Taking Pictures of Dogs

Wily Coyote

2012-02-11T21:46:00.000-08:00

1 The concept of “economic consequences” iswithout a doubt true. As illustrated by Congressional testimony in the early2000s on the impending decision of the FASB to eliminate pooling of interestsaccounting, one change to accounting principles can curtail a whole stream ofeconomic activity. In this case, theeconomy was experiencing high growth, buoyed in part by mergers andacquisitions among dotcoms whose value comprised primarily of intangibles, likesoftware development. Use of the poolinginterest method allowed purchasing companies to depict their investments inother dotcoms as cheap.

Elimination of the pooling ofinterests method is not the only example of a change in financial reportingrequirements that has had both real and potential adverse economicconsequences. For example, many claimedthat a requirement to expense stock and option compensation would havesignificant reverberations, impacting low level employees, as well as companiesand industries as a whole, as they struggled to compensate CEO talent without runninginto the red. Finally, the recent globaleconomic crisis and the European debt crisis illustrate that the risk factor ofdebt and financial instruments has often been unapparent to investors. Had accounting standards been imposed toforce issuers of sovereign debt, in the case of the European debt crises, andmortgage-backed securities, in the case of the 2008 credit crisis, to makerisks more obvious to investors, perhaps the volume of investment in thesevehicles would have been much lower. Certainly, the lack of willing investors would have had immediateeconomic consequences, slowing the forms of growth funded by thoseinvestments.

However, disaster would have beenaverted. Accounting principles thatpander to the imperative of economic growth over the imperative of fairness andtransparency are like the air that Wily Coyote runs on as he leaves the edge ofa cliff. They help sustain forwardmomentum temporarily, but in doing so, they set the scene for the free fallthat will occur when reality catches up with markets too far entrenched inrisk.

At Alfalfa's

2012-02-11T21:36:00.001-08:00

At Alfalfa’s

How do you help someone with suicide?, Irving thought. Don’t you sort of have to be convincing themto kill themselves to want to help? Thiswas a strange twist on the Doctor Kevorkian bit. Some young healthy people helping each otherout to kill themselves?

He set the paper down, looked out the window at theintersection for a moment. There was anold woman with white strands sticking out from under a pink hat crossingslowly. He moved on to the registerwith the image of some demented death love, shots firing and blood spraying,floating atop his consciousness, like the perfectly thin layer of foam atop hisAmericano. He should go to Italy. He tried to picture this Benny woman andhimself in Italy together but got stuck, considering that she was not stylishenough. He hesitated for a moment over atofu smoothie, then went back and got one. It was great for protein. Hewould need the energy for the Peak to Peak.

This suicide assisting couple in Nederland fueled Irving’srage at Lindsay, for inviting a criminal into his apartment. She said it wasn’t her and how was shesupposed to know, and she shrieked and cried, melodramatically, accusing him ofaccusing her. She would end in somebatty situation like this, he thought. Hisown daughter. The way she had manipulatedher way through adolescence, never reading a book or learning long division. There was so much Cindy in her.

Baring his basket, he fell in behind a brunette with darkbags under her eyes. He looked at them,liking how they contrasted with her girlish face. She was probably Benny’s and Cindy’sage. And she wore it well, even thoughshe was clearly unhappy on this particular day. Someone called and the pair behindhim interrupted his meditation. “Sir, doyou want to go over there?” there’s another checkout free. “What? No no…takeit.” “Oh, thank you, sir.”“Thanks!” said the other, and thankfully theyshuffled off in a blur of bright colored clothing to another register, leavinghim to regain his focus.

He was mesmerized by the interaction in front of him: bouncy young store clerk and oafish bagger repeatingtheir cheery mantras while this woman gave responses in a morose monotone. There was a clamor next to him and another checkoutgirl smiling at him and asking if he wanted to come over to her line. He gave in, comforting himself as he handedover a wad of cash with visions of the evening to come. Dim lighting, Pat Metheney, and a sparkly-eyedblond woman in his clean apartment. Salmon,couscous, roasted red pepper, and a bottle of wine. She would heap adoration on him and that iswhat he needed.

Irving remembered a snatch of witty conversation andsparkling eyes from that night at the Warren Miller film. The depiction of skiing in all its zen glory madehim extremely positive. As the date neared, he grew less enthusiastic.This date was like a movie he thinks he wants to see but, somehow, after buyingthe ticket, has a realization that it is not going to be any good. He grew tired of the spunky thing before sheeven knocked on the door. By the timeshe did, he was as morose as the woman he had seen at Alfafa’s. He just stood and stared down for a minute atthe little leprechaun of a woman standing at his front door.

When he offered her a glass of wine, she said, “No, no. Iwish…god I wish. I just can’t thoughwith this gluten free thing. It sucks,”I know.

“Wait…am I hallucinating or something. Weren’t you drunk the night we met?”

Knock at the Door

2012-01-19T22:51:00.000-08:00

Irving was one of many Boulder success stories. So many peoplefall along the way side, get lost in the tide. A thousand cliches apply. It'shard. It's hard not to miss the boat, to end up hanging out on the Barrel House,having ten more beers, because what else is there? For some people, it’s hardnot to hear a knock at the door one day and find that it is the cops come totake you away. And by those measures, Irving was a success.

But it's also hard not to find that everyone you ever knewdespises you or that your spouse has fallen out of love with you. And bythose measures, Irving may not have been a success.

Irving could have easily sunk rather than swum. He came into the world a runt, with aheavy weight around his neck. The under grownoffspring of a man and woman who liked to have ten beers at a time, punchingbag to his sibling, Irving grew wily. Hegrew narrow minded and judgemental, prone to flashes of anger that inspireddeference from the less biased and respect from equally narrow mindedsuperiors. Each person that came withinIrving’s sights was a potential adversary, a bug to squash or deer to beprayed upon.

He went to make something of himself in the army. The Department of Defense, at peace, set totinkering, digging virtual tunnels, and Irving got to be one of thegophers. “Gopher: Noun. Someone in alow-rank position. Usually used for low rank tasks. So called because of itssound-a-like to "go-for", as in to go for something, such as to gofor coffee." He built hierarchical abstraction layers of protocol to transmit whole libraries of intel from Edwards to Yuma, Peterson to the Pentagon. Buckley to Patrick to Little Rock and back to the Pentagon. .

This was before Google, before Yahoo, before Lycos and even Mosaic. When all that was was a galaxy ofunpredictable IP addresses. It was before anyone had even thought about thepossibility of a search engine at all. There was the US Department of Defense anda few wayward adventurers, just skipping from site to site, like Firefly, thefriendly, do-gooder starship featured in yet another amazing television seriesthat has been cancelled due to lack of popularity.

Irving was vaguelyaware of the adventurers, or ditherers, as he and others in the army tended seethem, somewhat like licensed doctors see practitioners of alternative medicine. Irving not only had the keys and understoodthe science. He also had a purpose—the simultaneousinstantaneous transmission of libraries of text between one army outpost andanother.

All this tunneling and he eventually broke ground at Buckley Air ForceBase, took his GI money and enrolled at University of Colorado, where hefloundered. He bore an almost fanaticaldisdain for all that seemed frivolous to him. So, anyone who knows anything about theUniversity of Colorado and the town that tolerates it, flanked bysandstone and Rocky Mountains, can imagine how crazy it drove him, with its skibums, potheads, and political activists.

The embodiment of frivolity in college was college girls, and thatwas before they even started to wear big sunglasses, which, just in case thephrase doesn't ring a bell, are defined by as, "A fadthat started in the early 2000s with certain female celebrities who got black eyes from their husbands/boyfriends, but needed to make public appearances anyway. They aren't cut , or appealing in any way. Their only purpose is covering one's bruises and/or making oneself look like an uppity bitch by purposely hiding ones expressions behind a bitch-trendy facade."

This was difficult psychologically, for Irving not only physically lustedafter four out of five girls he passed strolling down the network of campuspaths, lounging on the grass fields, or twirling their hair in the library,but he also olumped nine out of ten of them into a group he labeled“idiots”.

At the same time, upon his entrance in Boulder, he assumed his lifeof purpose was over, thought he might find a new one in the vast area ofactivity defined as “business”, but couldn’t really picture it. He secretly despaired, wondered if he wouldever raise above the fray of drinking, pot smoking, and club joining that surroundedhim. He wondered if he would ever escapethe squalor of his student apartment building with the overturned, muddy Big Wheelson the grass out front.

Before too long though, Irving discovered that the obscure branch ofcomputer-based transmission that had kept him so occupied in the army hadrelevance on campus, because people on campuses needed access toknowledge. He found himself not at thebusiness school so much as the computer department, helping the schooladministrators to dig the tunnels between departmental routers. By the time he received his undergraduatedegree in Economics seven years later, he was earning a steady salary as headof the emerging IT department, having built CU’s first Campus Wide InformationSystem, and he hadn’t really learned anything about economics.

Like college girls, frivolity was a moving target for Irving. At first, he looked on Boulder and itsinhabitants with loathing for every remnant of the social revolution—health food,peach and justice, drugs, concerts—but he grew in Boulder, came around to certainpoints of view. He got open minded andfigured out what mattered. By the end of college, the best way forsomeone to be, in Irving's mind, was toxin-free, road biking, and aware thatGeorge Bush was a neoconservative, capitalist pig.

His first real lesson in economics came when he started to teach aclass, the time and place of which were published in the Daily Camera Newspaper,to ignorant people about how they could do key word searches to pull long, unpronounceable,symbol-laden IP addresses out of Archie, V.E.R.O.N.I.C.A, and J.U.G.G.H.E.A.D.Or, in case you don’t know, “Archive without the v”, Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives, andJonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display. There he met Sheila,an ice-blond princess from the Jersey shore, and discovered that being shortwas not a problem to some blonds if you had the keys to knowledge, a house in Chautauqua,and a lean, fit body.

Sheila, to his constant chagrin, knew nothing about gluten orpolitics, and her idea of exercise was to put on a leotard and Jane Fonda videoand jump around on the small carpeted space in front of the bed.

Fourteen years later,Irving was revving it up a level, successfully fighting off age by devotingevery second of every minute of every hour that he was not fulfilling the deep,onerous duties bestowed on him by his prestigious, lucrative position asDirector of Information systems for the University of Colorado, to transformingevery ounce of fat in his body to hard, lean muscle.

This was very goodfor his heart, except that it left him no room for joy or for anyone else, likeSheila and his two children, Zach and Lindsay. He became increasingly defensive, increasingly convinced of his own chastity in a world fullof processed food choices and football watching couch potatoes.

Sixteen years later, things are not good: Sheila has the house andhe is stuck in an apartment. Happy timesare few and far between. He’s builtsomething of a reputation as a flamer, not in the homosexual sense, but rather,as "one who engages in online arguments involving unfounded personal attacks byone or more parties". This is both in hiscycling club and in the IT Department. Of course, he is in the right, for he built the cycling club forum andwhat is he supposed to do if people don’t understand the concept of drafting?He merely wants to help them be better riders. And, how can he possibly restrain his fury at people who would dare topropose a campus-wide shift to the tangled spool of thread known as H.T.T.P., orHyperText Transfer Protocol, with all ofits lose ends, just because you can upload pictures well as text on that protocol. What possible use is there fore pictures on the internet?

And worst of all, at forty eight years, he is being victimized,for possibly the very first time since his childhood, by sixteen year olds. On a Sunday, after returning from a trip toBeaver Creek with his girlfriend, he discovers that his daughter has hosted aparty in his apartment. Who knows whatkind of debauchery took place. She cleaned it all up, but he could still smell it,ever so faintly: the stench of cheapbeer and maybe even throw up. Thatwouldn’t be so bad, but what really killed him were the missing thechecks. 1300 through 1400 weremissing. He got his daughter to confess. She showed him a picture of the kid in heryear book. He was rail, wore a black hatwith a rim and had a disrespectful, clownish look on his face. Irving told Lindsay that he would contact thepolice on Monday.

That night, he andhis girlfriend are having a meal. There is a knock at the door. Irving has onlyone, two, maybe thirty seconds to take in the rakish frame, the long nose, andbaby skin of the boy he saw in the year book. "Hey, that's the kid," he thinks. The kid reaches into the pocket of his canvasjacket for something. It’s a gun, andthe kid is lifting it to point at Irving’s face. Irving is frozen. Then Irving is gone.

He does not survive to see that HTTP supplanted Gopher, to seethat a graphical interphase is exactly what the internet lacked. He misses out on the real shake, the WorldWide Web, which has turned into the fastest growing multi-dimensional, social,economic process in human history.

Bits and Pieces

2012-01-14T20:36:00.000-08:00

Joe was standing in the bathroom, amidst the bathroom objects bathed in the yellow light. He saw his wife's lotion bottle on the back of the toilet, thought about the strange contents--a perfumey smelling goo with unidentifiable sparkles in it that made her skin glisten bizarrely. He remembered bitterly how much that smell and that starry looking sheen used to turn him on.

Bengi explained in a nasally voice, "Yes. I compose the seniors photos on a background themed by their school colors. Then, you know, there's a caption underneath that explains a bit about each of them. You know, what college they plan on attending, perhaps what industry they'd like to go into."

Ginger had once been in love with a guy by the name of Brendan. He was young at heart and playful and their relationship was so spontaneous that it inspired her to delve back into an art that tortured her. At the same time, one of Brendan's old loves, Mell, who had annoyed the hell out of him in her tortured artist phase, began to reap all the benefits of the time spent making art in the seemingly never-ending spasms of fond remembrance and heartbreak that followed his and her breakup. Of course, Brendan had been drawn from Ginger back to Mell by the daily appearance of her image--glamorous, genuinely happy, bathed in the flattering glare of widespread admiration--on his facebook feed.

Once he decided, it took Santi only five minutes to find Twighlight Yearning's real name. It took him half an hour to find out her real address. Next would be figuring out how to get all the way across the country to Florida, to save her. Her face touched something a lot deeper in him than lust. He felt he knew her, and that she was lost for lack of knowing anyone like her, and that she merely needed to be rescued from her sordid industry by the manifestation of himself, a true kindred spirit.

Jeremy Freeze had a meaningless job in a cubicle that he felt was sucking his soul. He quit and became a mortgage broker but hated that as well. He felt like a failure and thought that if he just tried hard enough at something that he loved, he would succeed. This is The American Dream of sorts, and it should bear fruit, if the script is followed without abandon. As so many quit, that is the hardest part and the key. He decided that he would become a famous talk show host and began to broadcast a show from his bedroom. He got his wife and his friends involved, and the show seemed so much fun and such a success that he quit his job after the first one. Over the show's trajectory, it became first something of a local phenomenon, then slowly broke apart, like a football team being obliterated by the opposition. He kept it going for four years, despite the fact that he suffered routine panic attacks during the last two years, began to default on loan payments, and lost all of his crew and audience. At the end, he finally gave up; his wife, their two children, and he were forced to move to a cheaper area and give up their vacation condo in San Diego, and he now is living relatively happily, in a job that doesn't suck as much as the first one or as much as being mortgage broker.

Lila Burns was chatting with four other women as they walked through the synthetic marble foyer of the office building. She excused herself to use the ladies room. She finished, glimpsed at her reflection in the mirror, and looked down to wash her hands. When she looked up again, there was a man standing behind her. He leaped forward and clasped his hand around her mouth. She felt panic and twisted away, trying to find a scream. He held her firm and told her, "Don't scream!", his hot breath blowing into her ear as he spoke. "I'm not going to hurt you." These words terrified her, seeming an obvious prelude to some sort of torture. She writhed. He held firm. She heard him but didn't understand the words at first. They were muffled under the desperation whistling through her mind now. "I'm here to help you," he said. "Someone's trying to kill you." Then she understood. She stopped writhing and trying to scream but felt cold fear race through her. In the space of three minutes she had gone from Lila Burns washing her hands in the sink, to a frenzied small animal, losing ground fast to a jungle cat, to Lila Burns, the hunted. Her body trembled as she processed the meaning. Who? When? How?

Lost in Prague

2012-01-12T18:30:00.000-08:00

From time to time, Prague will come up in a conversation. This happened to me recently, and I was astounded that I spent six weeks there--long enough for the experience to become life--and I hardly remember anything.

I didn't even remember the name of the currency, the Koruna, or what it looked like. My most outstanding memories, I suppose, include dancing to an endless series of songs underlaid with the beat to Infinity by Guru Josh Project at Double Trouble, which, like other clubs in Prague, was a series of catacombs descending below the street level, where everyone would definitely die if there was ever a fire, a possibility that was heightened by the fact that one of the most popular shots--which I can't remember the name of now--was one that gets set on fire.

I told my friend who brought up Prague that, actually, it pretty much sucks. It's just this hollow tourist playground, where the locals get angry and yell at you if you don't know the Czech word for the kind of croissant you are ordering.

It's not hard to imagine why the locals might be a bit peeved. Over the last hundred years, the city has been subjected to brutality and humiliation by the Nazis, the Soviet Union, and now the Euro, capitalism, and tribes of drunken assholes on stag parties and educational exchange programs, who pack the Starbucks in the morning and pee in the streets at night. In fact, at the butt end of Wencesles Square, named for the country's patron saint, hangs a sculpted, upside-down, flogged horse with Wencesles astride his belly. The horse was created by David Cerny, a Czech artist, famous for his objectionable installments around Europe, one of which depicts Bulgaria as a toilet bowl with a man diving into it. Anyhow, the upside down horse installment is named Objekt, which means installment in Czech, but has a double meaning in English.

I remember getting lost, or rather, delayed, all the time, because the city grid was a concentric tangle of cobblestone lanes twisting together like intestines, so that I was routinely confounded by my tendency to think of locations as situated on a parallel grid. It was impossible to grasp, like trying to visualize string theory.

A perfect example of this city's confusingness happened on the first night we went to Double Trouble. That night, it was me and three guys. Someone had told us about the club and we went out with a vague goal of ending up there. We raced over cobble stones, straining our tendons, and laughing at our own drunken, ethnocentric epiphanies. For instance, we observed that the street names-Hellichova, Platnerska, Retezova, Pricope, Kotcich--all sounded like horrible skin conditions. We were lost and we stopped to ask a threesome--an Italian man and two attractive women--if they knew where Double Trouble was. "Look no farther!" the man said. "I've got double trouble right here." We then gave up and got in a cab driven by a Russian immigrant who said he knew where it was. He told us about hating Prague, spent about ten minutes driving us to the club, and charged us ten Euros. Later, of course, once we knew Prague a little bit better, we realized that the intersection where we had talked to the Italian man and his double trouble was just around the block from Double Trouble the Club.

Speaking of Russian immigrants, we met a few more later that night, at one of the ubiquitous sausage stands that tempts drunken tourists as they stagger down the elongated Wencesles Square (or, in Czech, Voklavske Namesti--another skin abnormality). We stopped to get our end-of-the-night sausages at a stand managed by some Russian women, and, when one of my friends, who happened to be gay, stepped up to order his, the Russian women used their limited English to make what I assume was a vane sales pitch for their side business, by giggling and babbling, "Spicy spicy? kissy kissy?....sausage..good times... schnapps...hotel...you like?" We thought this was hilarious, and, as you can see, repeated it so many times that, despite remembering little about Prague, I have it memorized.

Us four were not the only ones to get lost, though. Our classes were located in an unimpressive convention center/hotel with Steven King-esque hallways, located in a small, forgotten town that was an hour ride on the train from Prague. About half the class had made the unfortunate decision to board there. One group of students boarded the last train out of Prague at 12:30 am, got off late or got on the wrong train or something, found themselves stranded on an a platform in the middle of nowhere, and had to cross cornfields and country roads to get back to their dorm rooms.

I remember other unbelievable stories. There was a popular bar called the Golden Dragon. Someone told me that they saw Cuba Gooding Junior at this bar, and that he looked strung out and was talking about how he liked to pee on women. From then on, the Golden Dragon became known as the Golden Shower. Am I getting that right? Memory does not serve.

Of course, I didn't really think Prague sucked. Among the Chinese who have ended up in Prague for unimaginable reasons, a few have opened restaurants with dumplings that make your heart explode. And the structures, though they are literally swarming with tourists, are both profound and amusing because of how cartoonishly dark they are. For example, Charles Bridge is ornamented with stone sculptures of people suffering in dungeons, and that is no product of a set director's whimsy. That is real. I enjoyed the utter beauty of the city, especially from afar, as I and two friends routinely took runs along the Charles River. And getting lost one morning, after rising at the crack of dawn from a friend's couch, wandering through cobblestone and wicked sculptures, I felt like a kid who had Disneyland to herself, because all of the ticket holders were sleeping off their hangovers.

Funny Poem

2012-01-11T07:14:00.001-08:00

"The Unknown Citizen," by W.H. Auden

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Readings

2012-01-10T18:51:00.000-08:00

I know of only one other person at my office who seems as unable to figure out what to do with herself as I am. That is Kristina, the receptionist. Kristina always looks fresh and smiley on Monday morning and then throughout the week, she wilts, from boredom I assume, and, as you walk behind her to go to the bathroom, you see that she is looking at pictures on Facebook. She doesn't minimize her screen or anything but just turns around to see if who ever is walking by might want to chat. And then if you stop and talk, she thanks you for the chat.

Like Kristina, I've lately been surfing and finding random things out all day. For example, did you know that yoga can paralyze you and is actually harmful for the majority of people who do it because they are not fit enough and do the positions wrong? Hahahahahaha...Everything becomes unhealthy when it is McDonaldized.

Moreover, its not like the Broncos v Steelers game was a miracle. There is a simple reason the Broncos were able to beat the Steelers, and that's because the Steelers defense stacked up against the run, leaving only a safety to protect against the pass. And pass Tebow did. He only completed 10 of 21, but threw some golden nuggets and the Steelers never adjusted their strategy. The lesson here: pull the trigger. Pull it again and again. You may fuck up, but you'll never produce that perfect 30-yard spiral that slides into Eddie Royal's hands like a champagne glass on a silver tray if you don't pass the ball.

And poor White House Chief of Staff William Daley decided to give up and go home to Chicago, because he was hired to help reach across the isle but the president has since decided to challenge congress and as a result, everyone at the White House has started hanging out without William. Ouch. That hurts, man. I understand. I don't feel that sorry for him, though. At least he has a home to go back to.

But Michelle. Have you heard about Michelle? She feels as if the white house's rudder isn't set right. Her husband has 33 staff members with whom he meets on a daily basis and she has to figure out how to wield her influence. Funny that I came across this article just after listening to Chris Rock live from Johannesburg in 2008 say, "a black woman cannot play the background of a relationship. Just imagine telling your black wife that you're president? 'Honey, I did it! I won! I'm the president.' 'No!' she would say, 'we the president!"

And, "Is You're Personality Making You Fatter?" I won't even comment on that one. But, I did experience a moment of amusement whilst scrolling--slyly, albeit--through a photo article on How Pharmaceutical Companies are employing a softer sales strategy. Like, who could care less. But, one of the beautiful pictures in the "article" displayed a shelf with samples of Cialis, Lunesta, and Saphris. The Cialis and Lunesta cracked me up--"This makes you sleep!", "This helps you get an erection!"--so I just had to look up the other one. Saphris. Turns out it for schizophrenic people, specifically for people who experience strong or inappropriate emotions. "It helps you be normal!"

A Man's View

2012-01-08T20:47:00.002-08:00

Strangely and randomly lately I've been more culturally exposed to a man's view of the world. This is due to four things which I will summarize here:

1. Tom, my boss, told me that if I want to understand men, I just have to think 3 things: money, sex, power. (I think those were them. Really, I can't quite remember.)

2. My ladies book club chose The Rum Diaries as our first book under the understandable assumption that it would be a fun read. Ironically, this book turns out to be a painstaking personal account of a life episode from the viewpoint of the type of man to whom us ladies are (by mysterious reckless forces of nature)attracted.to

3. I just spent some time listening to the Joe Rogan show. With no background on the show, I can only say that it was a shameless session of ego stroking by three men who have their egos affirmed by their salaries, their fame, and the women they screw. Money, sex, power. Wait? Was that it?

4. Then there was Chris Rock. And there's just too much to report there. What a genius. I love it when a comedian can actually teach you something.

So, now that I've learned all this stuff, I have one shamelessly philosophical question: If, as Joe Rogan and Chris Rock seemed to agree, men suffer from "Bust a Nut syndrome", which basically means that they often are like passengers in the back of a bus, driven by their kamikaze dicks (...just using the common parlance), then what is the metaphor for women?

The disappearing town

2011-12-28T17:29:00.000-08:00

A young couple arrives in a quaint, well-preserved old Colorado mining town to ice climb at the town's world class ice park.
After the long drive, Emma flops herself on the bed and reads an excerpt from the brochure on the Town ice festival . It is about Glitter Girl, who from what Emma reads is an ex-alcoholic and a legendary, elite ice climber who wears a leopard-print suit on the ice and claims her favorite color is clear with sparkles. How can people get so intense?, she wonders.
This is a weird but beautiful town, situated in the crevice between two long legs of mountains. Some people are afraid to visit it, because, once every so often, it disappears completely and all of the people that are there at the time disappear completely too. Just like the people who were in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Gone. The town only disappears like once every 100 years or so. In fact, the disappearing has become so seldom that people began to sort of doubt that it ever happened at all. Except, that it had happened kind of recently, in 2002, as reported on 9 news.
It was a chance, along with the chance you take that a huge chunk of ice will fall on your head when you're ice climbing, that the couple was willing to take. Because ice climbing was so fun. And it's not like they were so attached to the present world anyway. They were just two insignificant people with two insignificant jobs. Who really cared if they got whisked away to some parallel universe anyway?
Some other people would never visit this town because its main attraction is an ice park that some ice climbing-obsessed rich people with plumbing knowledge started making in the 1990s. Aside from its obvious detraction, the possibility of a huge column of ice falling on your head, ice climbing also requires a lot of expensive equipment. And a lot of people already spend their equipment allowance on their pet horses or a ski pass to resorts where this year it wasn't snowing or on their cigar collections or their motorcycles.
David and Emma already have horses and ski passes and a lot of other toys they spent money on, so they haven't had enough money to buy their own ice axes. So, they borrow ice axes from another other couple. There doesn't seem to be any real problem in that.
However, what they didn't think about is the possibility that they would lose the borrowed ice axes. And that's unfortunately exactly what happened. Maybe. All they know is that they go to ice climb on the first day of their trip and they don't have the axes. Did they leave them at a pizza joint? Are they back where they started? Sitting on the counter at home? Did they get stolen? The ramifications are terrible. This, David and Emma realize, is why you don't borrow stuff from other people. The suckiness of it makes them angry, enraged and needing to lash out at someone.
Fortunately, they whip out the shiny plastic and rent some gleaming new tools and lash out at the ice instead of at each other. The rented axes are black chrome beauties forged in the fires of Basalt by the best ice ax blacksmiths in all the land. What can you do when you make such a mistake? Crawl into a hole? Find a front stoop and sit forlorn on it. It's hard to tell when you should punish yourself like that. Cut yourself off. The time never seems to be now.

Later they are out to dinner at a pub, sitting on some swings that are at the bar, and get into a conversation with a grey-haired man who is also ice climbing with his wife. They remember seeing this man when they were drinking beers in the hotel hot tub, which is situated next to the parking lot. He came and got in his white Prius. The Prius deftly swung out of one parking space and into the one next to it. The man got out and went back inside. David and Emma pondered why someone would have done that. David said something about how that guy was the type who decides to save money by getting the gas efficient car. "Priuses are more expensive than normal cars, David," said Emma. "Really?," he said. They laughed at how David didn't know that.
From his accent, the man at the bar might be from Germany. The topic of the conversation goes from ice climbing to passionate pursuits. The guy lectures them about how he and his wife, Isabelle, have always maintained ardent passions for different activities and how that's the key to life. In fact his wife's absence can be attributed to such a passion. For Legos. She is actually one of those official Lego experts, who gets free Legos, just so that she can supply Lego with ideas. The interesting thing is that she dreams up Lego sets for girls. So her creations are windmills with butterfly wings, flowers, curved bridges, gardens with trellises and tree swings, and anything else a girl might want to have rendered in legos.
The man, who predictably is named Hanz, is founder of Packsmart, an environmental packaging company. This type of thing always seemed stupid to David. Why make a more environmentally sound way to create waist. Why not just not create it?
The man asks them about themselves. Emma tries to explain that each of them dabbles in a lot of different things, mentioning that she is a pretty good horn player but doesn’t work it at it that much. The man sort of frowns and seems to disapprove.
David feels impatient with Emma for buying into a pompous old windbag like this and for acting like she needs to justify the way they are. “Ima go have a smoke, babe.” He says, gets up, kisses her, and heads out the door.
“So, you’re not worried about the town disappearing while we’re here?” she asks the man.
The man frowns fully and shakes his head vigorously now. “It is a terrible thing, that. I’ve spent a lot of time here, possible since before you two were born. I remember the last one. That was so sad. So difficult for a place like this, you know, to just lose people like that.”
Emma told the man she hadn’t thought of it that way before, from the perspective of the town itself. She just selfishly thought about the consequences for herself.
“Oh yeeah,” he said, “ You cante eemageen the difference after of this town now from the town that was there before 2002. It’s the people that make eet special, you know. Espeecially those that stay, becoosss they are so in luff with vut they do in there. Not the same as these tourists, you know. These people who stick around for a week or maybe even a few years and then go and never think about it again.”
“How was it before 2002?”, asked Emma. “What was so different?”
“Oh it’s just the people, you know. Each pearsone make their life and make eet what it ees. Eetz not that the peoplem now are bad, eetz just I guess I’m living in the pass. But chu know, like for example, how do you theenk they have this ice park here? Thees is made by wery wery special mayng and he is the only wonn who can keep it. To getting all the moonney and things. Thees is not free and it take very special pearsone to find all the people who want to put their money een eet.” The man’s accent has grown markedly thicker. “It’s a miracle that it come together again after he and so many disappear. Eets eencredible. But who knows? The next time it disappears? What if it takes all those who truly love it weeth it?”
David appears again. Sits down in his bar swing.
“Well,” the man says. He stifles a burp. And his torso pendulums slightly. “Back to Isabelle!” He gets up, pats David on the shoulder. "You keep an eye on that one" he says and winks. “She’s a good set of tools. And you wouldn’t want to misplace your tools would you?”
As the man leaves, Emma wrinkles her eye brows and catches David's eye. “What a weirdo,” says David.
On at the hotel room, Emma looks up the packsmart website. It has a picture of a lake and peaks jutting out in the distance behind it to demonstrate that it is a company invested in saving natural beauty. She recognizes the picture as Maroon Bells. That a Swiss company uses a picture of Maroon Bells seems to her a symbol of how little natural beauty there is left in the world. She mentions to her David how weird it was that the man mentioned ice axes. He agrees, "Yeah...that was weird, hah?" She presses him on it, but he doesn't really agree that it was all that weird. "I mean, that's a pretty normal thing for someone to say, Emm." They go on with their trip.

My Trip...part of it, anyway

2011-10-05T19:44:00.000-07:00

Day 1: The alarm goes off @ 6:30 am. As we have made a night-before decision to actually backpack...(to do the GRAND LOOP, the whole SHEbang), Duncan felt compelled to get rolling early. As an aside, I'd like to propose that perhaps we were propelled (a lot of Ps in this sentence, I know) by that night's shopping trip to REI into this decision--ever the consumers--or, perhaps by the fear of dithering and frittering our precious week of vacay away. But I digress, tempted to trace everything backwards, to the sources, which are infinite and worth going into but nevertheless not within the scope of this mini-notebook, the cuteness of which asailed me, as we approached the cash register @ McGuckin's Hardware to tally up the financial damage of treasures already cradled in our arms.

PART II
Flash forward.

PART III
Flash forward again. The grandfatherly ranger in one of the booths at the Estes Park Backcountry permit station informs us that the GRAND LOOP is practically insurmountable and that we will be bound and commited by whatever succession of campgrounds we reserve. "Fuck this," becomes the name of our trip. The ranger becomes a tubby "gomer" (a term borrowed from others cooler than I), and Estes a symbol of FASCISM. Yes, Fascism. "Fuck this," we say and are on our way for 350 more miles to Maroon Bells wilderness to 4 Pass Loop. Two many hours later, we have snagged the best camp spot along one of the roads that follows a creek up a dusty canyon away from the Roaring Fork, which sometimes roars and sometimes whispers down from Mt Sopras, past the preposterously tiny towns of Marble and Red Stone. The premium quality of the spot, which lies on the other side of the creek, at the bend where it is traversed by a dilapidated bridge, is evidenced by the still smoldering fire and half-melted beer cans. The only things to do:
1. pry chunks of concrete from the ledge of the road off so that they crash into the creek bed or
2. make your way up or down stream by hopping from rock to rock. Note: I do not feel bad about this--the prying concrete off from the ledge--because slabs of concrete sprouting rebar are already mixed in with the rocks and foliage here.

Day 5:
We charged four passes, doing 26 miles and all the passes in 50 something hours, and it was gloriously beautiful, but agonizing to the shoulders, hips and hamstrings. Hard to enjoy the ups and hard to enjoy the campsites when more setting up and breaking down and hiking is always left to do. And not at all difficult to hate the rain that sabotaged us one day. But, still...there is no other way to take in such magnificent vistas: that is, by being a part of them, in all their disconcerting disregard for us, and by earning them. Also, I was enthralled and continue to be enthralled by my companion, and I cherish all of our adventures together.

Hypnotizing Teacher

2011-07-27T20:41:00.000-07:00

The managerial accounting professor wove his presentation re the ISO 9000 simulation standing in the foyer afforded by a U-shaped arrangement of tables, at which the students sat clicking listlessly at websites or staring down at their phones to engage their brains through long minutes it took the professor to get the words of each sentence out of his mouth. The professor occasionally appealed the class for a chuckle, by saying something cute and then pausing, with a rye smirk on his face and his hands open like a preacher's. As he placed special emphasis on the importance of monitoring inputs--in other words, making sure that suppliers don't ply you with expensive, unneeded raw materials, the blue computer monitor projected on the pull down screen behind him began to blink on and off. He went on as if he didn't notice and the students were to polite to interrupt his intricately, meticulously preplanned lecture, but he began to say "kill your father" at regularly spaced intervals of approximately five seconds. Each of the students in the class that day, like Oedipus, bound by fate, killed their fathers.

Espanglish

2011-03-31T21:37:00.000-07:00

Ju no have ju phone? I no know. Maybe ju juss no jusing eet rye now o somezing. Juss in case ju no have eet I write my txt message that i send ju before ina email. Aaakay?!! It say: I sorry but I no come dis afternoon and then it also say me caes bien and also ask if ju have a good days? Aaakay?! Aakay. Byebyyye

2011-03-02T22:10:00.000-08:00

Life goes on for those who live it in the present. Nostalgia, cheap or otherwise, is always costly--Suze Rotolo

Just read an article

2011-01-19T21:50:00.000-08:00

It was a good article. Like a good comedian, it felt like an extension of my own thoughts. It felt like I wrote it. That's my theory of good comedians. They don't come up with the best ideas. They just recognize the best ideas that we all have. And that's why we love them so much, because they talk about what we've been thinking about. And can't say. How things don't work. How hard it is just to fucking breathe.

I keep having to remind myself to breathe lately. I'll be wiping off the counter or getting my things ready to leave the house, and I'll realize that I'm not breathing. Breathe, damn it.

So, this blog will hopefully turn out to be like that comedian or that article.

'Cept I've got nothin' right now: I have not wandered into any environments that are so otherworldly and rich in diverse characters as the nail salon was earlier this month. That's a lie.

I have. I have four accounting professors and numerous classmates, my observations of whom could fill a shelf. I've taken trips to the grocery store and, in fact, had an ethereal night of dancing, and another day of great snow. But my brain is crowded with contemplations. I'm thinking about mental commitment. Not living always like a tourist. And also what it takes to get to the next level. I'm wondering if a Masters of Accounting is the right thing to do. The work makes my brain happy but not ecstatic, like I imagine art could. I'm wondering how I can make more satisfying connections when it seems like everyone including me is tunnel-visioned onto their own track. I'm observing my relationship, how it has evolved into something entirely unlike its original self, how it makes me feel like a stowaway on a ship. Always fretting. Trying to make it through with something. What was it? Things have changed so much that I'm not sure.

Boulder Shine

2011-01-10T20:36:00.000-08:00

Today, I went on a hike with my friend Heidi in the new snow that fell last night . The sun shone brightly, making the hillside sparkle like the skin of Snow White, that is, if Snow White were to do it up and slather on some glittery lotion for the club. I fretted about love, a constant refrain, and we kept up the small talk and appreciated the blue sky together. These things--chatting and hiking with a girlfriend--fall about a thousand miles short of full realization of my incessant longing. I'm not sure what that longing is. From what I can tell, it is some maniacal being within, like Gollum or Stewie Griffin from the Family Guy. It does nothing but yearn for impossible things: everlasting youth, inextinguishable grace, the power to vanquish men. To be Audrey Hepburn and Jill Scott and a thousand other attractive qualities of a thousand other attractive men and woman all rolled into one, to live in a state of sustained ecstasy, like Biggie Smalls skimming across glittery blue on a private yacht, laying down velvety lines, like "Call Me Big Pappa". And to do it NOW. This creature within is certainly enough to drive one to drink many cocktails and taste of many tinctures.

I find it's good to simply appreciate the little things sometimes, though. So we hike and chat. During this particular chat, Heidi realized that she had never told me about Boulder Shine, a women's "support group," the goal of which is to help its members learn to "shine". The group's meetings are facilitated by a mother-daughter duo. Each member is required to bring not only ten dollars but also a home-cooked meal. The agenda is basically that each attendee shares how she shined or failed to shine or tried to shine since the last meeting. Heidi had been to two. The first one lasted three hours. The second five. Some of the women, she said, simply went on and on and the facilitators did nothing to manage the time. It seems to me all part of the same thing: the inevitable thwarting of that ridiculous, obstreperous longing we have inside. Don't know what it does to men but it drives some women to support groups. The length and the droning on of some of the group's members had driven Heidi to such an agonizing state of boredom that she felt prompted to write one of the facilitators and ask if it would be possible to simply duck out early at the next meeting. The response was not encouraging. So, she concluded. That was it. The end of Shine and her.

Nuking Nar Nar--Part Deux

2011-01-10T19:21:00.000-08:00

One of the things that stoner on the chairlift told me was that his two kids are teenagers and that means that they are just all about changing their outfits. I considered the man, his simple reverence for the nar, and conjured up the vague forms of his teenaged children, spending their time playing a sort of high-stakes dress-up game. They took the foreground amidst the backdrop of marijuana-induced self-observation and abject fear at the specter of my life that happened to be swirling in my head, as the snow showered down and down. My spoiled upbringing. My parents, far different role models and much much more substantial providers than this man. It seemed plausible. My immediate takeaway was that society molds us into materialists and is busy molding each generation into a greater, faster frenzy of materialism. Deep thought. Expansive reaction to one innocent comment by a stranger. Damn society. Only society is us, goodhearted people just riding the chairlift while our kids do backflips in the powdery backcountry. Society is this guy's wife, working to help her kids get as close to their dreams-bordering-on-delusions-of-grandeur as they can. Even when their dreams require incessant fashion updates, multiple snowboard jackets between October and April. The stoner went on and said, whereas, for me and him, it might seem normal to wear the same jacket throughout a season, that was, like, crazy for them. I bet it is, I thought.

Nuking Nar Nar

2011-01-09T19:12:00.000-08:00

Damn it. It's 1/9. Last time I posted was the first. I'm one day late to fulfill my New Year's resolution. Well, I thought about posting earlier this week. I thought about describing my experiences at the nail salon in the nearby mini-mall. I felt like it would be worthwhile to write about how:

1. They talked me into polishing my toe nails with their newest acquisition, sparkly blackish;

2. I taught my Vietnamese leg waxer to say "turn over" (haha I know. That sounds bad...) and, despite her utter lack of English, she managed to tell me that she and her crew went to Black Hawk to gamble for Christmas;

3. An ancient couple hobbled in for a pedicure. They spoke to each other rarely and mostly in grumbly mutters;

4. A seemingly retarded lady who needed a walker to get around annoyed her manicurist by commentating on her trip to the sink to wash her hands;

5. I ran into the same youngish couple who had sat next to me the last time I got a pedicure. The guy was apish, endearing. The girl was chatty. She had fake nails and I remember her deliberating over what designs to get them bedazzled with last month.

So, there, I did it. I think I thought it was worthwhile, because I simply marvel at how others live their lives. How gambling on Christmas is the norm for someone, how a girl could suck a large man into her beauty routine, how it is to be old. I 'spose someone couldn't be with a high maintenance, Lee Press-On woman without getting into it a little.

Today, some days after the nail salon, was a snowmageddon. So Duncan and I went to Eldora and caught first (well, maybe 10th) chair. We spent the day incorporating the word nar into our sentences. Duncan took a break to get some food for a while, and I did laps on the narrific backside of the mountain. I thought it might be worthwhile to describe one of my chairlift partners, a forty-something man, whose eyes seemed puffed from decades of pot smoking. We were on the same wavelength of simple, Golden-retriever-like appreciation of the nar, and the first thing he said to me was how good it was that he had been at Eldora last night...so that he could see what the lay of the wind-swept crust was like underneath the powder. "Wow, sounds like you really have a leg up on the rest of us," I said. I simply marvel at how some people live their lives.

One one: one one/ one/one/one one

2011-01-01T22:05:00.000-08:00

I'm holding my breath and typing, "This must be a moment of great import!" Time to make a wish? Oops...I was too busy with the finger acrobatics required to get the punctuation right and the moment passed! Gone forever! Waisted! That specific moment of utter numerical coincidence will only occur once every millenium and the last time something remotely like it occurred was a whole three months ago: ten minutes after ten in October, about two weeks before Halloween. Right? ten ten on the tenth of ten in ten. But that time there were not nearly so many tens as there are ones today!....and I waisted it.

Well, I suppose it was a good moment to re-announce the grand re-opening of my re-commitment to writing in dis blog. I hereby pronounce my resolution of our new year of 2011 A.D. to pound several sentences into this virtual slate on a daily no wait weekly basis from now on or at least until 2012.

The key will be keeping it short by focusing on small things. Small things such as this, perhaps: I brought in the New Year by going to Crystal Castles at the Boulder Theater. Period.

Waz up Saturday?!!!

2010-04-11T14:10:00.001-07:00

….unfort, ridiculous sentence construction is not uncommon in graduate school. In fact, I may engage in some similar behavior below:

Uuuugh, I'm dragging like a wildebeest today. I guess wildebeests are not known for their dragging. But Diet Coke! Aaarrrgh, bane of my current state! Black blood of the earth!...(no wait. That's oil.) Toxic serum. Nectar of the devils....stupid stuff kept me bobbing on the surface of sleep all night last night, whilst some douche-yard gunned the engine of a vile, unnamed machine, which, judging by the earth-rumbling yawn of its motor, must have been constructed in the 1870s. What the hell were they doing out there? I imagine some ragtag troop of rangers, decked out in eclectic garb from multiple eras, pointing a long vacuum hose at things. I don't know. It was probably just a street cleaner. Meat grinder. Gas station incinerator. Why must such things be?! Down with the machines.

Oh well. Having my brain nailed to the ceiling by Diet Coke and the machine blaring in the night gave me time to review the Drudge report, which I found to be fascinating. I got to learn such things as how Obama broke years of tradition by sneaking out of the white house without his press core....troop...media...whatever they call them. Apparently, he was headed to his daughter's soccer game.

Also, there was a horrifying story of how an American woman sent her recently adopted Russian child back to Moscow with a note, "Dear Russian so-and-so, I no longer want to parent this child." Shit you not. According to her, the child had psychopathic and violent tendencies that made her fear for her life and the lives of her plants, neighbors, parents. I must say I sort of believe the woman, and it strikes me how exaggeratedly stereotypical this is for a Russian. The kid will probably be adopted personally by Putin and installed as the next ruthless leader.

Incidentally, his name was Artem Saveliev, a fact which, when taken along with other names I have recently come across—Iliopoulou, a suggested facebook friend; Spinoloricus Cinzia, the formal name given to a new species recently discovered on the ocean floor off the coast of Crete, remarkable in that it does not need oxygen to live; Rugiloricus and Pliciloricus, the temporary names given to two other recently discovered species who are also indifferent to oxygen; and Azlac, the name of an unwitting laboratory aid who was pulled on stage by his scientist boss in order to bodily demonstrate the life span of the universe during some geek convention one of my friends posted on facebook—makes me feel as though the cosmos have randomly intervened to make me the beneficiary of a stockpile of unusual names. This, especially considering that Spinoloricus Cinzia, a hideous bug, was actually named after a human, the discoverer’s wife.

At any rate, I think I'm liking "Diet Coke!!" as an expletive.

Dear Mao, What a Friday...

2010-04-09T15:50:00.001-07:00

Hi Mao Tse Tung,
Thought I’d get this new category off to a start with a letter, since it’s been quite a while since I’ve written to you. Don’t know what to write about. I ‘spose I’ll just ramble on about the minutia of the present moment. I’m in Michael Moffet’s class. Each and every one of us is appalled at having to attend it. “Class on Friday?!,” we’ve been collectively exclaiming. Bull shit. Barndt. Not once. Not twice. Not ever. Apparently Moffett is able to justify this human rights abuse on the premise that he was in Singapore last week and so we didn’t have his class at the ordinary scheduled hour. Really, I don’t fully understand the argument. It was rather too convoluted and complicated to follow really.

Anyway, class started out with Nancy’s Fans (our Forad competitors) sitting in the same row togeths (that’s a hip abbreviation). “A model of solidarity, Nancy’s Fans,” I think. “And where did it get them? Ha! 3rd place. Pathetic.” Not really. I wasn’t actually thinking that, but there’s this unwritten code of conduct that we’re supposed to play up the team rivalry and taunt each other, so I suppose I should have been thinking that. Meanwhile, Moffett was complaining about how he feels like his new hobby is watching us eat, because class is at one o’clock and so everybody brings lunch. Then, he asked where Juicy was (my team)…I made a raising the roof motion. I was the only one representin’, it seems. A guy named Reed walked in. Moffett greeted him characteristically with a gruff, disdainful, “Hi Reed…The hat’s a nice touch.” I guess Reed had the gall to wear a backwards hat to class.

“Well, it’s either that or hat hair,” Reed muttered.

Now Moffet’s down there in the pit of the lecture hall, in the midst of what seems to be a deeply engaging case debrief on P.T. Semen Gresik, which I am just now beginning to regret not having read. For one thing, despite the fact that it’s about the privatization of Cemex, which makes it sound more boring than watching paint dry, this Moffett guy really does seem to be saying something interesting. There’s a quote up on the screen about cement giants and not wanting to give up the family jewels. This gives Moffett fodder for an aside, his preferred mode of discussion.

Moffet’s aside: Apparently, the land surrounding Thunderbird was up for sale back during the real estate boom, and they had a buyer who was willing to give them $24,000,000. By the time the city got through with issuing all the permits for the sale, the economic crisis had hit and the land was reappraised for $12,000,000...Tundaburd decided not to sell it, because it was like the family jewels, i.e. you can only sell it once. Bummer.

I fully plan on reading this case after class, despite the utter dearth of time I have to get anything done. I’m scared, Nestor Kirchner (for some reason I’ve decided to stick with an array of socialist political leaders in naming you). Moffett likes to call people out and ream them publicly. The reaming I would get would certainly be legendary if he somehow discovered how little of an idea I have of what he’s talking about.

I was going to tell you about how I got a ride to class from Dan, who’s currently sitting next to me. How we had this conversation I’ve had a thousand times before. “You drivin’ to campus?” “Yeah. I feel like such a slob doing this.” “Todes. Right?” “I know. I wouldn’t leave so late if I didn’t have a car.” “Sames. It’s just so tempting.” Incidentally, I was running super late because I stopped at the Commons after my conference call with Vacmasters, I mean Barone, to have one of the Friday omelets served with tater tots. I decided to include this information, because, if, in fact, you would deign to eat such a thing as an omelet, we should todes have one when you come. They are amazing.

Anyways, I realized that my neighbor Dan is wearing a backwards cap too. Why did Reed have to be ostracized for his backwards cap?...

...wow, now Moffett just said, “…race riots, burning, genocide…” I really wish I had read this case…aaah, now he’s saying something about how George Soros is like an elephant in a row boat. Of course the discussion is fascinating when I decide to tune out. Oh well, no regrets. Man, I am remembering what it was like to be a kid now, when grownups seemed to always be talking about extremely fascinating things that were far too complicated to understand. Seems I now have the brain of a child. ‘Member when we first started hanging out in November, Mao? and I was always complaining about my brain?….yeah, getting back to that totally scrambled state…

Anywho, I think this Reed guy was ostracized for his backwards hat because Moffett set a precedent for reaming him last class. “Reed!!!!,” he screamed, suddenly, and without warning, in the middle of his last lecture, causing Reed to leap a few thousand feet. “Could you just write something down? I mean could you just pretend?!!!” In response, Reed parodied sliding the notebook of the guy next to him over to the blank space in front of him, an action which elicited little mirth from Moffett. So, Reed then began to dig around in his bag for a notebook, while Moffett grumbled about how after 30 years of teaching you’d think something you said had some value.

Yikes, it is really nerve racking sitting here with no fucking clue, President Eisenhower, I mean Mao, Mao mio. Moffett keeps posing questions and then cold calling people.

“Piers!!! At least nod your head while I’m talking. Jeezz!!,” he just said.

…oh, man, now he’s talking about how Japanese tourists spend $475/day somewhere…F-ing hell. Why do I stay tuned while Kimball explains T-bond futures pricing and then zone out for this?!!! Oh horrible fate, why do you hate me??!!....

Find some other characteristic Moffett admonishments below:

In response to a timid answer by my neighbor, “Okaaaayyyyy Dan….can you add a subject, verb, adjectives to that answer?!”

“...C’mon, Brent, at least tell me something. Make up an answer!....”

“Thanks for playing, Tracy, but no. Tony?”

I think I made it through the class without being publicly ostracized though. I think Moffett realized I was doing something else, and decided not to expose me to public ridicule. What a softy. Anywho, if he had cold called me, I would have told on Patrick Buckley, who is currently watching The Masters on his Iphone. Awesome. I have a lot of respect for that.

Well, I just missed out on possibly the best lecture of the module, of the semester, of my Thunderbird career, hell, probably of the century. But I’m content…

….wait! what’s this? I guess Cemex spent lavishly, and had an 18-hole golf course on its property for management employees back in the day…

But I am content! I am content to have missed out on this lecture, William, I mean historical figure, because I want to I'm writing to you.

Yours Truly,
Amilia Earhart

P.S. I hope this made some sense. You might have to read it twice. It was pretty rushed. And it came out pretty jumbled, like my current brain.

Back on the wagon

2010-02-15T00:57:00.000-08:00

Well, it's 2 o'clock in the morn on Sunday, February 15th and probably as good a time as any to pick up the fallen threads of this blog once again. Not sure why I'm writin as if I were a cowboy sittin round a campfire but it seems the best voice in which to express my trepidation over this very blog (it's been buggin me that I haven't written in it seeing as how I set forth for myself the goal of writin in it on a reguller basis, but the problem is and has been that I can't find any time to write in it nor can I magine what in tarnation to write about since the whole point of a blog is to have people read it and those same people that would do the readin is the same ones that would get written bout in it)....so, I don't know how exactly to proceed but with a real short story like this'n: Today, I got myself a shower curtain and some Extra Virgin Olive Oil at Target. Then I came home and, in the process of puttin the groceries away, came across some chicken that I thought would be better off in the dumpster outside. I put it in a plastic bag and tied it to another'n that came from the trash can in the bathroom. In the process, I decided I would have myself a walk to the library upon which I'd pass by the dumpster in the parking lot. I did just that, slung the bag up and over my shoulder so that it would make a pretty arc on the way in, and felt a little surprised at the clank I heard when it hit the bottom of the dumpster. "Hmmmmm," I thought. Later, after I came back from the library and cooked myself some tofu and kale (not very cowboy like, I must admit), I went into my room with the intention of putting my new shower curtain up, but, in the process I was interrupted by the realization that the rotten chicken was still sitting in that plastic bag on my desk. I thought I could have sworn that I had thrown it in the dumpster. Well, so much for the shower curtain affixing portion of my evening.

Wall Street--A Written Impersonation

2010-01-19T08:53:00.000-08:00

Monday—The Same Old Normal
The first person we spoke with was Darcy, a wealth manager for high net worth individuals: heirs, retirees, particularly early ones. Basically the Paris Hiltons of the world. $1bn is the average net worth of each family. She said what she likes best is “determining the best way to allocate the asset bucket,” but it was apparent that what she really liked was what she called training, or, as it seemed, helping super rich young people understand how many houses they can really afford without having to go back to work. Her firm has a multi-generational approach but many of her clients are women. I asked her if she ever had any problems with getting her clients to manage their money prudently. She mentioned a recent client, a former Google employee, who had cashed out on her shares.
The woman, who was in her fifties, decided to get married. She insisted that a prenup was unnecessary, but shortly after the marriage, her new husband quit work and became a pain in the butt. The couple began to buy houses, and Darcy had trouble trying to convince her that she was working with a finite sum of money.
Next we spoke to a professed eccentric, a failed PhD in philosophy, who heads a prominent brokerage company that advises institutional investors. While the rest of us have to portray our forays into the liberal arts or, god forbid, the fine arts as sidebars to our lifelong missions of becoming financial advisors and investment bankers (or, better, avoid them altogether), this guy somehow walked away from a PhD in philosophy at NYU and became the head of a prominent institutional investment advisory company. I could see why though. He spun pure verbal gold, a long string of witty statements with shock value.
He started with: “The world hasn’t ended, so it’s a good time to get into capital markets.” That was the basic idea of his presentation, The Same Old Normal, which was a refutation of a well-publicized report by PIMPCO called The New Normal. The New Normal is the name the organization gave to a dismal outlook for the next decade or so—the prediction that the US and the west will not return to the high growth of the last 8 years or the 90s. The prediction is based on the view that the global financial system has reached a dead end, because of over leverage. Stagflation—high unemployment and inflation—will be the status quo, the government will have a heavy hand, and finance won’t be such hot territory anymore.
The PhD argued this prediction was wrong. His argument was basically that the financial crisis was a panic which transferred to the industrial sector through the credit crisis. This led to massive layoffs and under-production. “The best way to look at the historical charts is to cover up the crisis,” he said. “The crisis is false data… We’re going to have an inventory recovery, because we’re going to run out of stuff. ”
The PhD was replaced by a dinosaur from McDonald’s corporation. He had been the international treasurer for 150 years or so. It was actually fascinating to hear what he said, because I wasn’t really sure what corporate finance actually involves. At a career fair, I’d been asked, “…So, do you want to work in treasury?”…and my answer was basically, “Ummm…I guess. What’s treasury?”
So, he explained the main responsibilities of a treasurer and they seemed to add up to what would be a fascinating, engaging position: basically working with a ton of different foreign banks to see that franchises get the loans they need. And cost optimization via what they call, “peeling the onion,” or looking at the grocery bill, determining all of its components, and hedging everything.
The only problem is that, as far as I see it, the job happens to perpetuate a number of problems with today’s society, including: the obesity epidemic; deforestation for purposes of cattle grazing; the eradication of small farming and replacement of it by agribusiness, which is in the process creating massive soil erosion (which, along with overgrazing, will have extremely detrimental consequences to future generations), the conversion of our diets into principally processed, corn syrup-infused foods and corn-fed beef; and the befouling of foreign cultures with McDonald’s franchises. Like I said, it seems like a cool job, but there are couple of moral implications.

Tuesday—Bitter Cold

I was not supposed to have to participate that day. I had lost my license the previous Thursday, and the organizations that we were going to—The Federal Reserve, the NYSE, and DTCC—were not supposed to let me enter with my student ID. So, I was completely prepared to be denied entrance and get to go home and replace my tights and heels with sweatpants. Unfortunately, despite Obama’s calls for tightened security measures following the recent foiled bombing attempt on American Airlines, everyone was happy to let me in everywhere with nothing but a student ID. Bummer.
The day was the only actual day of the “Wall Street Winterim” that we spent on Wall Street, which is way down on the tip of Manhattan Island, by the water. It was bitter, F.U. cold outside. At The Federal Reserve, they gave us breakfast. Then an HBS alum came and told us that he would talk to us about Risk Management for the 18th time. I sighed. Then he told us he would talk about job ops for MBA’s at the Fed. Well, maybe this is actually worth my time, I thought. Then some other guy entered and told us that there were currently no job ops available at the Fed. Nope. Not worth my time.
I focused my attention on a much more pressing matter. Leslie and I had been having some problems with our “landlord”, Pamela. She was a 2009 Georgetown Law School Graduate about to start a job in M&A at a prominent law firm, only the economy crashed, so her employment was deferred. So, rather than beginning her career as a workaholic, she was forced to remain idle. Fortunately, the law firm subsidized her forced inertia, and she was able to take a pre-career sabbatical to chill with her boyfriend, a Spaniard, in Barcelona. Hence, Leslie and I were able to sublet her expensive New York apartment. All she needed in return was two rent checks and a deposit, equivalent to one rent check. I sent the deposit in early December. Then, we didn’t send anything else. Pamela wrote me one day asking where the rent check was, and, fully intending to put it in the mail that same day, I told her that it was in the mail. However, I was deterred by the potential difficulty of finding my checks.
When I got to New York, I found that Leslie had also neglected to send her rent, because she didn’t own checks. The very first day there, she got a money order and put it in an envelope. We tried to buy stamps at a couple of places, but they either didn’t have them or had run out. Then the Winterim started, and we forgot all about it every day until 10 or 11 at night when it was too late to do anything about it. Eventually, Pamela lit a fire under us with an e-mail. We procured the stamp, I wrote a check, and we prepared to send it off. However, at the last minute, Leslie said, “Why does she need your check? You already sent her a deposit…” You’re right, I decided, and pulled my check out of the envelope. Pamela would soon have the full amount of the rent and should be happy with it. Anyways, what was she going to do? Evict us? She was in Spain. We were only there for two weeks.
It turns out that Pamela was not happy with it. It also turns out that, despite here geographical handicap, she would be able to evict us. That same morning, I had received an e-mail titled “Notice to Vacate Apartment”. The contents went something like this: “Erin. If you do not respond to my request for the rent check by noon tomorrow, I will coordinate with the owner of the apartment to have you forcibly removed.” She was probably bluffing, but it was a rude awakening nonetheless. By that point, I had actually sent my rent check, so I wrote, “Pamela, I put my rent check in the mail yesterday. I’m very sorry for the delay. I hope you don’t kick us out.”
At the Federal Reserve, I opened my e-mail again and found a response from Pamela: “I hope you don’t think I’m being harsh…” What followed that phrase was a mini-lecture about the realities of New York apartment rental. So, rather than listen to the umpteenth lecture on Risk Management, I set myself to the task of reassuring Pamela that she was not being harsh and that the whole thing was our fault. Only, I didn’t want to explicitly admit our noncompliance with lease documents. I fancied that, given her dubious occupation, she could be fishing for self incriminating statements. I fancied writing her something utterly ridiculous, such as: “Dear Pamela, This has been a stress point for my chakra all week long. However, after meditating upon it this morning and chanting three ohms in unison, Leslie and I achieved enlightenment. We have come to the realization that we didn’t meet your expectations and that we, not you, are the ones who have accumulated bad karma in this situation….etc, etc, etc.” Ultimately, I wrote the same thing in much planer terms. Boooooring.

Wednesday-No Surprises
The umpteenth day. We sat in Bank of America in midtown in the morning and Citi in Greenwich Village in the afternoon. The day, like every other day we’ve had, was WAY TOO LONG. The BofA people were super young. They were former Merrill Lynch employees who were feeling the pain of the recent acquisition. They were working for this hotshot Wall Street firm whose name got dragged through the mud for exorbitant executive compensation and then BAM, they were acquired by a main street bank. They’d lost something like 40,000 associates over the last year. Their boss, the CFO, was unable to produce the right words to smooth over it as he explained the challenges of integrating their Merrill mindset into BofA. They came from a wealth management firm that catered to ultra-high net worth individuals, and now, he explained, the challenge was to roll BofA’s “mass market” into the wealth management process. His lips turned down and he stuttered as he said “mass market”.
Aside from that, they spoke at length about sell-side research. So did one of the guys we spoke to at Citi—I’ll call him Heath Karowitz, #1 sell side research analyst on the street in 2009, apparently. So, I got it—the difference between buy side and sell side—finally. A bit late in my MBA to understand such a thing, but at least I can say I’m gaining something from this group self torture—some basic principles threaded through this two week fire hose treatment of finance. Something I can say I got and now can ignore the next time someone tries to tell me about it, because, thank you very much, but I have to listen to so many things. The last thing I need to listen to is something I already know.

So, here it is:
Sell side refers to the practice of assessing stocks, bonds, sovereign funds, currencies, and whatever other instruments (and abstract vehicles of value accumulation might exist in the world) in order to issue a recommendation—Buy, Sell, or Hold. Revenue for the sell side is generated through commissions. It’s a very competitive game in which REPUTATION counts for everything. You gotta be the one on the street that gets the call. You gotta have an edge, some ideas and insights that you’re working. Otherwise, you add no value, and you get no commissions from trades.
Buy-side, practiced by hedge fund guys and portfolio managers, refers to the practice of accumulating investment vehicles to drive alpha. And for them, Alpha=bonuses. These people can be separated into two basic groups—the hedge funds and the long only shops. Hedge funds people are hyper-proactive, aggressive types with short attention spans. Though not day traders, they are the CNBC junkies who respond to every blip in a stock. Karowitz described them as The NYC mafia. They’ll perpetuate hype and then ride it, playing a game of musical chairs by tag teaming stocks and then competing to see who can be the one who jumps off at just the right time. The long only shops are places like Fidelity and Vanguard.
If you’re a sell side analyst, you are constantly goaded to cheat. The long only shops will call you up and ask you, “What’s Fidelity doing?” Hedge fund people will engage in tooling, paying you to be a tool for them by talking stocks up or down. At BofA, which contains both sell-side and buy-side people, they are legally required to follow a strict code of conduct, called a Chinese Wall, for communication between the two groups. This involves having compliance officers whose job it is to be present and prevent fraud during meetings between analysts and sales people.
Karowitz came over to my side of the conference table for a while when he was explaining this, and I was surprised to look into his face and see that, back in college, he was definitely completely unattractive and geeky. It seemed to me that he had miraculously overcome his undesirability through passion and success. Later that night, Leslie and Victorious brought up the subject of Karowitz’s geekiness but they did not agree with my opinion that he had overcome it. At any rate, the man had a valuable message, a cliché, but true: that you’ve got to have passion for whatever it is you decide to do. Otherwise you will be totally mediocre. And while sell-side research sounds interesting, I sort of doubt that I could, as Karowitz says he does, live, eat, and breath a pack of stocks—in his case, auto stocks, I think.
After Karowitz, we were bedazzled by Andrew Johns, an investor relations guy, who Maddis suggested I speak to about a job. The guy started by looking out at the spectacular view from the boardroom window while telling us that he had prepared no speech because his was constantly slammed with work, that he had four more meetings that afternoon, and that he was looking out the window at his apartment because he wished he could be there. He exuded rebelliousness and bragged about how he often had to go tell the CEO off. This attitude, according to him, was due to the nature of Investor Relations, which unlike Public Relations, is not about smoothing over and fluffing up. The mantra of IR is “No surprises,” and while PR people are paid to BS, IR people shouldn’t even bother, because their audience knows more about the mechanics of corporate performance than they do. Johns trash talked Citi’s previous CEO, Sandy Somebody, calling him a strategic ops ponzi scheme artist who achieved the status among shareholders of investing guru but in the process accumulated such a glut of toxic assets for the bank that Citi is just now beginning to turn itself around.
During Johns’s sermon , Victorious TXTed, “Estoy acabado.”I was fully engaged. “Q pena,” I responded. Johns was going on a bit, though. He resoponded, “Ask this guy what time is it and he tells you the history of mankind.” So true.
Then despite his pronouncements about the sans-BS nature of IR, Johns proclaimed that Citi, currently valued at a meager $4/share, will be the biggest financial services turnaround the world has ever seen. A little marketing pitch perhaps? Everyone in the room believed him, and we all began making note-to-selves about investing in Citi stock. Later, we asked Maddis about it, and he told us to take it with a grain of salt. Citi may appreciate substantially over the next five years. However, it may also get taken over by the government, in which case, you’d be out whatever student loan money you decided to gamble on it. Nevertheless, Johns convinced me both that I wanted to invest in Citi and that I wanted to go into Investor Relations…that is, right up until Tatiana asked him about the career path into IR. He scoffed and said, “Don’t even try! I’ve only got about 8 people on my team right now and I’ll probably fire some of them soon.”
Next we got blabbed at for an hour or so by Larey Cathrop. Title: Global Head of Credit. Importance: prominent trader in fixed income. Subject of presentation: The Fixed Income Market. Probable reason for being there: someone forced him to come. Retention rate of HBS Students present: 10-20%. Questions asked at end of presentation: 1. It was Fernando.
Next, according to my notes, it appears that an alumnus by the name of Tom Johan spoke with us about Liquidity Risk Management. My notes for that speech include a tree, an Eskimo standing outside of his igloo, and a street with three buildings on it. At some point, I feel asleep. As always happens when I fall asleep sitting up, I was woken up by gravity tugging on my head. Then I was almost unable to suppress a fit of laughter when I sat up and looked at the other side of the table and found Fernando laughing at me.
Between naps and doodles, there was some TXTing regarding a potential Happy Hour @ a bar across the street. So, after Johan finished up, we asked Maddis if he’d be interested, packed up and went across the street for a couple of drinks. From there, everyone went to a nearby Italian restaurant. I noted a distinct feeling that my head was caving in and opted out. I headed home in my usual manner—that is, zigzagging all over the place—overshooting the subway by four blocks, then getting on the subway going the wrong way, then getting on the express going the right way so that I had to get back on the local going the other way, then getting out on to 7th and being confused about why I wasn’t on 5th. The problem is not, by the way, that I have poor directional sense. It’s that I space out.
Or that I get misdirected. Later, I met up with Victorious and Leslie at Maker’s, a bar that is about twenty steps to the left of our apartment. However, Victorious TXTed me, “Makers, straight from you aprt, turn right and keep walking.” Based on this, I walked about five blocks in the wrong direction, called and TXTed Victorious 17 times to no answer, and then decided I would check out the block to the left of our apartment. Victorious and Leslie were there, on their 3rd or 4th vodka con cranberry. I had one of the vodka cranberries and one or two light beers while they matched each other drink for drink on the vodka cranberries.
Victorious pestered Leslie about giving him a chance and we pestered Victorious about his hypocrisy. He is, after all, dating a Russian girl at HBS. He defended himself saying that they had different world views and that it wasn’t going to work out. Leslie started a barrage of TXTs with Al, during which she proclaimed her intention to end their “relationship”. This propelled the number of vodka cranberries consumed by my friends to about 8 a piece. He responded that he couldn’t believe she would just throw him away like that. Then, at some point, he said something like, “Some people are just not meant to be with someone else, and I think I am one of those people. But I don’t’ want to lose you.” Finally, Victorious picked up the tab and we decided to call it a night.

Thursday-I’m not obsessed. I’m just Latin.

And another day. I asked Victorious how much the bill had been last night. He didn’t remember. But he did remember the # of vodka cranberries they had. “I am so hung over,” he said.

“Based on that vodka and cranberry flavored water?” I asked.
“No,” he corrected me. “That was how Leslie’s drinks were. Mine were strong.” Apparently, he had had a little talk with the bar tender.
It was another ridiculously long day. We started out at Standard Chartered Bank, talking to a bunch of Latin American men. The first one, Rodrigo, worked in structured finance. Up until 2008, he had been promoted through the ranks at Citi. Then, they laid off his entire area. He talked about how incomprehensible that was: to start out as a management associate, have good performance reviews, work hard, fly all over the world, attending your meetings, doing your deals, then “BAM!”, you r whole area is laid off. You get escorted out by HR and you have no job, no prospects. He also talked about his job in Structured Finance at Standard Chartered.
He basically worked in an area of the bank that facilitates transactions between emerging markets. It sounded like a pretty awesome job. They give loans to exporters and importers, manage Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that buy, sell, and hold commodities, and embed derivatives to arbitrage commodity prices, FX, and interest rates. This area is a bit like the McDonald’s example for me, though. While his job sounded awesome, how many ills and evils is it responsible for? Looked at in one way, Standard Chartered is facilitating trade between emerging markets, carving out the path of the future. Looked at in another, they are facilitating the exploitation of every last acre of the Amazon Rain forest, pollution of rivers by mining, human rights abuses by Chinese companies ravaging Africa. The list goes on and on.
Next, an uber-confident, raspy-voiced, small-boned, sprightly Argentinean Ken doll named Pablo came to talk to us. I didn’t write his title down but he was head of the derivatives trading floor. He said, “I make sure that every $ that goes out the door has an attachment on it.” If I’m putting the pieces together correctly, this means that he manages traders, who enhance the value of the revolving low interest bearing credit lines that Standard Chartered extends to corporations by using derivatives to arbitrage interest rates, FX, and whatever else fluctuates. I guess that’s what corporate investment banking is. Hmmm…good to know.
Victorious was sitting next to me while Pablo talked, and he commented that this guy was more Latin than Latin. His super tan-ness, his rascally manner, and his way of shaking his shoulders back and forth and holding his hands out to everybody as if he’d just pulled two pistols from his hip holsters. His raspy voice and funny Latin-influenced sentence constructions were entertaining. He said things like, “Think always about the basic, and it will help you in your future.”….his way of saying that, when you get down to it, derivatives trading is not that complicated. He started out as a gym teacher. If he could do it, anyone could do it, he said. The two most important things in trading, according to him, are: Focus and Cut Your Losses. “Take theee loss. Close theee trade.” He said. “The worst thing you can do is play with a loss. You will maybe think is gonna go my way. I know it, and that is the exact moment that it doesn’t.”
When Pablo had dazzled us enough, he was replaced by his diabolical opposite, Dan Somebody, Head of Transaction Banking for the Americas, who bored us to death with lengthy descriptions of clearing and drafting letters of credit for trade finance. After suffering through Dan, we took a walk through Standard Chartered, (the walls of which are adorned beautiful but banal oil paintings representing diversity and multi-culturalism), to the trading floor.
The trading floor was not particularly glamorous. It was about 10 rows of 20 -30 somethings, sitting shoulder to shoulder in front of three panel Bloomberg screens. Each of them specializes in a subset of derivatives. For example, there is a whole row they call the Frenchies, because they speak French and structure deals that require proficiency in that language. On the one hand, this kind of a job seems like it would be torture to me. Highly performance-based. Massive amounts of money on the line. 0 introspection. No privacy or private space. On the other hand, I think it would be a blast. Fernando started out in trading in South America and said that the years he spent on the floor were the funnest of his life. “Like Colegio,” he said.
After Standard Chartered, we went to Continental Grain, which, in my opinion, was the uber company. The offices were cool, the people were friendly, and heaps of food were made available for our consumption. The CEO, the CFO, and the HR Director accompanied us for the lunch, during which time they actually asked us about ourselves. The CEO, Paul Somebody, listened to all 27 of us explain our backgrounds, and in, almost every case, he offered some kind of response related to our background or the country we come from. Something that had happened in the news or something that the company was dealing with. Paul told interesting stories, none of which I heard, because I was rehearsing my pitch. This was, essentially, a valuable op to pitch ourselves—i.e. make ourselves memorable to the CEO of a major corporation. As Paul talked, Charlie used his smart phone to discover that he is worth $2 billion and that he recently he had an affair with Paula Zhan.
Leslie told me that Paula Zhan was Paul’s wife’s best friend. Later Charlie corrected her. It had been his best friend’s wife. Several of us deduced that that was worse because it involved screwing over 3 people you know well—your wife, your best friend, and your lover—whereas the other scenario involves screwing over only 2 people you know well—your wife and your lover. We joked that our experiences at HBS have prepared us to perform lightning quick analysis like this one and that we could potentially present our findings in power point flow charts to other promiscuous, high profile individuals.
Nevertheless. I liked Continental Grain. However, we were there for 3 ½ hours, during which time I did get that Continental Grain, once a grain trader, is essentially a private equity investor…only, rather, than following the normal PE model of invest, enhance, sell, they focus on the long term transformation of companies. This sounded awesome to me. I want to work there. However, I didn’t want to be there for 3 ½ hours. It was terrible. It seemed like it would never end. Later, I asked Leslie why she thought that Paul never got tired the whole time we were there. “Because deep down everybody wants to be a teacher,” she said. “And that was his moment to tell us all of his insight.”
When the merciful end finally came, we actually had to go back the ING building and listen to another speaker. I don’t know what his name was. I don’t know who he worked for. I think he spoke to us about…no, I don’t know…Private Equity? His power points all head multi-colored boxes spread out on graphs. That’s about all I got. He was very hyper and he went on way past the point that everyone was either hemorrhaging from boredom or passed out and drooling on the table. Victorious was sitting next to me again, so I asked him why he believed that his current girlfriend at HBS had a different world view. He said that she is too sentimental and serious. I got it.

Friday-Rome is Burning
The last day was just torture. I stayed tuned to the first speakers. They performed marketing for a private equity firms and they gave us a rundown of the birth, growth, and recent decline of private equity as a business model. I guess Private Equity people were originally viewed as corporate raiders in the 1980s because of the infamous buyout of Nabisco by RGR? There were only about 100 PE firms and they had trouble raising funds. Then, by the 2000s, PE came to be seen more as operating partners and the availability of capital made fundraising easy for them. They grew to about 15000 firms. Now, in the wake of the financial crisis, they’re suffering, primarily because of a bad brand image and because Limited Liability Partners (the people who provide the dough) are instituting much more stringent requirements. The dudes we spoke to said they were trying to come up with a new euphemism to save PE, something that would stick.
Later, Fernando, spoke to us about BNP Paribas and how he managed to be the youngest asset manager in Chili at 24. He was basking in his moment as a teacher, and he went on and on. Afterwards, I convinced a bunch of people to go get sushi at Taki, this little hole-in-the-wall that Victorious, Fernando, and I had visited the week before. Fernando was too cool to go. He had a lunch already arranged with one of his high powered NYC colleagues.
The afternoon was a wash. I have no idea who spoke or what they spoke about. I had a book of crossword puzzles. Some people had noticed and asked me for sheets. I worked on one until it put me to sleep. I woke up and researched my jet setting classmates on facebook. Linda fell into the Dead Sea by ax. Shranka and Meganski posted phenomenal pictures of Capetown. They win. By far. Liam is somewhere exotic. Patriki just got out of the jungle. My cousin continues with the winning status updates. This time, its: “Anything is impossible.”
After our last torturer left, Maddis told us, “Ok. Wow. You guys were a little low energy today.” I don’t know where he gets all his. Maybe it helps him that he’s getting paid to do this. He didn’t even ever seem to be straining to keep himself attentive during the entire two weeks. He seemed a bit disappointed in us, but that didn’t keep him from accepting our invitation to happy hour.
Fernando said that he would go to happy hour as long as he could sit next to me, which is exactly what occurred. So, while Leslie and Maddis listened calmly as Jessica got increasingly louder and more animated at one end of the table, Fernando asked me for the story of my life at the other end. I said he needed to give me some more specific questions, so he started out by asking me about snowboarding and we covered basically everything en espanglish. Which was excellent. Once I finished telling him my whole life, I asked him about his, his wife, his baby girl, his luminous career and achievements. He told me. By the time we finished, I had only had one glass of Blue Moon, and I felt like my head was caving in. So, I went home.
Around 11:30, Leslie and Victorious came in. They said, “Get ready. We’re going out.” I said, “I don’t want to. I feel like shit.” I was envisioning a full morning, a working brain. “Really?” said Leslie, “Really? That’s awesome, because this is my last night here.” Sufficiently guilt tripped. I said, “Ok, fine. I’ll go.” Envisioning taking it easy, having one drink and then coming home. I forgot rule #1 of avoiding a hangover: don’t go.
So, where were Leslie, Victorious, and I—now laughing uproariously in the back of taxi cab –headed? To a club called Hiro to meet the Kelly and her boyfriend. Hiro turned out to be a pan-Asian club, in the bowels of which we found a thousand young extraordinarily hip Asian people dressed to the nines along with blond Kelly and her black boyfriend mingling with other classmates next to a table with a bottle of Absolut on it….tricked into bottle service again!
It was utterly ridiculous to be at a pan-Asian club getting bottle service. We stood around for a while listening but not responding to the hip-hop techno playlist. Victorious confessed to me that he can dance a lot better than Asians because of his Latin blood. “Look. They’re doing thees,” he said, bouncing to demonstrate. “I can dance. See,” he said, and proceeded to do a more elaborate version of the Standard Chartered guys’ shoulder-shaking, pistol-holding move. Some drunk Asian girls pushed their way past us and yelled “Cheers! Cheers!” Then, something took hold of me, probably the cranberry vodka in my hand, and I yelled “Cheers!” and started dancing. Leslie, drunk, was susceptible, and followed suit. Victorious followed Leslie. And Amruta, who was also standing next to us, got shakin’ as well. Sohei, a Japanese student, ordinarily so quiet and timid, asked some girl to dance. They started but then she walked away before too long. I asked him what happened. “She said she want business man. And I’m a student, so…hahahah…” he said . Then Eliisabet, our HBS Estonian dancing queen showed up and we just danced. Soon, people were pouring into the club and we were squeezing out.
Saturday
The 3rd Saturday in a row hijacked by hung-over wackness. Pamela woke us up at 7:30, because apparently, the woman she was selling her coach to is crazy and demanded that hour. We slept till 11. I bought bagels with cream cheese, nova, tomatoes, and capers. I had mentioned the special NYC combo to Leslie and she wanted to try it before she left. She loved them. I watched a movie on TBS about cheerleading. It was awesomely stupid. My brain hurt. I felt very terribly unimpressed with myself. I saved up my strength and went to Bikram in Midtown at 3. The instructor was a tiny, taught Asian woman who had a thick accent but was quite particular about certain aspects of the poses…she sounded like some character Luke Skywalker might come across in an alien city, determinedly grunting and jabbering to get some incomprehensible point across. After, yoga, I downloaded Rhapsody on my iphone and walked all the way home—from 8th and 48th to 3rd and 29th —listening to music. That’s quite a good activity in NYC, like walking through a bunch of music videos or a montage in a Star Wars movie.

Boa Constrictors and Toilets

2010-01-07T08:07:00.000-08:00

1/3/2010
Maybe my iphone figures just as heavily in this entry as does sleep deprivation. I had to do four things in six hours:
1. Buy shirts
2. Print out resumes
3. Do Bikram
4. Go to Manhattan Inn in Brooklyn for dinner
The iphone came through. I became a blue dot on the map. I battled shoppers at H&M on 34th, then found and took the M to an open FedEx 37 blocks away in SoHo, then took the 6 29 blocks to my apartment. Yulia and I ran to Bikram and persevered through an hour of sweaty hell. Then, I took 3 trains to Manhattan Inn in Brooklyn. The iphone failed me on the G train, and I took it the wrong way for one station. At Manhattan Inn, I asked Ethan if he would take the G back with me because it was sketchy.
“It is,” Nick agreed. “It used to be worse, though”. Seven years ago, which incidentally is around the last time I saw Nick, he was on the G, when a man got on with a boa constrictor wrapped around him. People gasped and gawked, and when a bum who had been sleeping on one off the benches, woke up, he began to freak out. The train made a stop, and the man with the boa constrictor checked out some girl’s ass on the way out. The bum needled him, saying, “Hey! What’s up with that? I saw what you did there!,” to which the man with the boa constrictor responded by lunging and wielding his snake. The bum in turn pulled a hunting knife out of his backpack and wielded it back. The man with the boa constrictor was unperturbed, so the bum reached into his backpack and pulled out a meat cleaver as well. At this point, Nick said, he realized that the bum had been carrying around a backpack full of knives. He and his friend responded by hopping off the train and missing the conclusion of the standoff.
Ethan has been seeing Royln on and off over the last decade. According to him, she’s the only girl he ever really liked who liked him back but they’ve “dicked each other over” so many times that he’s not sure how it’ll ever work. That, and they live on opposite sides of the country: he in Seattle and she in Brooklyn. I met Rolyn in Albuquerque about 9 years ago. Ashley was there and we were impressed with the funkiness of Rolyn’s apartment. If I were a planet, she has been like a star that approximates a planet—Ethan-- which crosses my orbit every couple of years. Most things I’ve ever heard about her are twinkling and impressive and cause me to respond with incredulity. When I first met her, She’s has an MFA in Creative Writing? Two years later when I saw here in Boulder or somewhere, She’s carrying a video camera around and actually taking footage? Six years later when I asked Ethan about her. She opened a club in Brooklyn?...and now…She owns this restaurant?
The restaurant was impressive. It seems to me like the rickety, abandoned, old stream house full of clay pigeons that my brother and I used to play in when we were kids and which we wanted to convert into a restaurant some day. I think the way to express its je ne se qua is: subtle eclectic whimsy….or like the Eternal Splendor of a Spotless Mind…or kind of neosurrealistic. We sat in a cavernous oak-gilded chamber, like the hull of a ship, crammed onto a bench at one of a dozen wooden plank tables that bordered the room. There were people standing up eating and a white baby grand being played by a guy who for all intents and purposes was Tom Waits. The menu had pulled pork bib lettuce wraps with ginger plum dressing but it also had Sheppard’s pie and Zywiec.
Altogether an eclectic night. I asked Nick what he was doing. He said he opened a Still Life product photography studio several years ago in Brooklyn. Then, he proceeded to rattle off his recent subjects: “backpacks, barstools, juice boxes, donuts, and toilets.” I asked him if each subject is its own field of expertise and he said, “Yes.” I asked his wife what she does. Photo editor for Maxim. Somehow, we started debating about American Apparel advertisements. She loved them. I said I wasn’t that opinionated either way, but I had heard some people complain about them, basically because the girls in them look like under-aged whores, and we proceeded, moving through the paces of a common argument. They’re not under-aged--Yeah, but they look like they are. And the pictures objectify them—The women in those pictures love being in them…

The Sleep Deprivation Continues

2010-01-07T08:06:00.000-08:00

1/2/2010-1/3/2010
I think this is the theme connecting the disparate collection of experiences I’ve had thus far in 2010. It is certainly the reason that the 2nd and 3rd bled into each other and could not be separated into two different blog entries.
I didn’t get very regular sleep in December 2009. Finals kept me up during the first half of the month. Then, I hung out with Duncan, who works until midnight, almost every night during the second half of December. Come to think of it, I remember complaining from regular sleep deprivation when I saw him in mid-November. Sleeping at bedtime has become such a rarity that it is difficult to do. Now, it seems, I sleep better in airplanes and hospital waiting rooms.
New Years Eve was not a sleeping night. Then Yulia and I woke up on the morning of the 2nd to resume our thus-far-neglected resolution to do Bikram every day during the Winterim. In the afternoon, I caught the Long Island Rail Road at Penn Station to Huntington, where I ate Thai food and lost at Trivial Pursuits to my parents, brother, and Liz, who had spent the last several days and nights losing sleep and waiting for Liz to give birth to Lilly Connolly.
That night, I occupied the couch. The house was blasted by unbelievable gusts of wind as my sleep deprived brother and sister-in-law stirred, timing intervals between contractions. At 2, I got up and found them in the office, looking at bedding on line. “Do you guys need any help picking out bedding?” I asked.
At 5, after three more hours of utter astonishment at a thousand powerful gusts of wind, punctuated by one strange dream and Bella, the dog, excitedly nuzzling me and snorting, my brother announced that Lizzy was giving birth. I brought a pillow to the hospital, where I got 3 perfect hours of zzzzs in the waiting room. When I woke up, Liz’s parents and sister, Laura, were there. Laura disappeared for a while. When she came back, she announced that Lizzy was going to have a c-section. We twiddled our thumbs and attended to butterflies in our stomachs for an hour or so until the baby came. Then, upon some signal, we were permitted finally to pass through some heavy, swinging doors into a previously restricted section of hallway, where Liz lay on a gurney, with Lilly on her chest. Trevor had to hold Lilly there, because Liz was completely numb from the neck down. We all oo-ed and aw-ed and snapped iphones and cameras at them. Lilly was unperturbed. She just cuddled against Liz’s cheek.
This being our first experience with 21st Century medical care systems for attending to child birth, we were flexible, apprehensive, fumbling our way through, allowing ourselves to be led by a seemingly illogical sequence of events. First, we fiddled with our phones, texting and sending baby pictures to people. The moms agreed that they couldn’t call people yet, because they didn’t know the birth weight and that is among the first things that everyone asks. Next, it was time for one person to go see Liz. Then it was time four people and no more to view Lilly, where she lay naked and black footed under a heating lamp alongside other babies in similar predicaments. Maternal looking nurses occasionally poked and prodded her and seemed satisfied when she whaled. I marveled at how she seemed so content despite being marooned on a slab of foam and induced to cry. We quickly identified what made her “our Lilly”, as everyone was calling her:
1. She had Liz’s mouth
2. She had crazy astute eyes, when they opened
3. She was big
4. She was not, like one of her neighbors, splayed out in an uncouth, spread eagle position. “Our Lilly would never do that,” we claimed.
5. She had a full head of hair and long fingers and toes, with nails. According to Trevor, the doctors had to reprimand her as she grabbed at the tongs on the way out of Liz’s belly. Perhaps she inherited her mother’s tendency to scrapbook and cherish memories and that was her first attempt to collect a souvenir.
Next, we were eating with Trevor, not knowing what to say. Now he had a baby. He seemed reticent. In truth, he was incredibly sleep deprived. They were holding Liz and Lilly until Thursday. Would Trevor take work off then or later? No clue. How long did they want mom to stay? No clue. Finally we asked, has it hit home Trevor? Yes and no, it seemed. He was in a dream state. Then it was time for two people and no more to go see Liz. Then I saw Liz. Then, I was leaving my brother and his family to their sleep deprivation and altered world, and my dad was taking me to the Manhassit station.
I guess The Sleep Deprivation Continues was not the appropriate title for this entry, because it is clearly already full, and it did not encompass the following events, which I think are worth noting and were certainly permeated by my own sleep deprivation. I don’t know what the right title would have been though. Maybe A Real New Year, maybe What a Weekend!, maybe Cute as a Wigwam.

2010 is Confusing

2010-01-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

An excellent way to hail 2010 indeed. I didn’t see the light of day. Around 6, we decided to head to Borders. Yulia wanted to read the Black Swan, some recommended reading for our Winterim. When we got there, she didn’t want to read it or anything anymore. I’ve listened to half the book on tape and believe that the gist from Wikipedia is sufficient. Moreover, while it is an interesting bit of philosophy, it is a 50 thousand ft view and doesn’t really explain anything about the workings of Wall Street. Here is my book report:
1. By Nassin Nicholas Toleb
2. Named after the Black Swan logical fallacy: the belief that something, like a black swan, is not a possibility, merely, because it has never happened before. A poignant example would be that of a Thanksgiving turkey who believes his owners have benevolent intentions towards him, simply because they always feed him. Personally, I think the biggest Black Swan of all is our general belief, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, that earth systems will continue to support human civilization simply because they always have.
3. Presents a new concept, the Black Swan event: an event that is (1) as surprising as a black swan or a 6 sigma event—an event that falls 6 standard deviations from the norm (2) extremely impactful, such as the .com boom, or Hurricane Katrina, (3) predictable in retrospect—meaning that people are able to devise logical explanations that make it seem predictable in retrospect, just as they did with things like The Great Depression.
4. Nassin asserts that Black Swans are occurring with more frequency for some reason I never fully understood
5. It was published in early 2007, just before the Black Swan of the 2008 economic collapse.

Anywho, I think the Harvard Review provides synopsis of all these lengthy philosophical diatribes, but I’m not sure. I tried to look it up on line, but I couldn’t get on line. We wanted to rent a movie but didn’t know where. Or did we want to go to a movie? We decided to get Korean food. Only we didn’t. So, we explained to ourselves that we were headed to a Greek restaurant. Only we weren’t. We went to some European restaurant. I liked the décor. Rustic + Victorian. Plaster + oak. Yulia said it was Crate and Barrel. I was sorry to hear that it had already been co-opted and mass produced. We went to Blockbuster but I wasn’t where it said it was. We got “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”, a fictional movie about a woman conducting a bunch of interviews with men about their “reasons for behaving badly”. It was profound but nonsensical.

NYE Play by Play

2010-01-02T18:52:00.000-08:00

12/31/2009
First day in NYC. I slept on the hard, fold-out couch in the windowless living room. Yulia and I are planning on alternating weeks in the bedroom. She went to bed before I did. Then she got up half an hour later and stumbled sleepily across the living room, speaking in Russian. She said something about a crazy dream in English. When I asked her what the dream was about, she said something in Russian again and stumbled back into the bedroom. I thought maybe it was some insult but, according to her, it was “good night”: spo'koinoi 'nochi.
It was a typical NYC day. Basically a blur of speed-walking, navigating the grid. Eating bagels. Bleeding cash. Trying to mentally catalogue enticing restaurant options and then giving up, because there are too many.
Yulia woke me up at 9 to go to Borders. That set the tone for the whole day: basically, Yulia telling me what to do and me doing it. “Go left…walk faster…eat some fruit…don’t wash your hair this morning. Wash it after yoga….this way…” I didn’t mind. I acquired 0 directional sense of our neighborhood, because Yulia did the navigating all day long, as we struck out from the apartment on different errands. It was good though. I’m still in the obsession stage with my iphone, so being led around allowed me to devout more attention to it.
The main event of the day was Bikram yoga at a studio I found on my iphone…We got 30 days for $30, which is un-f-ing believable, considering that you can pay $30 for a cocktail in this city. Yoga was a scene and a half. There were bathing suits and other variations on the skin-tight, scantily clad theme. The teacher was a character and a half. She yelled out instructions like an auctioneer. She was obsessed with linking your thumbs, for some reason. Is that a key aspect of Bikram?
“If you think linking your thumbs isn’t important, I’ll challenge you,” she said. “I’ll show you that my arms are stronger because I link my thumbs, even if you’re a muscle man. Anyone? C’mon. It would be funny.”
When one of the students turned green and started staggering around like a zombie 15 minutes in, she calmly sat the student down and went on with the class.
“You have low blood pressure, don’t you?...Yeah, that’ll happen if you have low blood pressure. It’s alright. “
Personally, I think passing out while doing five minute-long side bends with your arms over your head in a room heated to 104 degrees is a possibility at any blood pressure. I was worried the same thing might happen to Yulia, so I kept telling her to drink water and take a break if she felt dizzy. Then the teacher yelled at us. “Hey, you guys, it really doesn’t work if you talk. You know why? Because then I think you’re making fun of me and I get all paranoid and self conscious.” She spoke about focus and inner quiet. Apparently, if you never learn to quiet the inner chatter during this life, you are more likely to be born into a chaotic, painful next life. Apparently, we come to yoga to purposely impose struggle on ourselves so that we don’t have to struggle in the future.
Unfortunately, Yulia’s yogic-struggle-induced peace of mind was quickly shattered after class by an MSG from Al, which announced that he had planned to spend NYE with Ignacio or Julio or some such person. This after she had given him 4 months of notice regarding her plans to be in NYC on NYE. Although my sleep deprivation was at an all time high, this TXT became the driving force in our evening, propelling us to drink copious quantities of vodka, attend 4 different establishments, and author pages of TXTs.
Our evening began with Hunter at Dos Caminos, an upscale Mexican restaurant, where we had blueberry margaritas, lamb and mahi-mahi tacos, and a salad bowl full of guacamole. I would say the atmosphere was somewhat clubby and decadent. Mariah Carey and Justin Timberlake were played. Hot air balloons could easily be obtained, simply by tugging on one of thousands of golden ribbons hanging down from the ceiling. Yulia and I took one each for the road, along with some hideous feathered French maid Happy New Years crowns and a cardboard hat for Hunter. I kept my feathered crown on for a long time, down ten blocks of wet snow, into a grocery where we obtained cheap champagne, all along the green line to 75th, where it clashed rudely with the stately antiquities in this oak paneled, 3-floor Park Ave. apartment to which we were invited by Joe, a fellow Thunderbird student I had never met but who turned out to be from Boulder and whose New Years Eve party mates included the grandchild of the Park Ave apartment owners/younger brother of one of my more popular high school classmates. Small world!
....he was wearing suspenders and his girl had on one of those chiffon, suspender-inspired shirts that is made of two strips of fabric slung over her flattish chest. I kept my crown on there, in that high rent atmosphere, where its low-rent flair seemed to slightly appall my former high school classmate and his Ivy League entourage. Hunter had “lost” his hat on the green line, and Yulia gave hers a rest during the Park Ave. interlude. She replaced hers and I kept mine on as Joe and his party mates disappeared into cabs and the three of us took the tube back downtown. On the platform, I mused on that suspender shirt and wondered aloud why it is okay to show your whole boob but not your nipple. “Really, Erin?” said Hunter. “You don’t get it?” “No. Explain it,” I said. “It can’t be explained……….. It’s a different animal, that’s all.”
On the subway, our crowns were called pretty by an inebriated brother-sister duo who had up till that point been trying to teach other passengers the hokey poky. They were adorable, friendly, and funny, so I started exchanging background information and NYE plan information with them. Hunter commented that I was perhaps divulging too much, so I told them he was from Israel. Really, he’s from Omaha. They were finishing off a water bottle-full of what looked to be an apple martini of sorts, and I was glad I talked to them because the brother imparted a great scrap of wisdom: basically that, things happen in NYC and if you have the balls to just move here, opportunities will fall into your lap. I took this to be true, as I know of several examples.
Our crowns set us apart at the Cake Shop too, as its pop art bedecked walls had clearly never been desecrated by the synthesized resonations of Mariah Carey or anything even vaguely melodic, for that matter. The Cake Shop, so deemed because it apparently sells cake, contained within it the pure essence of hipster, from its vintage vinyl chairs to its free PBR to its nerdy patrons in bangs, white-boy afros, skinny jeans, baby doll dresses and berets to its basement bar where hipsters gathered around to hear the agonizing alien death moans of the androgynous lead singer of The Screaming Females. Ethan and Roland showed up at a quarter to midnight, I introduced them to Hunter and Yulia, and they quickly disappeared. At the stroke of, The Screaming Females revved up their screeching machines and prepared to unleash their unbearable dissonance. Lead singer went,"Yeah, it's 2010...whatever..." Hunter, Yulia, and I clinked red plastic cups and Budweiser bottle, and Ethan and I exchanged a wave from where he stood alongside the band set.
1/1/2010
The Screaming Females quickly became unbearable, so we fled the basement, still bejeweled in New Years Crowns. This was the tipping point. All discernable signs suggested we would bring in the first 8 hours of 2010 asleep in our beds. We were tired. The Cake Shop, though a spectacle, sucked. But alcohol exerts a gravitational force towards the planet of “staying out”. A quick succession of miniscule occurrences was all it took to push us over the edge. First, Hunter bought us each a miniscule glass brimming with whisky. Second, Yulia sent a miniscule TXT to Joe: “I hope 2010 is better than the Cake Shop”. Third, Yulia received a miniscule TXT from Al: “Even if you don’t care, I wish you a Happy New Year.”
So, we decided to get some more beers. Ethan and Roland appeared at my side. They were headed to The Glasslands, the club Roland owns in Brooklyn. “We’ll TXT u if we decide to go there ,” I said. Roland attempted to entice us with offers of free drinks. We demurred. (Our particular spot at the bar in the present hipster club felt very cozy. We didn’t need to haul ass to Brooklyn for more hipster.) I bestowed my crown on Roland. “We’ll TXT u if we decide to go,” I repeated, then convinced Yulia that I knew how to respond to Al’s TXTs. My intention was to have Yulia sign off on them before sending, but I don’t know how to use a Blackberry, so I sent a couple by accident. She kept getting extremely pissed at me and then handing the phone back to me to respond.
Hunter bailed at some point. Yulia proceeded to order beers faster than we could drink them. Some Eastern Europeans accumulated around us. Our cozy section of the bar became cluttered with half full beers—or were they half empty? The clutter became intolerable,so we decided to meet up with Joe and the Ivy League contingent at The Box.I navigated with my iphone. When we got there, we played with our phones for a while in front of The Box. I talked to Duncan. Yulia TXTed Al or Joe. I gave Duncan to Yulia. She gave him back. As soon as we hung up, we were in. Then upstairs. The place had New Orleans flair. Upstairs was stuffed with drunk people hanging out over a balcony, which opened to a packed dance floor and stage, where a series of burlesque exploits provided patrons with both music and inspiration. We found Joe. Drinks shot into our hands. Yulia was absconded by Joe. Hours passed. Hours of fun peopled by random, Park Ave. types, devoid of dialogue or anything comprehensible. Way to hail 2010. I definitely hope it's better than the Cake Shop.

Blue to blue 12/30/2009

2010-01-02T18:43:00.002-08:00

Today, I caught the sunrise in Denver and the sky fading over the coast of Maryland or somewhere along the jet trail to New York City. The shortened day was framed on both ends by “looking from windows and seeing shades of blue”, like it said in this BMW ad in the New Yorker I perused on the airplane, reading about Obama’s special brand of “complex and tempered hope”, which he used to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. Seems he is the president of truth, avoiding absolutism and over-simplification, asserting American responsibility despite “a landscape of bad options”. Seems he draws on the ideas of a philosopher named Reinhold Niebuhr. What Obama said about the philosopher’s work was:
I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.
The BMW ad featured the personal philosophy and desert-landscape-inspired dress by Catherine Malandrino. It was worn by her, a beautiful member of the Council of Fashion Designers of North America. Interesting to know such a thing exists. The 3-pager started: “we’re nomads in this life,” and continued with other aphorisms. The gist was satisfaction in responding to new shapes and patterns that emerge as we pass through different landscapes…in our BMWs, obviously.
The short story in that edition of the New Yorker was some horrifying journal of an imagined Armageddon. I don’t know why they put it in. It was a sickening, depressing vision of a post-collapse modern world, where no one knows how to do anything, because google is not available anymore. The story was completely derivative of The Road, but written by some woman named Helen Simpson, who as far as I can tell, has done nothing other than write a collection of short stories called “In-flight Entertainment.” I’ll say.
I also read about Tiger. It seems the problem with him is not the sex-scandal but the way that sex scandal directly contradicts the persona that his sponsors have been able to capitalize on. Namely, Tiger represented a machine-like commitment and mental strength, something which has fostered endorsement by companies outside of the normal tableau, companies like Accenture.
In the car, I learned about how my dad established his own practice in bankruptcy law. He was living in Colorado with us, commuting to different jobs as a partner for Jones Day. Then Exxon responded to the oil embargo of the late 70’s with a massive plan to steam drill oil shale on the Western slope of Colorado. The project drew investors and spidered into plans for a new mining town: Battlement, Colorado. School teachers and nurses were sought out, plans were developed. Then, it became apparent that oil would never hit $100/barrel, as was predicted at the time, and Exxon pulled out. The result was a wave of bankruptcies across Colorado. My dad inquired as to whether trustees were needed on the Western Slope and the answer was yes, desperately. This first move of his was a first step in building a broad network of lawyers and judges dealing with bankruptcies in Colorado.
The Atlanta airport smells like cigarette smoke. I tried getting a breakfast sandwich but no one serves them after 11:30. I see no reason why cheesy egg sandwiches should not be served all day long. I love how rude people who work at airport food stands are. I’m sure I would be too if I were one of the black people stuck in a dungeon like the Atlanta food court airport all day. I think that some photographer should come and document the segregation—the way everybody behind the counter is black—and the work conditions—the cramped avenue between cheese steak grills and fountain soda machines. I love the spirit and sense of humor that emanates from places like Atlanta airport that are populated by more black than white people. “I bet they’re gonna give us some more peanuts on this flight,” says a woman next to me. “I don’t want peanuts,” says one of her companions. “Me neither” chimes in another. “Ya’ll have got personal problems,” she responds. “Personal problems.”