqis to the polls however was not the near-constant car bombings, kidnappings, decapitations, or the prescence of an occupying force of 150,000 troops. Instead "moral values" was the issue most cited by voters. Indeed ten of Iraq's administrative governates voted to ban gay marriage rather than take action on the pressing issues of a foreign occupation or incipient multi-ethnic civil war.

"If two men can get married, then it is all for nothing! Then the insurgents and the Americans really have won!!" Said Jimmy Joe Al-Hassani.

That was a common sentiment that seemed to unify a fractious country, which often chafes along ethnic and religious fault lines.

Thirty percent of voters named gay-marriage as the most important issue to them, followed distantly by "terrorism," "infidel occupation," "facial hair" and "the honor of our women."

"Oh, praise Allah, may peace be upon him!" Said Ibrahim al-O'Reilly "I mean, we gotta have priorities, you know??"


These are the sorts of things that I talk about with Chris. My dear Chris. The guy who trailed behind me through Europe like my little burka-clad Muslim wife. The boy who has a day named after him in Minnesota.

He's a guy whose wit sparkles like a champagne flute full of Mountain Dew. That's the best way I can think to describe him, a blending of the high and the low. He's got a brain like a nuclear reactor, yet is completely without pretense. He's incorrigibly himself. Perhaps the only adorable neo-con. My complete opposite in every way, and I love him for it.

Last night we ate at El Azteco. He had a jones for something in particular. I didn't know what to get and blindly stabbed at the menu. A half hour later a big mound of something was placed in front of me. The sight of it stopped conversations at two tables nearby. (I should've known it would be a project since it cost 10 dolla and I dont think I've ever spent more than $5.00 at El Az--even when eating sopapillas all night after smoking some of Melanie's stash.) "Do I eat this or place a flag on top of it?" I thought. It appeared to have slathered on it the all the UNFP guacamole rations intended for Banda Aceh, Indonesia.

Not willing to admit defeat, I boxed it up. Walking back to Chris's car though, I realized I was defeated and could never hope to eat it all. Spending a week in the fridge was not going to do it any credit. Still, I hate to throw food away. In the parking garage I noticed a Prius next to Chris's space. I set the styrofoam box by the electric-gas hybrid where its driver was sure to notice. A good liberal he--or she!!--would find a good use for it. Give it to a homeless person perhaps. Or use it as compost in their organic garden.

Danger, Danger! High Culture!

The architect Philip Johnson died last week at the skyscraping age of 98. As happens, that for which he was criticized in life, he is feted in death. (See Susan Sontag for same.) Johnson was an aesthetic skank who slutted from Modernism to Post-Modernism and back again. Good for him. Both mods and post-mods tended to be ideologues (see Adolf Loos), and as such, crashing bores too.

Johnson designed the IDS building, the anchor of the Minneapolis skyline. In our old house there I was once small enough to slip through my bedrom window--which opened only halfway, forcing me to inhale sharply as I pushed through in one rib-scraping motion--and crawl out onto the roof. From there I could see the skyline, and the IDS held reign over it. The commanding heights of my imagination.

In this sense the IDS reminds me of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a large opaque slab that draws the awe of those who look at it. And like Johnson, the building too is contradictory. On the one hand it is indeed a dominatrix, on the other it is one of the most humble of the city's skyscrapers. Perhaps it's the noblesse oblige that comes with great power properly understood. The IDS is humble in shape: a simple trapezoidal slab, easy enough for a small boy to draw obsessively in an impasto mash of dark blue crayon.

Which brings us to color. It is a brooding, obsidian shade of blue only occasionally. The fascade is entirely glass which means it reflects its surroundings. On a day of mottled clouds the skyscraper camoflauges itself in cumulonimbus fatigues. Seen while in downtown, the IDS reflects the colors and shapes of its neighbors. It defers to them. It even acts as a mirror to its prima donna co-star, the Wells Fargo building (itself a gorgeous cascade of golden light).

Once when I was twelve and riding into downtown Minneapolis on highway 396 with my grandparents, the IDS seemed to loom so large--larger and yet larger as we approached--that it necessitated comment. And to me specifically, as my IDS fetish is well known in the fam.

"Philip Johnson designed the IDS, Grant." My grandma said.
"I know."
"He's gay, you know." Though I couldn't see her face, she said this as if with an arched eyebrow.
"Mm." The most politic thing I could think to say. Or at least intone.

Speaking of. I hung out with Matt W. tonight. There are many reasons I like hanging out with him, one of them being that for as much as I may feel like a raging queen, my flame always seems to dim when compared to the roman candle of homosexuality that is Matt.

But not this night. We saw the movie A Very Long Engagement. (Incidentally, yes the movie is a very long engagement. Very long, but not long enough.) With absolutely no parking spaces at the megaplex we were forced to park at a nearby Hooters restaurant. I had never seen one up close, so before zeroing in on a space I drove past closely at an idling pace and looked through the windows. So exotic! alien! I felt like Jane Goodall. "Matt, is that wood paneling on the walls?? I love it!" I said. "Yeah but did you see the size of the breasts on the waitress?" Matt gawked.

No! I hadn't! That's right, instead of looking at the hooters of the girl at Hooters, I was checking out the interior design of the restaurant, while Matt was all about the mammaries. For at least a while I was the gayer of the two. That is, until after the movie when Matt said "And what about that little soldier boy in the movie [Gaspard Ulliel]? I'd suck his nose!"

Hail to the Queef

Inauguration Day 2005.

And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well as a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power; it burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.
--G.W. Bush, Inaugural Address

When my words were honey,
Flies covered my lips!
--Mahmoud Darweesh

There was very little one could disagree with in the President's Inaugural Address . Rather than that being a sign of good political thought however, it is a sign of its poverty. Just as bad science is unfalsifible, if one can't take issue with the points in a political speech it, it hardly seems to have a point.

Yet it is worse than pointless. With his vaulted language--as if his second term was the second coming of some avenging Messiah of "freedom"--the President has raised expectations so high that the reality will never be able to match them. Without a substaintial volte-face change in U.S. foreign policy, the President's crusade on behalf of "democracy" will become a crusade on behalf of hypocrisy. But no such change will be forthcoming.

The reality of world politics--and nonnegotiable U.S. national interest--will make hypocrites out of all of us. George W sees this "War On Terror" as a war for freedom, of course, but essential to prosecuting this war are alliances with, and aid to illiberal regimes (to put it euphamistically) in Pakistan, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Indeed the President's aides, as well as his own father, have said that this speech marks no real change in U.S. policy. Given the soaring altitude of the President's rhetoric and the reality of how little actual policy will fundamentally change, the U.S. can only lose additional international crediblity, while charges of hypocrisy will resonate--whether they deserve to or not--all the more. Flies will cover our lips.

The All Singing, All Dancing, All-cohol Blog

Not that I have been doing too much singing or dancing. Anita Ekberg, in La Dolce Vita, splashing in the Trevi Fountain did enough of that, and so well that I have been deterred. If I were drunk and an American in early post-war Europe, sure I would. But I am an American in post-post-post-war America, so as it stands I am lying in a fetal position. Such is The State I Am In.

I've been drinking gin and juice from a teacup. Um, times five or six. Better I do that here, alone, than in public. A bit too precious even for a party affectation.

S'my right though, to overindulge in both alcohol and ironic use of chinaware. It's there in the Fourth Geneva Convention, Section III, concerning the rights of those living under an occupying power. That's what America is these days,right? An occupying power? Mm, I like how when the right gets hysterical, the left thinks it's cool to act hyperbolic as well.

One gets the television one deserves at 3:30 am. The viewership is small enough that you can take the programming and targeted advertisements personally. These people know their demographics. Evidentally I need to wrest my abs from a winter's coat of averdupois, ask my doctor about getting my diabetic supplies from Liberty Medical, and invest in a Hoveround. Anything's possible with a Hoveround! I am told. That will be my acceptance speech when I use the little joystick to wheel my way up to the podium in Stockholm to accept my Nobel Prize in Advanced Theoretical Banality. "Anything's possible with a Hoveround!"

My head feels like the discharge from a near-empty can of aerosol. Which is the same way I would describe the tone of voice of that breathless, gee-whiz eschatologist Rexella Van Impe, currently on the tiv. "Oh my, Jack! What exciting times we are living in!" Last week they said the prophecy of the book of Revelation was at hand with Luxembourg's assumption of the EU presidency. The end is nigh indeed.

Funny, I don't think I am going to feel hungover. That's probably because I've done most of my barfing here into this blog. Le sigh. Time for me to stop playing the absinthe-minded professor.

Kinky Bastards at New Learning Media, LLC

I had to take an on-line sexual harassment test today for work. Some people bemoan our paranoid, politically-correct, litigation-addled, vicitimization culture. Not me. It makes life interesting, doesn't it? E.g. the fact that I took an on-line sexual harassment test today for work.

Preventing Sexual Harassment it was called. Copyright 2004 New Learning Media, LLC! Yes, the emphasis was on prevention, sigh.

The first part of the training module was educational, with lots of background information. This, I suspect, is the first step in preventing sexual harassment: freighting the idea of sex harrassment with so many definitions and prolix footnote-studded paragraphs that any of its imagined piquancy becomes lost. By the end of this portion of the program I would need to memorize the controlling opinion in the case of Faragher vs. Boca Raton (1998) in order to even attempt to sexually harass someone.

Sexual harasment was made against the law by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and is defined as "unwelcome sexual advances" that has at least one of two effects: either the creation of a quid pro quo [hereinafter known as 'a little sumpin sumpin for a little sumpin sumpin'], or the creation of a 'hostile work environment.'

Say, it's stuck with me. I guess the people at New Media Learning are pretty good at this pedagogy shit.

After being given sufficient background information and definitions to bold-face words, the program proceded to the test itself. This consisted of twenty or so scenarios where the test taker is tasked with deciding whether an instance of sexual harassment existed in each. A) Yes, B) No, C) Somewhere in between.

Invariably, A) was the answer. The test made it seem as though harassment was so pervasive that only through hyperawareness and immaculate mental hygine could it be avoided. The message was that if there was ever a moment of social awkwardness in the office, either you were just sexually harassed, or someone just sexually harassed you. Refill the toner? That's disgusting.

Most amusing though were the pictures that accompanied the individual questions. These pictures too were designed to act as some sort of deterrent against harassment, with both harasser and harassee so homely--ugly as if on principle--that the displayed harassment lent itself more to a shudder than frisson. Sidney Greenstreet pulls off five pounds of flesh from the doughy Midwestern bundt cake of an ass that happens to be in front of him. And same sex harassment too! The litigation that dare not speak its name! A man from the Johnson administration (skinny tie, Robert MacNamara thinning, combed back hair) corners against the watercooler a man from the Carter administration (fat tie, fat hair, a general look of malaise about him, 'lusting in his heart' to be out of his current predicament).

A score of 75% or less on the test would have consequences for one's employment. I would have thought that a score of 75% or less would have consequences for one's respitory and pulmonary function. My score of 100% merely denoted my sentience as a living being.

Perhaps a powerfully lame living being. Should it really have been so intuitive? Here's hoping the theory is more black and white than the practice. I mean if I have to go down for something, it might as well be for going down on...I'll stop right there. Double entendre interruptus.

God is a Pre-Op Tranny

I cashed out all the karma and good-will-toward-men I've got coming to me in 2005, and on the first day of the year.

Mac and I were on the stalk for some falafel in the East Village, close to his place. When I patted myself down--as I am wont to do--I noticed my flat front pants were flatter in the front than usual. No wallet in the pockets. Nor in my jacket, though keys, change, gum and cell were all accounted for. We retraced our steps, which turned into long, bounding strides. Still, no wallet.

Well, that's that, I thought. Because I still had my debit card and some cash (which I carry on me, away from my wallet for this very reason) I figured at least some damage had been contained. Credit cards could be canceled in minutes. And the lost money could be thought of as a moron tax which I deserved to pay, since I was pretty sure my wallet had fallen out of an open pocket along with my phone when it had fallen out earlier. All of this I could resign myself to, but with an early morning flight to Detroit the next day I absolutely needed my photo ID.

In the wallet, naturellement.

That being that indeed, Mac continued questing after Middle Eastern food. I went back to the apartment just in case the wallet was there after all. It wasn't. Two friends helped me resume the futile search. On a crowded Manhattan street, once out of my pocket, that wallet was gone. It probably never even hit the ground.

Still, there were motions to go through. Reality to avoid. My eyes were cast downward, but not out of any hope of finding the wallet; I wasn't really looking at anything. As the three of us made our way down the narrow sidewalk, a transvestite made eye contact with me.

"What's your name?" (S)he asked.

My friend put his shoulder between us, in a gentle attempt to prevent the tranny's attempted pick-up. This, in a moment of raw vulernability. But I answered anyways. "Grant."

Oh, my name was my shame! Saying it out loud sounded like an indictment. "Grant" as in "(comma) the idiot who lost his wallet on New Year's day and missed his flight home, remember him?"

But the transvestite persisted. "Did you lose this?"

She refused my offers of money as a reward. In the face the transcendent beauty of her act money did seem garish. "No, no" she said "I'm a good person."

Money? That's nothing. I would have done anything .

She slipped into a cab while the three of us reeled from such a flaming display of integrity. By the time we came across her, at least ten if not fifteen minutes had passed. And yet she remained there--exactly where I was sure the wallet had fallen out--until she could bring grace to some out-of-state 'mo.

At that moment, God was a pre-op tranny in the East Village.

Brisket! Brisket! Brisket!

If I've been spending hours in an glassy-eyed catatonic state lately, I have Drew to thank. A couple of weeks ago he burned me a lecture series he'd been listening to. So Heidegger ended up narrating my drive to Minneapolis. That turned out to be pretty prescient.

Best part was the CD folder he rigged up, constructed from an old calendar, with James Dean peaking out from the most amusing places. Crafty! Now with Martha unable to smuggle even nutmeg into Alderson, it's up to us on the outside to keep the flame alive.

Minnesota was relentlessly Minnesotan. For the first half of the week, Pre-Cambrian retro was in, with high temps barely reaching zero. The weather made the streets look eerily post-apocalyptic: silent buildings casting long shadows across empty roads. No pedestrians, or traffic even. Tuesday's family activity was maintaning core body temperature.

Minnesotans were relentlessly Minnesotan. On Christmas Eve day Byerly's was choked with people picking up orders. A woman, wide as she was tall--about four feet--and ancient as a coelacanth, was wielding her shopping cart like a Buick Roadmaster. As she clipped every shin and kneecap in her path, it was the victims that apologized effusively to her. Sorry! Sorry! Ooh, sorry there, then!

And grandma was even more grandma than she's ever been. She defeated my efforts at defensive eating by day three with weapons-grade food that should've been declared to the IAEA.

So taken was she with the idea of cooking a brisket that it seemed to find a relevance to every conversation within her earshot for a day. Brisket, brisket, brisket. She said the word four times in less than a minute, and I only began to count after the comedy of her mentioning it so often became unavoidable. Such was her enthusiasm that she began to cook the thing at 1:30 that morning. The smell woke me up in the middle of the night and sent me to the bathroom, where I threw up for the first time since Mac gave me a case of the nasties after a trip to Philadelphia during freshman year.

The depressing part wasn't that I spent Christmas Eve sleeping in the upstairs bathroom--the farthest possible room from the kitchen in the house--after releasing epic poems of vomit. The depressing part was that this made me feel better than I had felt all year. From anything. And 2004 was not without its moments. So I bear no malice to Grandma's brisket. In fact it reminds me of a line from the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you." See! I can do biblical literalism!

But the second coming of my Swedish meatball dinner was not the only Christmas miracle. That I was able to follow grandma's "conversations" was another. They are sort of unilateral, with her doing most of the talking while I'm just along for the ride. Disjointed, abrupt, at times seemingly diagnosable, her conversations can sound like someone calling out answers to a Rorschach test. She looks cheap, oh they used to know how to dress. This was all before They broke the unions. I think all that turkey gave me a case of the gout. "Do what you love"? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Clarence Thomas? He's a patsy. Norm Coleman? He's a patsy too.

These sessions can be like listening to a police scanner, with non-sequiturs and static occasionally interrupted by something really interesting. As when she retold the story of V-E day in Minneapolis, with Louis Prima leading a conga line down Hennepin Avenue. Or her trip to Chicago a year earlier, at age sixteen, drinking highballs and flirting salaciously with sailors on the train. "We were all going to die tomorrow back then, you know" she said.

Oh grandma, like you, or any of us girls in the family, have ever needed an excuse to flirt with sailors.

Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, No Straight Thing Was Ever Made

A quote by Kant. I take it to speak to our inherent imperfections and limitations as humans. But really it came to me when my osteopath was straddling my back and kneeding my vertebrae like an Italian peasant would dough. Or a prophet from the book of Leviticus, extracting some Old Testament style justice from my spine.

Five minutes earlier he had told me my back was slightly crooked and it was wrenching my muscles so one side of me was preceptibly lower than the other. I felt like my posture had been worsening, but I thought this had more to do with the last two elections and the intervening four years.

"Yup, your whole body points out to the left. It's crooked. See the nipple line?"

Nipple line! I laughed out loud. But that I'm not straight? That I lean to the left? No revelations here.

He didnt scribble any muscle relaxants for me though. Back to icing myself with a frozen bottle of Stoli, I guess. Speaking of prescription drugs and vodka, for the first time in three years I have New Year's plans worth mentioning. Mac has invited us aparachiks to his place in NYC. I'll pick up the Jess in Detroit and we'll fly over together. We each bought one way tickets, so I hope the TSA does not intrepret our destination, lack of return flight, and transparent 'hatred of freedom' as evidence that we're freelancing for al-Qaeda.

Last time I flew to Minnesota I was selected for a random baggage search. When the mouth-breathing lady with wooden stick poked my clothes aside and found four books on Afghanistan, religious fundamentalism and political Islam, her eyes met mine. She didn't lift her head or close her mouth. 'Sir, take off your shoes please...' She said.

But between now and a New Year's reunion of the college diaspora, there is that other great secular holiday: Christmas. Typically I love X-mas in Minneapolis. The family. The city. The lefse and cardamom bread. This year though may be asphyxiating. If my uncle insists on playing the Red State-talk-radio-evangelical martyr in our Blue State family, I'm not going to give an inch. I'll be as condescending, elitist and didactic in my leftist manifestos as I have wanting to be with him for years. That or I'll drive to Byerly's and stick my head in the olive bar. No sneeze gaurd will be able to stop me.

My Kind of Town, Chicago

And not just because it is known as the 'city of big shoulders' or 'hog butcher to the world.' Though there is that.

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen the painted women under your gas lamps,
luring the farm boys.

A train is really the best way to get there, unless you like comfort, speed, efficiency and seats that aren't feculent. I kid because I love. The grittiness is actually part of the appeal. The best part of taking the Amtrak is that all sides of the track are the wrong sides of the track. Like taking a way-back machine to the land that the 1950 Interstate Highway Act left behind.

I guess I hadn't realized how industrialized our Midwest is. Or was, at least. Big, beautiful industrial buildings, with exposed viscera of wires and turbines, sinewy tangles of pipes and ducts look like monsters from the Jurassic. I would stare at one for a while and half expect it to roar like a Tyranosaurus.

Once in Chicago I had several hours to kill before my interview. And even after that it would be several more before I rendezvous'ed with Priya since she would be taking the GRE after work.

One of the first things I do when I get into a city is to deliberately get lost, then find my way back. Often you don't know what interesting things you are looking for until you find them. But getting lost was sort of hard when you are bound in on one side by Lake Michigan and the city has a pretty rational grid layout. And when you've grown up in the Midwest and Chicago was treated like an ersatz Paris, or New York, even.

So I just used bus maps to reconnoiter the location of my interview and then bought Priya's oxox--mas present. I had it wrapped by some guys from a charity that does male cheerleading to raise money to care for cancer victims. I wasn't sure how that worked. Maybe the mere threat of male cheerleaders is enough to extort money from people who are terrified of such things. Like me.

I was just one block from my interview--the Northwestern Law building in sight--when a large Nissan Murano turned against the signal and just about hit me in the crosswalk. Instead of doing the sane thing, the instinctive thing, of say running away from the car, I planted my feet. I stuck my arm out, pointing my finger at the incandescent little 'walk' guy in the signal, while looking for, then locking onto the driver's eyes. He skidded to a stop and gave me a look so sheepish I was embarrassed for myself. Things about ourselves are revealed in these seconds spent on the seared edge of life. Turns out I am some sort of asshole pedant. Rather than save myself from possible injury I--quite literally--took a stand for a minor principle, my rights as a pedestrian.

With all my senses widely dialated, I wondered if that itself was the law school interview. Some admissions officer would try to run down candidates, and those who make it into the law school, are, well, in the law school.

The sit-down interview went well. Maybe I was a little deprived of social contact because I couldn't stop haming it up with the interviewer. Actually, had the interview turned combative or adversarial, I had in my folder lots of dirt and less than glowing press on the Law School that I would load, like depleted uranium, into my questions. But that didn't happen.

I was impressed with the school and interview, which may have disarmed me. But I still have real concerns. For instance, NWern makes a big fuss about importing sort of a 'business school' model into its law program. Hence the interview. I tend to think of B-school as a little shallow though. Business bestsellers read like self-help books and pop-psychology, and qualities that are encouraged in business, like trading on connections or contacts, would be unethical in law. Think of Roy Cohn cutting a deal with the judge in the Rosenberg trial.

Moreover, Dean van Zandt has said that "risk averse students" are the ones that should be "kept out" of the law school, that such students could not understand their business clients needs. That quote really got to me. Lawyers--and our whole society in general--would do well with a healthy booster-shot of risk aversion. We live on risk; and to an unsustainable extent. The major scandals of the last ten years--Enron, Worldcom, etc.--happened because the lawyers advising these companies were not risk averse enough, they were enablers. In the Iraq war and Abu Graib scandal, lawyers have brushed aside voices of dissent and caution, making arrogant desicions that have put this country more at risk: Not appreciating the predictable effects of the law of unintended consequences in Iraq, brushing aside the UN as 'irrelevant' and the Geneva conventions as 'quaint.' Lets not even get started on the budget and trade deficits, or our national savings rate which is less than a penny on the dollar. Risk-aversion I think is appropriate in this increasingly Hobbesian world, one created by risky actions in the first place.

Sorry, but this is easier for me than doing Hatha yoga or something.

The above rant notwithstanding, I left the interview buoyant. I still had some time until 'Ya got through with her GRE. So I headed for Milennium Park and took in Frank Gehry's impressive bandshell, as well as the sculpture Cloud Gate. It is a giant losenge shaped thing with a highly reflective surface and it turns the Chicago skyline into an epileptic fit of lights.

Oh, and walking along Wacker Drive, I saw Tim Curry. Sans his Rocky Horror corset, alas. There is only one appropriate thing to do when you see Tim Curry, and that is to call your friend Alissa. I told her that I'd call her back if I saw Susan Sarandon, or if everybody on Michigan Ave. broke out into 'Let's Do the Time Warp Again!'

Blood on the Amtrak

These short days and long nights are all right. The sun goes down--'goes down'? too Christina Aguilera--the sun 'sets' rather, a little after five. Since I make such a muck of them, it's best that my days are as short as possible.

Like Alicia Bridges, I too 'love the nightlife.' Perhaps in a slightly different way. Not so much because 'I got to boogie, on the disco 'round, oh yeah.' But I do like how the previously daytime hours are now steeped in darkness. Six-thirty's now a little bit sexy.

On these longer winter nights I bring out the telescope. It's a big, clunky, orange affair bearing the name 'Celestron,' which I can only say in a robot voice. It dates to the 1950s when my Grandpa probably bought it to catch a glimpse of Sputnik, or Laika, that dog shot into space by the Soviets. I look at the shadows cast on Jupiter by its moons. Or I train the telescope on a seemingly empty patch of sky then look through the eyepiece to see the galaxy as busy as swamp water under a microscope. I like the liberating feeling of insignificance I get staring at such infinity. George Bush is just an random tangle of molecules that will disassemble soon enough.

Uh. Ground control to Major Tom. I'm back. I'll be going to Chicago Monday. Biznass and pleasure. When through with the biznasty, I'll see Priya. See her? I'll be staying with her. There's a Chinese dish that describes what I'm feeling. Ah, yes, 'Double Happiness.'

So best: I'm taking the train. There's a certain 1830's-to late 1950's romance about that. If my life were directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet I would have a saucy French bob haircut and would spend my spare time hanging out at the station, running after trains, saying tearful goodbyes to perfect and grateful strangers.

I love me the Amtrak. It's perpetually dying, hemorrhaging public money. The bete noir of conservatives, the St. Sebastian of, well, maybe only me. State subsidized inefficiency on a national scale? This is as close as I'll be getting to a vacation in Spain for a little while. And there's the fact that every time someone actually pays to ride Amtrak--or use public transportation of any sort except rickshaws--Tom Delay cries.

Then a job interview on Wednesday. The last time I interviewed for a job I spied written on my evaluator's form: 'He's articulate, but nerdy.' I took that as a compliment. Though since the woman who wrote it was inordinately into the March Madness of NCAA basketball, I doubt she intended it that way.

Love You Like a Milkshake!

The first snow of the year came on Wednesday. In such a dramatic fashion that it must count for the second and third snows of the year too. It was one of those obese snows, that cover and cake the whole area code. Once skeletal trees and bushes were larded up with so much snow it seemed to be their proper foliage. A winter flush.

In the morning light, the whole world was a Cool-Whip commercial. I went running in a suddenly alien environment. That to me is one of the thrills of a good snow. The inert death of late fall is replaced by an entirely new, at once more dignified and more fanciful world. Running through the woods, the syncopation of black branches and white everything else, beat a staccato rhythm. Inspired views from my left, to my right, and straight ahead.

"I hate the snow." says Priya. "Brown is beautiful." To each, their own.

So it was a white Thanksgiving. Well, with jello-marshmallow salad and toxic amounts of TV, every Thanksgiving is a white Thanksgiving at our house. For me at least, the apathy and sluggishness I feel after the dinner is less a result of the Tryptophan than from prolonged exposure to football on the tiv. But if that's what it takes to get my Brother, Dad, Mom and myself in the same room at the same time, heck, I'll take one for the team.

It was my Brother's birthday as well. He was born on Thanxgiving too. Growing up, this was always the scary time of year for me. With his birthday in late November and mine in January, there was always a period where for a little more than a month, we appeared to be one year apart. Instead of him being six and I being eight, for the interregnum he would be seven, but I would still be eight. During these forty-five days I lived in a state of paranoia--what if he caught up with me one year? What if he overtook me? It would all be over.

After dinner, I caught up with my Bestus: Melanie, back in town from Boston. A one sentence profile: Once in high school we drove past Old Country Buffet; "Mmm! Let's eat out at Ole Cunty!" she said. I haven't been there since, which earns her sincere gratitude.

This was the same cat who worked on the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Broward County, Fla. She schlepped for Jewish-outreach as a matter of fact. The girl's got Shiksappeal.

Standing in her foyer, she presented me with kitschy tchotchkes, that were ironic, she said, only because Kerry didn't win. She bore gifts of K-E buttons in Hebrew, as well as a K-E t-shirt, also in Hewbrew, and a snappy little box for pills, with compartments for each day of the week's dose, and again, emblazoned with the K-E logo. This is a gift I must use. I must get an addiction.

Funny thing about the shirt--it was a smallish girl's shirt. Funny because when I stopped off at the state Democratic party HQ back in early October, the lady saw fit to give me a "Women for Kerry!" button. And at the Rally in late October, I was given--on separate occasions--a placard that said "It's up to the women! Vote Kerry!" and a bumper sticker that said the same. "Maybe they know something, Grant" said Drew.

We went to Denny's, the only place open Thanksgiving eve. Open and actually filled with people, apparently alienated from their families and estranged from their will to live. I needed caffiene to counter act the effects of the giant meal hours earlier. I bought Melanie a malt, which she only consented to after I said "ILoveyoulikeamilkshake!!"

We then took a long night's drive. Since I had a captive audience, I inflicted my taste in music upon her. With sleeping towns and pastures rolling past us, we had one of those conversations where every Noun should be capitalized. You have to be careful who you have those with. Though the moon was partially covered, the new snowfall made the fields glow, as if lit from beneath. These things seem to happen when she is around.