To the Orient he flew. Again.

On leaving and returning

2010-05-28T15:23:00.002+08:00

Yes, I'll be back again no matter where I go
For it's only love that frees the fire for burning
Then I'll take you in my arms and tell you all I know
As I sing the changing song of my returning
-Phil Ochs

Those of you who find my habit of opening my posts with song-quotes pretentious will be happy to hear I texted that verse to Gyle a few weeks ago, and she replied, "Are you drunk?"

I wasn't then and I'm not now, but I suppose it's a fair question.

I've had a lot of practice with moving. Sometimes, it's easy to leave. I was definitely ready to get out of DC in 2004, for example. I remember walking around downtown during those last few weeks and thinking the place felt like a ghost town, with all the friends I'd made there who were now long gone, and while I was more than a bit apprehensive about going to Taiwan, I wasn't sorry about what I was leaving behind. Other times, not so much. This is one of those other times. The good news: I'm only going back to America for a few months (the exact time isn't yet determined, but I'll probably be back in Singapore by Christmas). The bad news: that's still a pretty long time to be away from someone you love. Still, I've been after the boss about getting started on the US market for quite a while now, so it's great that it's finally happening. And I do love long trips, so the longest trip I've ever been on should be an interesting experience.

But for the moment, it's the awareness that I'll be gone soon that has my attention. Singapore feels unfinished to me, everything very familiar and yet still fresh. I'm reminded of how I felt when I moved out of the student house in DC in 1998. I really thought I was ready to say goodbye to the place at the time, but in my very last days there I ended up falling in with a group of friends so tight-knit we actually had a bad reputation when it came to house parties because we slow-danced too much. Saying goodbye to that life wasn't easy, and I was only moving six blocks or so! In any case, I remember looking around the place and feeling like I still belonged there. It's a tough feeling to put into words, but I know it when I feel it and I feel it again now. Of course, I didn't know it at the time, but I did end up moving back to the student house about five months later (at least one person who had just moved in when I'd moved out recognized me thusly: "Oh, you were one of the slow-dance gang, weren't you?"), and I ended up falling in with another very close group of friends. This time, of course, I have the benefit of knowing I will be back.

And in the meantime, my first visit to the USA in four years is of course more than welcome. There are friends I haven't seen in at least that long to catch up with, and favorite foods to indulge in that one can't get here. And I have to try to remember that I'm there to work, of course. A lot depends on how well that goes, but early signs are that it will go well. But right now, it's the reunion in December that I'm looking forward to the most!

Happy Anniversary

2010-04-23T12:58:00.000+08:00

Today marks two years at my job. Which was orignally a 6-month internship.

I can't decide if I'm happy about this or not. When I moved to Singapore, the plan was to do this job to keep a roof over my head until I found something I really wanted to do. As I recall, I ended up looking for about two months and - after not getting a single interview - deciding I might as well stick with the one place that had given me a chance. Then a few months after that, the Wall Street meltdown happened, and I decided I not only would never get a job at a bank, I also didn't want one.

In other words, having sworn I wouldn't just fall into something after finishing my last degree, well, that's exactly what I did.

On the other hand, I've stayed employed over the past two years and that's something to be grateful for. I've also gotten to travel for work quite a bit, I have experience on my resume that I didn't have before, and there have been times when this job really has been a lot of fun. But as you may have guessed, the past few weeks have not been among those times. Things are slow. That could change any time, or it may not. Such is life with a startup company: 0-60 and back again in no time.

But I guess if things were really going to fall apart, it'd have happened by now!

An ordinary couple is all we'll ever be...

2010-04-15T19:20:00.003+08:00

If you know me, you won't be surprised to hear that I have always doubted I'd ever get married. And if I did, I would never, ever get down on one knee and all that jazz. No offense to those of you who like that particular ritual - that's your choice, and more power to you. But I find it mildly insulting to both sexes. If I have to make any pretense of begging, then is it even really love anyway? I've always said if the woman in question had a problem with that, then she probably wasn't right for me anyhow.

One out of two ain't bad, in this case anyway.

We haven't set a date and probably won't for a while. Too much is up in the air for both of us these days. But it is at least as official as can be without a date. It happened over coffee at Starbucks a couple of weekends ago. There were no fireworks. (Just what happens with big elaborate proposals in a public place when the answer is "no", anyway? I don't think we want to know!) And, as noted, no getting down on one knee.

Now, what I love about Gyle - and why we got this far in the first place - is that she's fine with that. She wasn't expecting me to beg her for anything, she knew I wouldn't, and she's okay with that.* She's okay with having a fiance whose most romantic gesture is reciting the second verse of Bruce's I Wanna Marry You as one might recite a Shakespeare sonnet**, over a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs (yes, I'd had a couple of beers, courtesy of her flatmate). How could I fail to love that?

I don't really feel any different than I did before that day at Starbucks. And I'm pretty sure that's just the way it's supposed to feel.

*One of her predecessors once got rather upset at me because I'd collected the wrong number of Sweet & Lows for her coffee, even as she failed to notice that I didn't take it in my coffee.
**Another of her predecessors once asked me "Is that Jimmy Buffett, honey?" when I was realy quoting Sylvia Plath. And yeah, I know I'm probably the only person alive who could quote both of them from memory.

Shanghai'd!

2010-03-15T17:32:00.002+08:00

There is at least one silver lining to having no trips for six months, and that is that all the hassles of getting a visa and arranging the tickets are that much more bearable when the time finally comes around. Such was the case with the latest trip, to Shanghai. Chinese visas are expensive with a US passport, but of course that wasn't coming out of my pocket. And since I was glad to be getting out again - especially to a new-to-me country - I didn't mind the late evening flight either.

The Shanghai airport is a lot more modern and well-kept than I was expecting. Amusingly, the international arrivals gate was marked "International-Hong Kong-Macau-Taiwan," neatly sidestepping the question of whether or not those locations are international. (I have heard some amusingly nasty stories from my Taiwanese friends about going through immigration checks in mainland China - they stamp your passport, then shove it roughly back at you and grumble "Taiwan is not a country!" I renewed my passport back in Luxembourg in early 2008, so there was no risk of my having to explain my work visas from Taiwan.) All I saw of Shanghai that first night beyond the airport was our hotel. It was a nice hotel, though!

We had two days in Shanghai, of which only about six hours involved actual business, so there was plenty of time for sightseeing. This was complicated a bit by the fact that it was very cold, and remember, I haven't been to anyplace cold in two years. That was less than pleasant. But we braved the cold to visit the main shopping district, which was pleasantly busy and colorful. I got to see a lot of Shanghai from the taxi along the way, which I always enjoy. Even if it is just a drive by view, there is something really fascinating about seeing how and where people live in a place I've never visited before. Speaking of which, besides being cold, Shanghai is huge. I believe it was the biggest city in the world at one point, and it's still one of the biggest. It definitely shows from the route we took downtown!

Like I said, the shopping district was great. Delightfully Asian, right down to the fake Rolexes for sale everywhere and the hawkers working so hard to pawn them off on every Westerner who turns up. Speaking of "Western," there seems to be a Pizza Hut on every corner. But we stuck to more authentically Chinese food, at a local eatery. Along with the fish soup I got, we also had a round of the inimitable stinky tofu that was the bane of every Westerner's existence back in Taiwan. Since I didn't have to smell it being prepared, it turned out to be pretty good. Nice surprise! This was accompanied by Tsing-Tao, served in cans with the old fashioned pull-tabs that come all the way off - who knew those were even still made anywhere?! (It wasn't the only time I felt a bit like I'd been sent back to America circa 1975: smoking was permitted in the hotel lobby. I'm one of those lucky non-smokers who doesn't mind smoke much, but it was pretty strange to see people lighting up indoors.)

Despite the frigid weather, it is the end of winter and cold-weather clothes were on clearance, so I got a sweater at 80% off. It came in handy for our last day in Shanghai, which was spent entirely downtown. Like Singapore and its extremely hot weather, indoor shopping centers are your friend. I had a bit too much time to kill at one such mall downtown on Wednesday, but it was a nice enough place and there was plenty of window shopping to do. I also got to visit the Oriental Pearl Tower, probably the biggest tourist draw in Shanghai. Even from there, seeing the end of the city is tough! Quite a view, though. The weather wasn't nearly as chilly either, though I was still very happy to head south again at the end of the day.

I look forward to the day when our company can afford business class on planes. That would have made for the perfect ending to a great trip. Sleeping in coach is always an...interesting experience. But it was great to be back on the road! There may be another trip to India in the works soon. We'll see.

Comments welcome, but...

2010-01-29T13:25:00.002+08:00

In response to a rude comment from an individual who doesn't even know me (and who, like most bullies, doesn't just give up if one ignores him), I have made a change to the comment policy here. From now on, all comments will be subject to my approval before they appear on the blog. I will, of course, publish all comments that are not rude or insulting to me or to anybody else. In other words, disagree with me all you like, just take the personal insults elsewhere.

I'm sorry to have to do this. I'm even more sorry that some people think anybody who cares deeply about much of anything is "angry". I admit that I was rather naive to write about the politics of abortion and not expect to be insulted in response. That's the Internet for you. In any case, comments are still welcome and encouraged - just play nice! Thanks.

A poignant but amusing reflection

2010-01-29T12:57:00.002+08:00

I'll start by quoting myself, from the last paragraph in this post:

Rachelisms - Extremely lame excuses for not doing your homework, i.e. "I meant to do my part of the group project that's due today, but there was this party I just had to go to, and I got back at 4:00." The Rachel who inspired this one was not the one I knew in DC or the one I worked with in Taiwan, so if you knew me during either of those periods, it's not who you think. Interesting, though, that I knew these three different yet like-named women in the space of less than six years and they were all incredibly irritating in one way or another.

Emphasis added, because today's post does concern "the one I knew in DC". I haven't been in touch with her since 1998, so I doubt she'll stumble across this, but I'll apologize in advance if any feelings are hurt. (Apolgies as well to the numerous other women I've known by that name who were wonderful people! There have been many more than three.)

In retrospect, "incredibly irritating" is an exaggeration about Rachel-of-DC, but she certainly had trying qualities as a friend. To make a long story short, she was one of those people you think of as a good friend at one point, only to discover before long that, despite your best efforts, she really never knew you all that well. We had (and I still do have) several mutual friends who could back me up on that. In any case, one night several of us were on our way out the door for an evening out. Another of our friends said something that amused me (regrettably I can't recall what, exactly), and I responded that he was reminding me of a character in a novel.

Then it was Rachel's turn to speak up. "Hey Dave," she asked me, "You know what novel you remind me of?" She said it in that tone of voice people tend to use when they're sure they've come up with a witty rejoinder nobody else has thought of.

"Catcher in the Rye," I responded in that tone of voice people tend to use in response to what somebody else thinks is a witty rejoinder, when in reality it's anything but that.

"Oh, you've heard that one before, have you?"

Why yes, yes I had. I suspect anybody who has ever felt disaffected in the past 60 years or so has. Which explains both why I had heard it before, and why people like Rachel tend to be surprised that it's not an original thought. They're also the kind of people who find that book "depressing" (a matter of opinion, to be fair; but it's anything but depressing to anyone who's been in that frame of mind before) or who think it's 200 pages of "I hate everything" (which just isn't true). I will admit that nearly everything I've heard about JD Salinger's life since he wrote it does sound rather depressing. But I'm guessing he didn't see it that way, since it was his choice. And hey, more power to him.

All of which is just my anecdotal way of saying "thank you and RIP".

Blog for Choice Day

2010-01-22T14:26:00.020+08:00

I have to confess to having been previously unaware of this, but today is apparently the 5th annual Blog For Choice Day. (One of the perks of living on this side of the International Date Line is that you can sometimes get away with being late on these things!) In any case, the topic of the year is "What does Trust women mean to you?"

For Blog For Choice Day, I can't help thinking my entry would be about the same regardless of the exact topic at hand. It would most likely start with wanting to explain why I am as staunchly pro-choice as I am; but I can't do that, because it concerns something a close friend told me once in a moment of alcohol-addled intimacy and then openly wished he hadn't told me.

That's right, he, and that brings me to what would most likely come next in any case: a rather bitter refutation of my inimitible ex's belief that no man has ever - not once, since 1973 - been there for his wife or girlfriend when she was going through the sometimes-unpleasant experience of getting an abortion. (And that would likely lead to me reciting her other greatest hits, such as "all men benefit from rape". But I digress.)

That, in turn, would lead to my addressing the difficult, but essential, point that yes, sometimes the decision to get an abortion is a difficult one for a woman, and sometimes she will experience emotional pain in addition to the physical aftereffects. That, unfortunately, is a tough one for us pro-choicers, since it creates an easy opening for antis to accuse us of contradicting ourselves regarding whether or not abortion hurts women. Here's my response, as neatly as I can put it: sometimes it does, but 1) that is not a reason to ban it; and 2) in many cases where it does hurt women, that is only because the anti-choice movement has done such a great job of stigmatizing abortion.

At this point, any response I make is going to have to veer into an amusing-if-it-weren't-so-pathetic recital of a few of my greatest hits from when I was escorting back in DC. (Tom Paxton said it best: "Some folks you don't have to satirize, you just quote 'em".) These included a lengthy treatise on how the abortion industry creates a demand in order to line the pockets of doctors with blood (this coming from a guy who once gave me a hard enough shove that I nearly lost my balance, and I am very proud to say I didn't hit back); "Margaret Sanger supported eugenics to rid the world of African Americans" (she didn't); "They're gonna kill your little brother!" (that one was directed at a little boy who was entering the clinic with his parents and a younger sibling in a stroller; naturally the kid looked at the stroller and started to cry); "Place of murder, place of death!" (only one time the guy slipped up and said, "Place of abortion" - I nearly spat out my coffee trying not to laugh); "Who's going to take care of you in your old age if you don't have any kids?" (I still regret that I didn't have the nerve to ask that particular woman if she'd never seen or read Like Water for Chocolate); and of course, the songs. Yep, they made up songs on the spot. My favorite: "The fruit of abortion is war!/Nuclear war!", roughly to the tune of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from Cabaret, which if you think about it is really pretty appropriate.

And then I would have to admit to the rare moments of actually addressing the folks across the sidewalk as if we were both human beings. It didn't happen often, but it did happen. Of course I didn't tell them my real name; but I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I claimed my name was something extremely unusual, which of course clued the smart ones in to the fact that I was obviously lying. I did consider using my middle name and my grandmother's maiden name - that would be far off enough from the truth that I'd be in the clear - but odds are there really is an Andrew Mayforth out there somewhere and I wouldn't want to be responsible for his hate mail. If I really wanted to get under their skin, I guess I should have told them something very Christian, like Peter. Oh well. (You'll notice I don't repeat the name here that I gave them. Call me paranoid if you like, but remember George Tiller.) In any case, there were times when we actually agreed to disagree, and even a time or two when we could joke about things like the weather. One really cold and rainy day, we joked that God was obviously on somebody's side, but which? Once just before Christmas, the antis sang "We Wish You a Merry Christmas".

But such moments of levity were few and far between. Why? Ignorance. On their part. And that's where I'll finally get around to the question of trust.

You see, there were two distinct types of antis. First, there were the ones who just stood on the sidewalk and prayed. They were mostly college students. We called them "the long skirt brigade," in reference to the way most of the women (and I use that term loosely - they were very young) dressed, no matter how cold it was. I could have done without the part they played in making patients feel guilty (or at least trying to), but at least they stayed out of the way. Then there was the other type, the aggressive ones. The ones who got in the patients' faces and yelled and screamed and waved disgusting signs and did everything they could to make a visit to the clinic as miserable as they could.

What does that have to do with trusting women? Well, obviously, they didn't. And that their mistrust seemed to be linked to ignorance - ignorance both of what Planned Parenthood actually did, and what the patients were there for. Many of them believed - really and truly believed - that PP encouraged abortion, didn't even mention adoption as an option, and offered no other services. There were patients who were there for services that had nothing to do with abortion (exams, pills, etc.), but they made no distinction. They never even stopped to think about it. If we bothered pointing out that there were other services available, well, we were still supporting an institution that supported abortion, and they didn't approve of contraception anyway.

And that's because they didn't trust women. (Or men either, but that's another rant.) As one anti calmly explained to me once, his beef with us was that we didn't tell the patients about adoption on our way to the clinic. How arrogant, you're probably thinking; and so did I. Out loud. His response: "Adoption isn't mentioned much as an option, and I think you're arrogant for not mentioning it!"

The sheer stupidity of that comment was one of the things that kept me getting up at 7:00 on Saturday mornings for two years to go to the clinic. But it could be discouraging, too, when you realized that was the level of ignorance we were dealing with. They thought trusting women with their own bodies was "arrogant". How on earth do you even rationalize that? How do you put up with that week after week, along with the nasty pictures and slogans and female antis who were born long after Roe v Wade and thus don't even know what they'd be in for if they got their way?

Well - and this would be where the big climax comes if I were writing a movie screenplay or something - the answer didn't just come to me. It's a real incident that happened one Saturday morning. One of my fellow escorts was a grad student in women's health policy (or maybe the official title of the program was just "women's health"; I forget), and she told me about it during a lull in visits. Remember the Long Skirt Brigade from several paragraphs ago? Later on that morning, while my fellow escort and I were still chatting, two of them came over to us.

"Excuse me," one of them asked. "Did I hear you say you were studying women's health?"

"Yes."

"How come?"

"To fight back against people like you, frankly," my friend said.

The girl laughed, surprisingly politely, and went on to ask my friend what she knew about polycystic ovarian syndrome. It turned out she had several symptoms of PCOS (unexplained weight gain, irregular periods, etc) and hadn't been able to get any help for it because...well, because she lived in a world that doesn't have a place for addressing women's health problems. My friend answered her questions as best she could, and made some recommendations for how to get help. And then they were off to return to their very conservative Christian college out in Virginia somewhere, where she probably wouldn't have access to a doctor who could or would help her.

That is what "trust women" means to me. We were (and back in the States, others still are) fighting a battle that features almost constant hate and ugliness and occasionally results in somebody getting shot, but every now and then, a young woman figures out that she needs to cross the line for her own good. Why? Because we trust women, and they don't.

(A big shout out here to anyone from WACDTF if you happen to read this. Give my regards to 16th Street!)

Not quite the solution I was looking for

2010-01-20T16:24:00.003+08:00

Do you ever get the feeling that you inadvertently caused the wrong solution to the right problem?

Allow me to explain. Singapore has a lot of great restaurants, but for reasons I haven't quite been able to figure out, service here is the worst of any major city I've ever been to, consistently. I've thought of a number of possible explanations - it's an extension of the local culture where people tend to act like robots and not pay much attention to anybody else; some wait staff are nervous about using their English with a native; I moved here from Paris and that's an impossible act to follow - but really, it's anybody's guess why. In any case, I've never experienced more cases of waiters hearing something other than what I really ordered (as I discussed here, or waiting on some people before others who've been waiting longer, or just plain ignoring hungry patrons. Along the way, I have also discovered that "Are you ready to order?" and "Have you already ordered?" sound just about the same with a Singaporean accent. I do know one unlucky waiter who will never make that mistake again after he asked me the latter and I heard the former and answered "yes". When he walked away, I got up and followed him and made very clear what I had heard!

But I digress. Among the numerous "good food, bad service" experiences I've had was a bratwurst place here. If you know me well, you're probably thinking I don't like bratwurst at all. And you're right, I don't. But this place also has - or at least had - the best pancakes in Singapore, as I discovered one morning when I was at that particular mall waiting for some store to open. Since the pancakes were terrific and that's hard to find in Singapore, I made a note to come back and have them again next time.

And I tried to. Oh, how I tried to.

But on my return visit, I placed my order, paid for it and went back into the seating area and waited. And waited. And waited. After about ten minutes, some other people turned up in the dining area. Ten minutes or so after that, their food came. Mine still hadn't. I asked the waiter where my food was, and he said he'd check on it. A few minutes later, he returned and said it would be out shortly. Around that time another party came in. We're now talking at least fifteen minutes after I had arrived. Next time I saw the waiter, he had their food. He once again said my pancakes were on the way. That was the last straw: I got up and went back up front, and politely asked for my money back. I got it, with apologies. That at least was nice. This is one of those places where you can see the grill right by the register, and - you guessed it - they had just poured my pancakes on the grill, after having served everybody else first! The sad thing was, I wasn't surprised.

This is where the wrong solution comes in. Last week, I had occasion to walk by the place again, and I happened to glimpse the menu. Something wasn't quite right, so I stopped and read the whole thing. Sure enough, I hadn't misread it or overlooked anything.

They no longer carry pancakes.

Well, that's one way to avoid repeating a mistake, I guess. But it doesn't really get to the root of the problem, does it?

Sorry, Teddy

2010-01-20T16:17:00.003+08:00

Here's a little something I posted on Daily Kos a few days ago:

I have explained elsewhere that if I lived in Massachusetts, I wouldn't be able to bring myself to vote for Coakley. Does that mean I would vote for Brown despite his being a bigot and a shill for the insurance industry? I hope not, but...well, let's just say I'm very grateful I don't vote in the Bay State at this point.

That said, win or lose, I'm already sick and tired of the argument that health care reform depends on this particular seat. If Brown wins (or, more accurately speaking, if Coakley loses), then the Republicans will have picked up one seat, which will be the least senior seat in the upper chamber, and they will be highly unlikely to retain it in 2012, and they'll know it. The Dems will still have 59 seats, and Harry Reid will still be making Mister Rogers look like Malcolm X when it comes to strong leadership, and Obama will still be putting way, way, way too much emphasis on achieving bipartisan consensus with a party that has no real interest in such things. That will be the reason why health care reform fails again if it does, not because the Dems nominated the wrong person to hold the Massachusetts seat, still leaving them with the biggest majority either party has had since 1978.

My opinion hasn't changed a bit, except perhaps that Brown's extremely tasteless comment regarding what he'd like to do to Coakley with a curling iron would probably have guaranteed that I'd have voted for Snoopy if I lived in MA. I don't support him any more than I supported Coakley, and I sincerely hope he loses in 2012, but I'm not at all sorry we won't have to explain away having a senator on our side of the aisle who doesn't seem to have any qualms about destroying innocent people's lives for political gain.

"American Thinker" article on Martha Coakley

2010-01-15T15:41:00.003+08:00

If you or someone you know votes in Massachusetts, please read this before you vote in the Senate election, and please think long and hard about the fact that even I would vote Republican in this case.

Yes, American Thinker is a conservative site. Yes, I noticed the insulting use of "Democrat" where it should be "Democratic" and the gratuitous swipe at Barney Frank (what I wouldn't give for him to run for Senate, by the way), and the rather odd comment about Louise Woodward that seems to conclude that she was guilty. But unfortunately, it gets most of the facts right. The seat will be up again in 2012, and if Brown wins, he'd probably lose next time to just about any other Democrat. If Coakley wins, as the article says, she'll probably be senator for life. And we are talking about someone who has no qualms about destroying innocent lives for her political gain.

Speaking of which, the 1980s daycare sex abuse witch-hunt has always been a favorite target of the "men's rights" crowd, partially because Janet Reno was behind one of the false convictions and partially because they always blame feminists when an innocent man goes to prison, as many did in this case. (A certain ex-girlfriend of mine - those of you who know me personally don't need a clue as to which one - actually told me once that a few false convictions were perfectly acceptable it it meant keeping women and girls safe from the bad guys. She probably didn't really mean to say it, but she did say it.) As I always say when this topic comes up, don't fall into the trap of guilt by association here. Smoking isn't good for you just because Hitler didn't do it, after all. Having a female senator who built her career on false convictions would only hurt our credibility against the "men's rights" crowd, if it comes to that.

Incidentally, one thing in that article really jumps out at me: "Periodic internet polls in Massachusetts show that more than two-thirds of the respondents think the Amirault family was unjustly prosecuted and convicted." When I first started following the Amirault case back in 1998 (I worked for a polling firm whose clients included Scott Harshbarger, who helped railroad the Amiraults and then ran unsuccessfully for governor), polls showed quite the opposite. Of course, Harshbarger lost that year, and Tom Reilly (who also had his finger in the case) managed to lose to Mitt "Divorce is mandatory in France" Romney for governor in 2002, so maybe there is hope. [CORRECTION: Reilly ran in 2006, not 2002, and he lost the Democratic primary to Deval Patrick. Thank God.]

The mother of all business trips, or As long as I'm moving...

2009-12-14T13:54:00.002+08:00

Friday afternoon saw the latest of a series of altercations with the boss regarding why we weren't making more of an impact. I told him for the umpteenth time that he really needed to start taking the US market more seriously, since breaking through there will give us the resources to hit the ground running in almost any other country (and we definitely don't have that yet). This time, though, he listened. I'm not sure why I got through to him this time where I was never able to before, but I did.

He agreed with me. And then he asked me to write up an itinerary for a two month trip to the US, starting shortly after the New Year. So, in January, it's off to San Francisco for a few weeks, then Las Vegas for a conference in February, and probably at least three other cities. I don't know which cities yet, but I could be visiting as far afield as Boston. The idea of traveling with my boss for that long isn't the most appealing thing I've heard. But for reasons that aren't important here, it would have been a big mistake for either of us to try to pull this trip off alone (and I was deeply afraid he was going to try), so dealing with him will be an acceptable price.

Whatever the drawbacks, San Francisco is one of my favorite cities, I've never been to Las Vegas, and I haven't been "home" in over three years. So this was quite the early Christmas present. Stay tuned for more details.

Just what are the Christmas-in-the-tropics blues?

2009-12-09T18:01:00.002+08:00

Since I got in a bit of trouble on Facebook for saying I had "the Christmas in the tropics blues" (and I truly am sorry I made my friends in Denver read that!), perhaps I should elaborate a bit here. There's a limit to how much I can do so without betraying some personal confidences, so I'll have to be circumspect. Here goes.

I like Singapore, and I like my job. In this economy, I like just having a job at all, if it comes to that, but for the most part I really do like my job in its own right. But sometimes a job can't help but make you feel rather blah, and I've been working my way through a case of that this week. (I was quite sick the week before that, so that probably has something to do with it.) And yes, while a 30 degree C/90 degree F December is a hard thing for a guy whose other homes have included New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado and Northern Europe to wrap his mind around, I'd rather cope with the weather here than in any of those places at the moment. My best wishes go out to those who are there now!

Here's where the circumspection (is that a word? it should be) comes in. Since I finished Part I of my novel last week, I finally got to work on Part II this week and it's off to a great start. But I wrote a really good line the other night that made for a rather stark revelation for me. It was something a lead character said about some of the choices he's made in his work- and personal-life, and after getting it down on paper I realized I was really thinking of myself. It made me think about my job and how things have gone in Singapore and certain decisions I've made since I've been here and the results thereof. And yes, it triggered a rather bad case of the blues. When I first came here, I wasn't at all sure I'd be here long, and if I had to guess as to whether or not I'd be at this company beyond the six month internship I had initially, I'd have guessed no.

But here I still am. For the most part, that's been all for the better. As I noted over a year ago, I'm a lot better off here than I'd have been at most other places I might have ended up working. The company has grown quite a bit, and things are looking very positive. Logically, I know this was about the best outcome that could have happened compared to the other places I looked into moving to.

Of course, not all in life is logical. I have always liked Singapore and I still do, but the place can be a bit oppressive in how businesslike and button-down it is, and it's also awfully remote from most of the people I care about. That has had its share of costs, and this week I accidentally brought a reminder of that upon myself when my art imitated my life. More than anything, I wish at some point I could have my career follow my life instead of the other way around. I guess there's no reason why that can't happen at some point down the road, of course. This too shall pass.

Yeah, I know this is one of the more self-indulgent posts I've ever put up here, and that it's also rather cryptic. Sorry about that. I just had to write it down for my own sanity at this point. And somewhat surprisingly, I do feel better!

Bess Lomax Hawes, RIP...and who knew?!

2009-12-08T13:54:00.002+08:00

I'm sad to hear Bess Lomax Hawes died last week (I've been sick and also busy with other things, and hadn't kept up with the news), though I have to confess I'm a bit surprised she was still alive. Now, I know who she was, since her family is just as important to folk music as the Kennedys are to politics and because she was a member of The Almanac Singers. (That picture on the obituary, incidentally, is the only picture of them I have ever seen. It pops up every time they are mentioned. You'd think there must be at least one other one out there somewhere.) But somehow, I had no idea she wrote "Charlie on the MTA".

Actually, I had no idea anybody wrote it, if you will. I thought I read somewhere that the original version was a wire recording by an unknown male singer sometime in the 1940s. I suppose that could be true, actually, and the account I read simply didn't bother to mention that not only was the song's authorship known even if the singer of the earliest known recording wasn't, but that said author was a member of one of the most important families in American music. Strange omission, though.

I did know that she lived in Topanga Canyon back before it was taken over by rock stars (or even before there was such a thing as a rock star), because I've read about Woody Guthrie staying at her house on his last trip across the country, after he'd already been committed once. She apparently cut his visit short because of his habit of lounging around the backyard naked when she had little kids. How much more hip could a person be in the early fifties, huh?

Anyhow. There are a number of people I really admire for living a truly full life even if they never become household names, and she was one already. How strange that I didn't know that key part of her life story, though!

Every now and then, petitions do pay off...

2009-11-08T12:14:00.002+08:00

Emma Thompson will remove her name from Polanski petition, and good for her! Already one of my favorite actresses...although my appreciation is tempered by the fact that she had to be talked into it. Still, great news.

Oh, and the elections?

2009-11-06T11:41:00.002+08:00

Gail Collins nailed it. I don't have much else to add.

I will say that I'm less than delighted with Bill Owens winning in NY-23. He's anti-choice and uncertain at best on gay rights (the official Republican nominee was actually better on both issues), and we really don't need another Democrat like that in the House. Besides that, the whole thing did start with Obama nominating a Republican to be Secretary of the Army, which is a wonderful way to reinforce the already-widespread mentality that Democrats just aren't capable of handling national defense. But at least Owens is a dependable vote on health care, and I can't deny the symbolic value of picking up a seat that includes territory last represented by a Democrat when Ulysses Grant was president, not to mention that the Republicans are now down to two districts out of 29 in New York. It wasn't that long ago that they had almost all the districts outside NYC. That brings the total Republican share of the Northeast House delegation down to 16 out of 92 if I've counted correctly. Has the mainstream media stopped clucking about how Democrats can't win in the South yet?

Work updates, and an invitation

2009-11-06T11:26:00.002+08:00

I do try to keep this blog focused on my personal life (stop that laughing - travel, politics, music and occasional angst about stuff in general...that is my personal life), but, well, there hasn't been much of one lately, as work has been quite hectic. No complaints there, given how hard it is to find a job these days. In any case, that, coupled with the fact that my job involves spreading the word about my company's services all over the world, has gotten me thinking I should put out a plug for those services here.

You'll notice I don't mention the company by name. Although I probably wouldn't get in any trouble for naming it here, I do want this to remain mostly a personal-issues blog, so I'd rather it not turn up on a Google search of the company name. But I can and will link to it here. I'd like to encourage everybody to create an account for yourselves. It is free for consumers, with no hidden costs whatsoever, and you can start saving information about your purchases (such as date of purchase, warranty expiration dates, and even saving a copy of the receipt) right away. At participating stores, they'll enter the information for you at point of sale and even register the warranty online. Odds are there are no participating stores where you are unless you live in Singapore; but if I do my job, there will be soon. Now is a great time to get in on the ground floor.

Note we also maintain a blog, on which almost all the recent updates are from me, so you can see I haven't been as silent as you think on the web lately! We are also on Twitter, and yes, all the tweets so far are from me. I hope you'll give us a try, wherever you are, as we will be reaching out to retailers near you shortly. (Next stop, the US beginning in December - I might even get a trip to San Francisco out of it, which you will of course read about here!)

It's October 29

2009-10-29T14:52:00.002+08:00

...and Starbucks has its Christmas drinks out.

I'm rejoicing at the availability of Peppermint Latte once again, of course. But still, it's not even November yet!

It did give me a good idea for a marketing gimmick for the company. I'm going to see about setting up a registration drive at my favorite mall in the near future.

"Bowling" for the right to call it that

2009-10-26T10:40:00.003+08:00

In these lean economic times, bowling is my one extravagance. Maybe I shouldn't really call it an extravagance, actually, as it's pretty cheap compared to most other ways I could be spending my spare time. But it feels like an extravagance for whatever reason. And I will bowl a 150 one of these days...but I digress.

The last time I went bowling, there was a party of three in the next lane. University students, I think. And they were bowling very, very badly. I'm not talking about people who are just learning how to bowl and are still hitting a lot of gutter balls (that still happens to me more often than I'd like!). They weren't even really trying. They were just tossing the balls every which way and not even always rolling them hard enough to make it all the way to the end of the lane. (Yep, just like Mr. Burns.) They did seem to be having a good time, so more power to them. But I do wonder why anybody would spend money on something like that!

Halloween isn't the only scary day in October

2009-10-15T17:09:00.002+08:00

The good news about October thus far:
1. My work visa, which was set to expire in November, was renewed for two years. There was no reason to expect that wouldn't happen, but still, that it did is obviously good news.
2. I may have scored a big investment in our company. Last Friday we were one of five startup companies who were invited to address a meeting of a local investors' group. (The group claims we were chosen from a few hundred applicants - sounds like an exaggeration to me, but why should I argue the point?) Each company rep was invited to give a ten-minute presentation to the group, after which we left the room for half an hour or so before being invited back for lunch. At lunch, the event organizers notified us as to whether or not any investors were interested in us, and if so, we could expect to hear from them in the next two weeks. This time around, only two of the five companies got any interest from any of the investors - and we were one of them.

The bad news: the boss has been on a tear about something or other, and has been really ungrateful for all that has gone well as a result. I don't know just what he's upset about (I do have my theories, but it wouldn't be appropriate to post the details here), but it has made for a very unpleasant week when we should have been celebrating a job well done. The other day he actually accused me of "forgetting" to include certain information in our presentation to the investors, when in fact I had deliberately omitted it because the organizers had told me the investors wouldn't consider it relevant, meaning it would have been a waste of time. We had ten minutes, period, so it made no sense to include anything I was specifically told I didn't need!

I explained this in what I believed was a reasonably diplomatic manner, considering how absurd his complaint was. Believe it not, his response was that "the other presenters" did include the information he had referred to.

That's right, they did.

Of course, they did not get any positive responses from the investors.

We did.

But I should have done a presentation more like theirs.

Even Dilbert can't touch that. Geez.

The nobel prize

2009-10-12T09:30:00.002+08:00

See here for my favorite reaction so far.

Since there is no Jimmy Carter or Nelson Mandela waiting in the wings this year, that reason sounds as good as any to me.

Generation gaps within a generation

2009-10-05T09:41:00.003+08:00

I'm used to making music-references that go over the heads of people my own age. (The all time champ was the time in France when a friend came to a party with a painted-on mole on her face..."Just like Cindy Crawford," she explained. "Yeah," I replied, "and Peggy Lee had one too." Of course, nobody else in the room knew who Peggy Lee was.) But for some reason, I never see them coming, no matter how many times things like that have happened in the past.

So was I reminded yesterday while Gyle and I were waiting in a taxi queue outside a mall. After we'd been waiting a few minutes - which can seem a lot longer when you're outside on a Singapore afternoon and you want to go home - she commented on the cab shortage by singing. "Where have all the taxis gone...you know that song?"

I replied that I did, but it sounded to me like she didn't have the tune quite right. It took a few minutes of comparing notes before I figured out that I was thinking of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and she was thinking of "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" Oops.

LIQUOR RUINS COUNTRY, FAMILY AND LIFE

2009-09-25T14:27:00.004+08:00

Well I've been walking through this country
And my eyes are open wide
And the things I've seen and heard
You couldn't imagine them if you tried
-Tom Paxton, "A Rumblin' in the Land"

If I am ever involved in making a movie that involves a high-speed car chase, I have decided I want my stunt drivers to be from India. Having witnessed the trifecta of Boston, Paris and Kuala Lumpur, I thought I was inoculated against shock at crazy drivers. But you ain’t seen nothing, my friend, until you’ve driven through Chennai. All the sightings of entire families on a scooter that used to frighten me in Taiwan? At least in Taiwan they all wore helmets and they didn’t take newborns on the scooters with them, with the mothers holding them while riding side-saddle. Unbelievable.

As if to drive the point home, on one of numerous trips with the drivers my boss hired for our stay in Chennai, I actually got laughed at for fastening my seatbelt. That, of course, just strengthened my resolve to buckle up. Either life is cheap here or everybody is a much better driver than it appears. Trucks share the road with barefoot pedestrians and nobody even blinks an eye.

By now you may have even guessed, if I were to describe Chennai in one word, it would be crowded. Very crowded. That’s not really a surprise, if you know anything about India, but you have to see it to really appreciate just how crowded it is. Definitely an eye-opener to any Westerner who hasn’t experienced the place before. If I ever bother with the Foreign Service Examination again (extremely unlikely, by the way), the experience I gained on this trip will be invaluable.

Before I delve further into my trip to India (my first), I feel I should add a disclaimer here. I have a long history of making people think I was miserable with certain experiences that I actually enjoyed quite a bit. I think this is partially because I don’t shy away from sharing the bad as well as the good (especially on trips like this that were not for pleasure anyway), and partially because some people just don’t get that there is a lot of gray area between love and hate. Lest I sound like I’m blaming it entirely on others, though, I’ve run into this issue enough times to know that I sometimes come across as sounding gloomy when I don’t mean to. So rest assured that regardless of what you might think after reading the following, I didn’t hate India. Far from it.

That said, Chennai is a very poor and crowded city. I saw an awful lot of people living and working in conditions most North Americans and Europeans (and most Singaporeans for that matter) could fathom if they wanted to, and they probably wouldn't want to. Anybody who goes to a place like Chennai and sees only nice things is probably not someone you would want to associate with, to put it bluntly. Although all our meetings were conducted in a clean and modern convention centre (and they went well enough), everything I saw from the car on the way to and from the hotel and the airport was, well, educational. That’s the most diplomatic word I can think of. Chennai is run down and badly overcrowded, and you definitely know you’re in the developing world.

But that’s where the definitely not-gloomy part of the story comes in. As is the case with most poor places (and I really don’t know why this is the case, but it usually is), the people there are remarkably nice. I noticed this on the one and only night the boss and I and our two local escorts went out to eat at a local eatery, the quintessentially Indian type of place where you eat with your right hand – sopping up the beans and sauces up off a banana leaf with vegetable bread – and keep your left hand under the table. That took some getting used to, but I was pleasantly surprised at the locals’ reaction to having a foreigner in their midst. (The boss is originally from India, though he’s now a Singaporean citizen, so I was the only one.) They treated me exactly as any other, except that they spoke to me in English (if they addressed me at all). Back in Taiwan, eating at a place like that always got a lot of attention, though I didn’t mind most of the time, and even in Singapore it sometimes does, even though there are a lot of white people here. Not in Chennai, surprisingly. We had apples for dessert, and I finished mine in the car back to the hotel. When I was finished, I held onto the core until we got back and I could dispose of it in a trash can. Our driver laughed at this (good-naturedly, to be fair) and told me I should have just rolled the window down and tossed the core out. “This isn’t Singapore or America,” he said, “You are in INDIA!” Yes, he was probably joking – but the roadsides in Chennai do in fact look like somebody’s wastebasket. Draw your own conclusions!

Another perk of staying in a city like Chennai is that you pretty much have to stay at a high-end hotel, since it’s either that or a flophouse. So I ate like royalty for all four days there, and had pleasant surroundings for the downtime between meetings. I finally got some work done on my novel for the first time in far too long, too. I love expense accounts.

The trip also brought me to Bangalore, and I was prepared for more of the same. I was pleasantly surprised, though. Starting with the spare but clean airport, Bangalore proved to be a lot more modernized and affluent than Chennai (though you still definitely know what country you’re in). Fortunately, this did not make the people I met any less pleasant to deal with, and the food was just as good. There is, of course, not a lot I can say about the meetings in public except that they went pretty well. There wasn’t a lot of time for playing tourist here either, but the guy I was meeting with did make time for a night on the town for the both of us. Sports bars look pretty much the same wherever you go. The more exotic type of bars do not. At one point in the evening we found ourselves in a swanky looking place with the tables and chairs lined up against one wall. On the other side of the room were lined up, well, a dozen or so young women in traditional Indian garb who stood there and smiled at you until and unless you pulled out a wad of rupees. In that event, the one you flashed the bills at would come over and talk to you for a few minutes. Think of it as chaste prostitution, I guess. No, of course I did not partake of this, but my business contact did. It definitely made for a good scene for a story, anyhow.

The business I was there to attend to was concluded by midafternoon on the last day, but my plane didn’t take off until quite late. That left about six hours to kill, and my contact took it upon himself to fill those with a tour of the local shopping mall (pretty lame by Singaporean standards, but hey, it’s a mall) and a welcome dinner...and, somewhat oddly from my perspective, a visit to his home to meet his family. One of those odd but pleasant cultural differences, I guess, and I am always curious about where and how people in the cities I visit actually live. It beat languishing at the airport all evening.

If I’ve counted correctly, I believe India is the 24th country I have been to. Not bad considering the number was three (USA, Canada and Denmark) just six years ago. And it had some of the best food of the bunch thus far!

Oh, and the rather discouraging title of this post? It was posted outside the hotel bar in Chennai, engraved on a plaque along with the bar’s license number and its opening hours. As an American, I found this perversely refreshing: my country isn’t the only one whose religious right has ridiculous pull in the government after all. The guys I asked about it in Bangalore had a similar reaction; they said their part of India was much more tolerant.

Sail on, Mary Travers!

2009-09-24T14:27:00.002+08:00

(I actually wrote this the day after she died, but haven't had the time to post it until now, hence the slightly out-of-date comments in the last paragraph.)

I knew this day was coming the last time I saw Peter, Paul and Mary on television, which would be about three years ago. That didn’t make the news any less sad when I heard it, of course.

Some of my very earliest memories are of my dad singing me to sleep with “500 Miles” when I was a little kid. Nearly three decades later, I overheard one of my kids in Taiwan singing it. That shows how universal her music was, I suppose. There were plenty of other memories along the way, such as long debates with friends over whether or not “Puff the Magic Dragon” was about marijuana (it isn’t), and listening to then-new LifeLines all the time just before and after I graduated from college. The sentiment of “I could no more stop dreaming/than I could make them all come true” was all too fitting for that first leap out into the real world, which saw a lot of dreams go bust for over a year before I got on my feet.

With that bittersweet memory in mind, I cued up my favorite tracks from LifeLines and No Easy Walk to Freedom last night at the hawker center to accompany my roast duck and Carlsberg. It’s a good thing I was in public, or “I’d Rather Be in Love” probably would have had me bawling.

Thanks for the memories, Mary, and “don’t let the light go out”!

Teh Stoopid! It burns!

2009-08-11T09:57:00.003+08:00

"Keep your government hands off my Medicare" is an oldie but a goodie...but is it the dumbest soundbite yet in the health care debate? Not even close. I give to you:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Words fail me.

Worth every damn bit of sacrifice!

2009-08-06T10:26:00.002+08:00

As I discussed here and later here, getting my employment pass last year was a not-much-fun experience. (I'm currently awaiting word on a permanent residency application, but that's another rant and it really hasn't been that bad so far anyway.) At the time, the biggest saving grace I could find was that it was at least a lot easier than it was in France. But that really isn't saying much.

Coming back from another trip to Malaysia yesterday, though, I was reminded that it really was worth all the hassle. Having the EP entitles me to enter Singapore through the locals-only booth, where there is usually a very short line or none at all. The memory of waiting at the immigration office for two hours and trying to explain to someone who doesn't speak English that "certificate" and "diploma" are the same thing? That fades away. One less line to stand in at the airport? That's a gift that keeps on giving!

Gates and Obama

2009-07-25T11:53:00.003+08:00

Drunk with the memory of the ghetto
Drunk with the lure of the looting
And the memory of the uniforms shoving with their sticks
Asking, "Are you looking for trouble?"
-Phil Ochs, "In the Heat of the Summer"

Patrolman Carlos Figueroa said in a police report that he heard Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer, ask for Gates' identification and heard Gates say, "No, I will not!" He also said Gates was shouting at Crowley, calling him a racist and saying, "This is what happens to black men in America!"

Yeah, and guess what? It is what happens to black men in America. Gates reacted in a way we now know was wrong, but he had no way of knowing that at the time. What he did know was that he was a black man being accosted by the cops in his own home, which was in a city with a long history of racial tensions. I'll bet not too many of the people who are wagging their fingers at him now have any firsthand knowledge of what that's like. (I have heard of at least one black cop who came to his colleague's defense, but I've always suspected the blue wall is quite a bit higher than the black one.) Obama probably should have kept his mouth shut until he knew both sides of the story, but give him this: he knows what it's like to be a black man in America, and specifically in Cambridge. He made a mistake, but it was an extremely easy mistake to make. Let's get off their backs already.

One of those things I never questioned

2009-07-21T13:17:00.004+08:00

For as long as I've been aware of Woodstock, I've been hearing that a varying number of babies were born there. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Who knew?

For what it's worth, I don't buy the explanation the article offers:

There is a theory that neither mother nor child particularly want Woodstock to define their lives, and have chosen to keep their distinction a private matter.

I could see that being the case with the child, depending on whether or not his or her parents sold their VW Bus and became Republicans like so many flower children did, or whether they're among the even more annoying variety who are still hippies 40 years later - and either way, depending on whether or not the kid rebelled against them and to what extent. But the mother? Everybody I've ever met who was at Woodstock (or claims to have been there) never shuts up about it. And yes, that includes the ones who are now Republicans. People just love to tell how they went from one extreme to the other and you will someday too.

Truly worth the wait!

2009-07-02T10:45:00.002+08:00

It's about time.

As I wrote elsewhere yesterday, I'm almost glad this turned out the way it did. On the one hand, I hate that so much money was wasted on the court battle when the outcome has been known for months, and I hate that we had to go through the motions on all this when everybody knew it was really just about keeping that seat vacant for as long as possible, and I hate that Sen. Klobuchar's office has been stuck with twice its normal workload since January.

But for all that, let's remember why Norm Coleman won that senate seat in 2002 in the first place. It was because the right wing s**t machine got away with some spectacularly cynical lies about what did and didn't happen at Paul Wellstone's funeral. I consider the whole episode second only to the Florida 2000 debacle. Yes, somebody in the crowd said something not very nice, but it was not the hate-fest it was made out to be at all. But the truth didn't get out until the damage had been done, as usual. As for those who do know the truth and still think the liberals were out of line, it's only fair to ask yourself, what if the shoe were on the other foot? Say it was Tom Coburn or Trent Lott who had died in that plane crash, and Wellstone had come to the wake...do you really believe every single person in the crowd would treat him with respect?

The pathetic thing is, I've met quite a few wingnuts who really and truly believe they would.

And as I noted in my post-election roundup last November, it was none other than Al Franken who set the record straight in his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. (Anyone who hasn't read that one yet, do it. Soon. Buy a new copy if you can find one; he could really use the cash right now!) So, although it's a shame he nearly lost the race to Coleman and that he - and we - had to wait so long for this day, I love the fact that he not only won, but that Coleman humiliated himself for months afterward trying to fight the results. It's an all too fitting end to a Senate career that began for the worst possible reason in the first place. (Okay, Saxby Chambliss gives him a run for his money on that front, but he's from a state famous for sending scum to Washington. Of course, having said that, I now have to acknowledge the inimitable Rep. Michele "Smalley-Hoot" Bachmann of...Minnesota. I'll quit now while I'm behind.) And then there's the delicious response from Fox News, which has started already.

Finally, a thought on whether or not we on the left ought to still be angry at Franken for almost blowing the race in the first place. Back in November when it looked like he'd lost, I recall a lot of grousing on the blogs that Betty McCollum or Tim Walz could have easily beaten Coleman. Overlooking the fact that we really can't know that for sure (and that Walz barely counts as a Democrat on a lot of issues and we'd have been lucky to hang onto his House seat), it occurs to me that even if that is right, it's partly because they're much more conventional politicians. Which means we couldn't expect nearly as much of them in the Senate. And yes, of course that means our expectations of Franken are now somewhat inflated after all that everybody had to go through to get him there. But why shouldn't they be? Besides that, Franken really is something of a pioneer when it comes to fighting back against the right wing s**t machine. He was doing it back when Bill Clinton was still kissing Newt Gingrich's ring, and the mainstream media was referring to Rush Limbaugh as a "conservative commentator" and other nice sounding titles that gave him a lot more credit than he deserved. I think we can count on him. Mazel tov, Senator!

Timing is everything

2009-07-01T10:53:00.003+08:00

If you have to get sick in the midst of the swine flu pandemic, there's one silver lining. When I went to the clinic and said I'd had coldlike symptoms for about a week and they hadn't gone away, I was allowed to see a doctor much more quickly than I usually would! It wasn't swine flu, so there is that. It was a throat infection, and a day's worth of antibiotics later, I'm feeling somewhat better. It seems fitting that this happened during the middle of a move (which I had been greatly looking forward to, but still a move. They're stressful. More on that later.). Between the hassle of moving and the matter of my health, this week started out with it being a pretty safe bet that I would be a lot better off at the end of the week. It looks that way. I guess I'm also lucky that this came during a lull in business travel. The only thing worse than being sick is being sick and having to spend time in airports and on planes and in other people's offices.

Tonight will be my first night in the new flat, and I might even be able to breathe normally enough to sleep through it. I'll have some thoughts on the move shortly. Lots to tell there!

Wacko Jacko

2009-06-26T14:48:00.002+08:00

Well, I didn't expect that to be the next way he got his name in the news.

Like a lot of people my age, Thriller was (I think) the first album I ever bought, though I am probably one of the few who got it on vinyl rather than casette (remember, it came out the year before the CD was introduced). Since then, like most people my age, I have gone from loving it to hating it and back to conceding that it is a gem of a pop album even if everything else about its creator was repulsive. At least whatever demons inspired him to such a bizarre lifestyle will not be doing so any longer. RIP.

Overheard in a bookstore

2009-06-14T21:11:00.003+08:00

From a few students who apparently aren't poli-sci majors. One of them saw a Francis Fukuyama book and misread the author's name before realizing that's what it was..."Oh, I thought it said 'France Is F**k-a-yama'."

While basically meaningless, I do find that a refreshing response to the guy who predicted the end of civilization.

Dr. Tiller

2009-06-01T21:58:00.002+08:00

Back in DC, I volunteered as an escort at Planned Parenthood on weekends for a couple of years before I went to Taiwan. I have avoided discussing that on here because I know some of my friends disagree quite strongly with me on that particular issue. But not now.

When I heard the news this morning, it was entirely too easy to believe. Some - not all, but some - of those folks are just gonzo. Take it from someone who has stood three feet away and listened to them chant and pray and compare me to Hitler, what happened in Wichita was sad, but it just wasn't that big of a surprise.

I have to admit that I do have some positive memories of those confrontations. When the weather was nasty, some of us on both sides had a sense of humor about the whole thing..."God must be on one of our sides, to make the weather this nasty for the other side," that sort of thing. Some of us on both sides also recognized that we were more or less cut from the same cloth, just opposite sides of it. It really does take commitment to turn up anyplace you don't really need to be at 7:00 on Saturday morning.

But still. The ones who said things like "Here come the SS!" when we went to shield patients from them, and then told us in the next breath about the love of Christ; the ones who told crying patients that "you should be crying because you're about to kill your baby," the ones who greeted young families entering the clinic by telling the kids "They're gonna kill your little brother!"; the ones who accosted black patients with their bizarre (not entirely off-base, but still bizarre) theories about Margaret Sanger and her racism...as Jerry Falwell said about people like me after 9/11, "I point the finger in their face and say, You helped this happen."

Random observations from a business trip to Kuala Lumpur

2009-05-30T08:56:00.002+08:00

1. It's a shame when your boss invites you to indulge in room service on the company dime, but the hotel doesn't have room service for breakfast, only for dinner. (Who wants to eat dinner in bed? It just isn't the same.)

2. The BMW 760 is just as beautiful inside as out. Getting a lift in one owned by a client is quite an incentive to get out and sell more software, I must say.

3. Whatever images CCR's "Lodi" calls to mind, you probably never envision it sung by a Filipina in a red floor-length evening gown with a synthesizer for accompaniment. At least I never did, until now. But it was surprisingly enjoyable.

4. KL traffic really sucks.

5. Getting a ride to the airport in a KL taxi whose driver offered you a cheaper price than the train on the condition that he could get you there faster is a bigger thrill than any amusement park ride. But wear your seatbelt!

6. Singapore looks just a little bit cleaner and well kept every time I get back from anyplace else in the region.

Tuesday? Must be Indonesia

2009-05-21T12:23:00.002+08:00

It hadn't really been bothering me until fairly recently, but my first anniversary in Singapore just went by in April with me having not left the Garden City since the day I got off the plane from Paris last year. That's a rather long time to stay put! But for the first several months here, I had plenty of time for a vacation but no money, and since I got promoted in October I've had the opposite problem. Like I said, though, it hasn't bugged me much. For one thing, I knew the job would involve lots of business travel soon enough.

It's started!

For good measure, I also managed a weekend getaway just before it started. The True Love is in Kuala Lumpur for two weeks on a teaching job, so I flew up after work last Friday to join her for the weekend. Some of my longtime readers will recall that my reaction to KL last time I was there was a bit underwhelmed. I liked it, but not nearly as much as I liked Singapore. That's still the case, but I figure that makes it the perfect destination for a quick getaway.

Of course, my perspective was a bit different this time around, now that I actually live in Singapore. The first thing I noticed when the plane landed? (Well, the very first thing was relief that I'd finally gotten there, as the plane was delayed by two hours. Airasia.com is great for the most part, but very cheap plane tickets don't always come without a non-monetary price!) But after that, the first thing I noticed was all the older cars. By "older" I don't mean "old". I mean "more than five years old and looking like it". Hardly anybody in Singapore ever keeps a car for more than ten years because of very high taxes levied on anyone who does, and Singapore is a much more affluent country than Malaysia. So I knew I wasn't in Singapore anymore when I saw all the not-old-but-older cars. The traffic in downtown KL was a pretty clear sign of that too.

But it was a most enjoyable weekend. I finally made it up to the observation deck of the Petronas Towers (the tickets were gone for the day last time I was there), which is worth the trip. You're only allowed up there for five minutes or so, but there's only so much to see and the tickets are free. The only real drawback is waiting in line for them. While we were in line, I overheard a group of friends behind us speaking French and was somewhat panicked to realize just a year after leaving Paris, I could barely understand a word they were saying. Imagine my relief when (sorry, Pat) I found out they were from Quebec. We got a couple of pictures on the observation deck, although I hated the way I looked in one of them. I really do need to practice my Photo Smile.

Then were off to do our share of window-shopping and fine dining at the slightly-different subset of Western outlets than that found in Singapore. One big advantage KL has over Singapore is that it's a lot cheaper. We also made it to lunch at the local Hard Rock Cafe - one of the less impressive ones I've seen, but at least I can say I've been there. (Amsterdam and Denver are still my favorites, and Paris gets an honorable mention because they have the guitar Jimi Hendrix played on The Tonight Show.) Finally, we visited a street market. I distinctly recall doing just that back in 2004 - it might have even been the same market - and finding the experience underwhelming because it was exactly like the night markets in Taiwan. Since there is nothing quite like that in Singapore, it was quite a bit more of a novelty this time, a welcome walk down memory lane. I also netted a badly-needed new laptop bag.

Wanting to maximize my time with Gyle and away from work, I had bought my return ticket for late afternoon on Sunday. Oops. Luckily the plane was on time this time around. Unluckily, that meant I got back to Singapore at about 8:00. That wouldn't be too bad normally, but I had some practicing to do for the first business trip, which was taking place Monday. So I went to the office at nearly 9:00 on Sunday night and made sure all the bells and whistles were working, only they weren't. Two phone calls and a lengthy wait later (it's a very good thing I like my job as well as I do), I had just enough time to go home and re-pack for Jakarta before bed.

The plane to Jakarta didn't take off until past noon, so at least I was able to make my trip back to the airport fairly liesurely. I got there in plenty of time. The boss, just as characteristically, got there at the last minute and then wanted to go over the website one last time in the terminal. Hey, I wasn't going anywhere just yet anyhow! As workplace drama would have it, we noticed one big error and had to use my personal e-mail account to get in touch with the office to have it fixed because the official e-mail didn't work in the airport for some reason. Then we were off.

Don't worry, the business half of the trip was great. Naturally, that was something of an afterthought to me as we landed in Jakarta, since I'd never been there before. One thing any Westerner who spends time in Singapore is likely to notice is that the locals are terrified of traveling in their neighboring countries. They don't quite say that, of course, but it's easy enough to see that they are from the advice they'll give you. Our marketing consultant warned us repeatedly about how to get through immigration without having to pay bribes by lying about certain things, and if you do get escorted into the back room, just pay the bribe to get out of harm's way, blah blah blah. As it turned out, I was almost glad he'd told us so many horror stories, because the reality was pretty bad (half an hour in line to get my visa!) but not that bad.

Indonesia's visas are among the more attractive ones I've had grace my passport. Pale green and white, and almost worth the wait. As for bribes and bullying guards, I ran into no such thing. More helpfully, we had been told to take only Bluebird or Silverbird taxis as they're the only trustworthy transportation services for foreigners. That, of course, is a pretty valuable resource in a place like Jakarta. Once again on the ride to the hotel, I was reminded how lucky Americans (and Singaporeans) are, as there was poverty everywhere. Nothing I hadn't seen before, but it had been a while since I had seen it. Needless to say, it was a fairly depressing sight and, even had there been time for any tourist activities (which there wasn't), would have taken away any desire to that end by the time we got to the hotel.

On a brighter note, the Hotel Ciputra is quite nice - I highly recommend it - and the local Bintang Beer they served in the lounge went well with our first, informal business meeting with a local friend of the boss'. (If you're thinking it was irresponsible for me to drink in front of the boss, guess who ordered the drinks in the first place?) That success had us both in a good mood when we went to the mall next door - complete with security checkpoints at the doors - for dinner. As it was still fairly early at that point, I might have gone out for a bit of sightseeing in a city I was more familiar with. But not here.

The big meeting was the following afternoon, which meant I had all morning to practice, and practice I did. For an hour or so. The rest of the morning was spent sipping sparkling water and waiting for the boss to turn up. We finally got down to business after lunch. The hardest thing about the meeting was finding the office where it was to be held, which was in a strip-mall where tourists don't usually go. Our first official off-site presentation went great, but there's not a lot I can repeat here (nothing too secretive - it just wasn't that interesting!). It was a big enough success that I will probably be going back there next month to finalize a deal. At least this time I'll know where to find the office. Maybe I'll get to the Hard Rock Cafe then too.

We'd had some concerns about getting back to the airport in time during rush hour, but they were unfounded. (Traffic was awful, but it wasn't very far to go.) Getting out of the country proved a lot easier than getting in, something I hadn't been expecting for some reason. So the first business trip was a pretty good one. I finally got what I signed up for.

"Misquoted", "Misconstrued", What do they REALLY mean, then?

2009-05-11T10:32:00.003+08:00

(Cross-posted at Daily Kos)

If you've read the Salon article about the tea parties by now (and if you haven't, you should), odds are the line borrowed for the title has stuck with you: "On 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building." It's kind of hard to even begin to think of how to respond to that, or to even try, isn't it? In an article full of outrageous and sometimes disgusting comments, that one really stands head and shoulders above (or below, as it were) all else.

But it's not the most telling line in the story. Close, but not quite.

To me, what's most telling is the way the guy who said that prefaced his shocking comment. Here's the whole remark: "I love my country and I don't like what's going on. Government -- to be honest with you, and this will probably be misquoted, but on 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building. They should have gone into the Capitol building, hit out, knocked out both sides of the aisle, we'd start from scratch, we'd be better off today." (Emphasis mine.)

"This will probably be misquoted but". I read and re-read the quote several times, both on its own and in the context of the article, and I was never able to make any real sense of that. How on earth could he expect that comment to be interpreted as anything less than outrageously offensive? The crazy thing is, it probably made perfect sense to him that as long as he attached that disclaimer, he could claim that he wasn't actually saying...well, exactly what he clearly did say. And of course the FoxNewsMax crowd would get it as well. If we say the guy called for destroying the Capitol and killing every member of Congress, well, we're a bunch of namby-pamby liberals and we're misquoting him just like he said we would! As for what he really did mean, well, I couldn't even formulate an educated guess on that one.

But the quote stuck with me all the same, because it sounded familiar. I couldn't quite place where I'd heard that trick before, but I was pretty sure I had. It took a while, but I remembered. Rep. Sue Myrick, R-NC used it to great effect back in 2003: "You know, and this can be misconstrued, but honest to goodness (husband) Ed and I for years, for 20 years, have been saying, `You know, look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.’ Every little town you go into, you know?"

Okay, so it's not surprising that two right-wingers used the same offensive rhetorical trick six years apart. Or maybe, it is surprising that it's only happened twice in that time (that I've noticed at least). It is, however, telling. Once I remembered the Myrick quote, I found myself also recalling how at the time, I wondered what she could possibly mean by "misconstrued" and I also wondered how that comment could possibly be construed in an inoffensive way. I couldn't think of a way then and I still can't.

Now that I've seen it twice, it's got me wondering if it's a form of dog-whistle politics. "I'm going to say something indisputably offensive, but first I'll warn you that it 'could be interpreted as being offensive' without actually quite saying that, so when The Liberal Media calls me on it, we can say 'Well, he/she told you it could be misinterpreted'." What do you all think? Have you ever heard anybody try to justify those comments, or offer up an inoffensive interpretation, no matter how implausible? Has this actually been going on for decades and I just never noticed?

(Halfway through writing this, it occurred to me that Jerry Falwell's "apology" for his comments about 9/11 sort of fit here too. But he really just implied the "this could be misinterpreted but" rather than saying it, and he only even did that after being rightly criticized for his comments, not while he was making them in the first place.)

Minor complaints

2009-05-06T16:48:00.007+08:00

One of the few good things about a long streak of bad luck is that you realize that a lot of annoying things just aren't that important. Since things have turned around pretty well for me since last year, that means I'm easily able to recognize that the right to complain about minor things is really kind of a luxury. Since I haven't had much to say on the blog lately, now is as good a time as any to note a few such things I've noticed about my current home. As with every great place to live, not everything is great. But close enough - usually.

Probably the ultimate Singapore stereotype is that people here are excessively slavish to the rules, down to the letter and common sense be damned. It's always "do exactly what you're told - even if it's not really what you're told after all." I was reminded of this recently when I ordered a coffee at Starbucks. The barista apparently rang up an iced coffee when I had not ordered it iced. When I got to the other end of the counter, the guy there called "Grande iced coffee!"
"I ordered a hot coffee," I told him.
"No, it says iced!"
Oh, well then, my mistake!
I did get my hot coffee, so no hard feelings. But geez.

Life here is extremely efficient, too. Sometimes that means details get lost in the hurry. Sometimes it's worse than that. While out to lunch a few weekends ago, I gave the waiter my order and noticed that he kept jumping in with an "Okay!" before I was actually finished with each part of the order. I knew without a doubt he was going to get something wrong, since he obvously wasn't really listening in his haste. Sure enough, when the drinks arrived, I could see something was wrong. I had ordered two sparkling waters. The sparkling water at that restaurant (like most) always came in bottles, but he had two glasses of what looked like sparkling water.
"Last time, I got a bottle..." I began to enquire.
Again, he was super-quick to the draw. "No! Always in glasses!"
When he'd set the glasses on the table and gone off, I figured out what didn't add up. It wasn't sparkling water, but Sprite. Same first syllable, you see, and he simply hadn't listened to the rest of what I said.
Once again, I did get what I really wanted in the end. But how frustrating is it when you see a problem coming, sense that something is off and try to ask about it, and still end up with a mistake? I was, of course, soon laughing it off as another distinctively stereotypical moment. And I was ever so slightly relieved the waiter had let me speak long enough to explain his mistake. I did have to talk fast.

This one isn't unique to Singapore, but is especially common here with all the malls and hawker centers: I really do not like it when people "camp out" on tables at food courts, leaving their umbrellas or packs of napkins or such to stake their claim to the table while they're off getting their food. I get that it's a competitive society and you've got to do what you've got to do. What does bug me is that someone often gets a table ahead of someone who actually got there first but got straight in line for food. If I get there first with my lunch, that means I probably got to the food court first, which means you can wait your turn.

Not a complaint, but a rather interesting observation: the local Borders accepts Brunei currency. I'm not sure why I find that interesting, but for whatever reason, I do. Last time I was there I asked the cashier if they get much of it, and she said they do. They don't accept currency from Indonesia or Malaysia, even though they're both much bigger and somewhat closer.

To err is human, to forgive divine

2009-05-06T16:03:00.003+08:00

...but nobody ever called me divine.

Some of you probably remember my rather nasty romantic misadventure a while back. My wounds have healed, of course, and I'm now happily involved with someone else. I don't know what she's up to now and I wish her no ill will. That said, I haven't forgotten how crushing it is to meet someone perfect for you, only to learn she'd rather be with someone she really ought to stay the heck away from. (Yeah, I know, that means she's not perfect for you by definition. Consider it the curse of a really wonderful first date...it does inflate expectations!)

In any case, that experience has had a couple of lasting impacts on me, like any sordid affair will. One of those is that when I hear stories about people messing around with their bosses and ending up in big trouble, I feel a lot less sympathy and a lot more schadenfreude (sp? - hey, I speak French, not German) than I used to. Even in cases where I really know I shouldn't laugh or feel anything but sympathy. Like this one, from right here in Singapore.

I want to feel bad for the both of them. But I keep thinking of what my best friend back in DC used to say when his prudish girlfriend hassled him about his fondness for South Park: "I don't want to like it, but I do!"

Exactamundo.

Truly a long, exhilarating, exhausting, stressful yet relaxing, poignant, wonderful weekend

2009-04-01T14:35:00.005+08:00

We were wild and young and willing
We still are in some ways
And every now and then
We still have one of those good old days
It makes me proud when I think out loud
About lovers and dreams and songs
How it always kept me going
And the best ones are never gone!

-Keith Sykes, "Those Were the Days"

I don't know why things can't balance themselves out a bit more in life. But at least when I get hit with one truly crummy thing after another in rapid succession like I did a year and a half ago, it's entirely plausible to think when things do finally get better, they'll get a lot better. Such were my thoughts at some point or other this past weekend, when I really didn't get a lot of time to think because I was busy with both work and play.

First, the news I'm sure you were all waiting for. Our product is out, and it's a hit. Well, at least it's a hit with the crowd that's been exposed to it thus far. We introduced it in a promotional event at an electronics store here over the weekend, and without sharing more information than I should on my personal blog, I can say expectations were surpassed. Actually, we didn't just surpass our goals, we destroyed them. It wasn't even close, as I feared it might be right up until about an hour and a half into our promotion, when our first batch of customers appeared. I had planned to keep track of them by hand, simply marking off each person who signed up. That seemed plausible for the aforementioned first hour and a half, when nobody showed up. But once people did start trickling in, that proved impossible as they were just coming in too fast to mark off one by one.

It didn't let up all weekend. By late Saturday I had perfected my "sales" pitch, and by Sunday our paid helper was doing it at least as well as I was, which gave me a chance to breathe a bit. (I put "sales" in quotes because we weren't actually selling anything. Our product is free for consumers. But the more popular it is with consumers, the easier it will be to sell it to companies, which we'll be doing pretty much immediately now that it's out.) It's just the beginning, but what a beginning it was!

On a directly related note, a few of our ads are now officially out. Have a look at my favorite one here...and yes, that is me telling her to look on the back of the refrigerator for the serial number.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I managed to squeeze in a Saturday night out with an old friend and his wife who were in town on their way to Bali. Monday found me with a well-deserved day off from work because the event had gone so well, so the three of us were free to play tourist (well, it was playing for me at least) all over Singapore. I finally got around to having a Singapore sling at the Raffles Hotel (which I made a point of not doing last time I was there), financed in part by the cash bonus I got for a job well done over the weekend. (They're not cheap!) That event led to what must be the gayest photograph I've ever been a part of, but Pat and I have knocked around enough to be okay with that. I wish I could link to a few of our greatest hits, but I was not so far ahead of the curve to be blogging in 1999. Let's just say Slurpees, Niagara Falls, a certain Dixie Chicks song, various past- and future girlfriends, styrofoam, late nights and a lot of caffiene can really inspire some terrific memories, from DC to Paris and now to Singapore. I'll have to see about posting a copy of that picture here when I get it. But that was merely the most amusing moment of a long day full of such moments. It's remarkable how easy it can be to renew old bonds once they're established. It all ended with the best night's sleep I've had in months, partly because most of the stress from work was gone for a change and partly because I was exhausted from all the walking on Monday and the talking over the weekend. All totally worth it!

Every now and then, I wax excessively poetic about the plight of the expat, and how it can be rough having friends all over the world and so rarely getting to see most of them, while so many of my friends have settled down. The upside of that is that when we do get together, some truly wonderful times usually ensue. They certainly did this time. The fact that it could all happen in an exotic locale thousands of miles from home is just icing on the cake, I suppose, but I do like icing. Thanks for the memories!

What happens when a humanities major works with an office full of engineers

2009-03-26T18:31:00.002+08:00

It's a common stereotype that engineers are inarticulate and extremely literal-minded. (Apologies to Brent, Pascale et al if you read this...you'll see what I'm getting at, I promise!) Stereotypes exist in the first place because some people fit them. So I was reminded the other day while driving back from a business meeting with my boss and a colleague.

I was trying to do a verbal run-through of how a consumer would sign up for our service (which is finally being unveiled this weekend - yay!). "Let's say I'm buying a computer, and I already have an account with [our service]" I began.

The boss cut me off. "How did you sign up for us?"
"On a computer, like everybody else."
"But you're buying a computer now!"
"Right."
"Then how did you sign up if you didn't have a computer?!"
I laughed. He didn't. "I signed up on my old computer," I finally said. That seemed to satisfy him. I resumed my hypothetical case. "So I'm buying a computer and I have an account with us-"
Now it was my other colleague's turn to butt in. "Nobody has an account with us yet, David," he explained in a very serious, matter-of-fact tone. "We don't go online until this weekend."

You think he was joking. Nope.

I do like my job, really. The minor issue of being right-brained in a room full of extremely left-brained people is usually no big deal, and it's probably good for my job security. They need someone who can explain what we do in language a non-techie can understand, and I've gotten to be quite good at that, and they know it. Just that it can occasionally be exasperating.

Luckily, I got a taste of this back in France. I wasn't aware of it until partway through my second semester there, but I had something of a reputation for being "the literary one" of our class because of my unorthodox-for-HEC educational background. It popped up now and then in the form of suggestions that group-projects be done in my room because "Dave has all those books that'll inspire us" (just by virtue of their presence on my shelf, you'll understand) or my popularity as a resume-proofreader. As it was usually an enjoyable occurrence there, it proved to be a good preparation for the unintentional absurdity that occasionally happens here!

The good and the just okay

2009-02-23T14:48:00.002+08:00

I've been meaning to put up an update of what's been going on at work, but I've been putting it off until something really big happened. The good news is, that's getting closer all the time. The bad news is, I've been saying that since October.

A bit of a recap: I've been a bit vague about what I'm actually doing in Singapore, mainly because I shared a bit more than I should have about my internship back in Luxembourg and I don't wish to make that mistake again. (Then again, maybe it's just that the company back in Luxembourg was one messed-up place all around and I should have shared more stories about how that was the case. But I refuse to dwell on that false start now that I've successfully moved on. Anyhow.) Also, there wasn't a whole lot to report at first. It's a software company, and I'm doing marketing and strategy. I'm hoping to branch off into finance eventually, and for the time being I get to handle that too as there isn't a lot to report as far as finances are concerned. Our flagship product has been in development stages since before I started, and the original release date was set for October. Since startups never run too smoothly, that date got pushed back to the end of February. I'm slated to oversee our official release event at a road show at a local department store here, which was going to happen this coming weekend.

That event has now been pushed back one more week. The good news is that it looks like this delay really will be the last one. It's really just as well, as preparations for the big event hadn't been going as smootly as they could anyway.

Frustrating? Sure. But with all the stories in the news about sky-high unemployment, I don't dare complain. I really don't want to complain much anyway. There's a lot of creative work in this job that I've enjoyed so far - everything from writing scripts for commercials to market research on exotic locales where I think we might be able to sell the software. So, yeah. No complaints. It's not what I wanted to be doing when I finished my MBA, but several of the companies where I did want to end up are now out of business.

More updates as they come!

Wish I'd thought of that

2009-02-17T23:28:00.002+08:00

As my earliest readers might remember, my very first trip to Singapore ended with me getting stranded in Hong Kong for several hours. It wasn't a very pleasant experience, but I didn't let it bother me nearly as much as this woman did. By sheer patience (okay, and spending a bit more money), I ended up with a first class flight back to Taipei. Maybe this is the way to make that happen faster?

By the way, I have seen it suggested that maybe she had a legitimate reason for being distraught, such as having a sick relative she was desperate to see. If I find out anything like that was the case, I promise to remove this. But if not...okay, it still wasn't in very good taste to put this on YouTube either way. But as millions of people have said by now, "If you don't want it posted on the Internet, don't do it."

Suburbs, Asian style

2009-02-02T09:53:00.002+08:00

In almost ten months in Singapore, I haven't had many occasions to visit what the locals call "the heartland." That's basically the northern half of the island, far enough from downtown that it almost feels rural in some places, but never too far from an MRT stop. Before this weekend, I'd been through the heartland on the MRT once, at night, so I couldn't see much of it because it was dark outside. The fact that I've only had that one trip through and I was only passing through speaks for itself, I think.

Yesterday, I finally visited it for real. The reason why is fairly odd (visiting a branch of the health club I joined to see if we could identify the branch from a picture in a contest set up by the club...yes, really), but I did look forward to seeing a corner of Singapore that had up to now held some mystique in the form of spots on the MRT mapp that I had never ventured very near.

Wow. I thought I had seen cookie-cutter housing back in the DC suburbs. I hadn't seen anything! Block after block after block of square apartment buildings all over the place, and construction of a few new ones here and there, and a shopping center at nearly every stop, looking more or less the same as the other ones, which look more or less the same as the one at my stop. But I'm glad I got to see it. As things continue to look promising for our company, I'm beginning to give some thought to where I want my next apartment to be once I can afford to choose a place rather than having it choose me. Up to now, I thought there might be a trove of lovely and cheap places out in the heartland that I hadn't even seen yet. There are a few that I could see from the train, but nothing to measure up to what's available downtown (and will probably be in my price range if current trends continue - prices are dropping everywhere). So at least I can mark a lot of places off my list now.

The health club branch wasn't the one we were looking for, by the way.

The rich really ARE different from you and me

2009-01-29T19:31:00.002+08:00

Among the many ways in which I'm glad Bush isn't president anymore, there are several that sound funny at first blush, but if you think about it, they're really pretty sad. One of these - perhaps the biggest one, actually - is that I can now usually tell The Onion apart from real newspapers.

Usually.

I saw excerpts from this article on Daily Kos earlier today, and before checking the link I was sure it was some kind of joke. But the New York Times isn't known for its sense of humor. (Maybe you've heard the joke about the world's easiest job: the New York Times comics editor. All you ever have to do is say "No.") After reading the article and the blog it links to, I'm persuaded that these gals are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also that they're somewhat serious about it all as well. For one thing, it really isn't very funny to pretend you're as shallow and materialistic as the image they're presenting. So they're probably sincere about it.

Disgusting, yes, but I found myself feeling oddly relieved after reading it. Of all the many, many times over the past several months that I've been glad I didn't end up working at a bank, this has to be the strongest case yet. The idea of ever getting anywhere near that community...ew. That's all.

The thing is, even if I did find myself on Wall Street, odds are I wouldn't have ever been mixed up with anybody like that. I'd have worked with them and perhaps gone out for drinks with them occasionally, but I'd never have actually been one of them. There's something intangible that means you're either one of them or you're not, and no, being a Yale alum does not automatically put you in the club. In fact, it marks you out in a big way at Yale - somehow, everyone can tell whose grandfather was a senator and whose grandfather was a jukebox repairman. Not everybody cares, but everybody can tell. And of course, some do care. The ones who whine about how busy their still-employed boyfriends are in the New York Times are among those who do, needless to say.

Thank heavens for my unglamorous but recession-proof job and for a girlfriend who makes slightly more money than I do!

I always expected this in Paris, but here?

2009-01-21T12:42:00.002+08:00

At the gym last night, I noticed one of the TVs was showing The Price is Right. I was watching one of the other TVs, with a talk show about the inauguration, but during a commercial I looked over at The Price is Right. They were in the midst of the Showcase Showdown, and one of the prizes was...a trip to Singapore.

I'm sure they do have some kind of backup plan for cases where a prize would be inappropriate like that, but it seemed pretty funny to me all the same.

Let the whining begin

2009-01-21T09:29:00.003+08:00

If you're anything like me, you might be wondering what the first round of "the Liberal Media is shilling for Obama" was going to be. (First after the inauguration, I mean - I know they've never really shut up about how the media was in the tank for him throughout the campaign either.)

I just found out. Perhaps not surprisingly, it came from one of that odd breed of wingnuts who think Bush's only problem was that he was too liberal. In any case, the issue at hand was Obama's line in his inaugural speech about being the 44th person to take the oath of office. He's really only the 43rd (Grover Cleveland was only one person, after all), and well, if Sarah Palin had said that, why, The Liberal Media would be all over her for how stupid she is!!

For what it's worth, I have always believed we should stop counting Cleveland twice. But right or wrong, that's how it's been done throughout my life and for quite some time before, quite possibly since 1893. I don't recall anybody making an issue of the frequent references to Obama's indisputably stupid predecessor as "Bush 43," or his indisputably arrogant father calling him just "43". (He also reportedly sometimes called him "Quincy," which is at least a bit more clever, but also disrespectful to the best ex-president we ever had, who really does not deserve to be compared to Mr. I-Don't-Recall-Any-Heaviness-Ruining-My-Time-At-Yale. But I digress.) If this is the best the right wing s**t machine can do against Obama, the next four years ought to be a lot of fun. It'll be interesting to see if anybody takes this the least bit seriously. Sad to say, I wouldn't be too surprised if some people do - what else do they have to work with at this point?

My comeback to the above, by the way, was to suggest that Sarah Palin probaby doesn't have the foggiest idea how many presidents there have been. It almost makes you wish someone would ask her..."Oh, well, y'know, I know about the presidents. All of them. I think it was Ronald Reagan who said 'give me liberty or give me death,' you know, and up here in Alaska we take that serious and we take our presidents serious, you know? By golly, I don't care how many presidents there were, I'm runnin' for the future and my children's future!"

By the way, Cleveland's service as president was interrupted in the first place because of a dirty trick that could have taught Karl Rove everything he knows. Somebody duped the British ambassador into endorsing him, which cost him the usually-Democratic Irish American vote in New York, and he won the popular vote but lost the eletoral vote. Lest anybody think the right wing s**t machine and its love for exploiting ethnic tension is a modern-day phenomenon...

Is this heaven? It ain't Iowa...

2009-01-20T14:57:00.002+08:00

You've probably heard at least some of the fuss about all the inagural balls in DC. I decided to stay over here in the tropical sunshine, though, because I couldn't get tickets to this ball...

So that's why they made playlists...

2009-01-19T21:05:00.003+08:00

Last Thursday was a really good day at work. I'm not at liberty to go into details about it right now, but things are looking pretty good for our company and for me starting in a few months. To celebrate, I went out to dinner after work. So it was pretty late when I got back to my place. No problem there, as I had my beloved iPod to keep me company, set on Shuffle as usual.

Now, the Shuffle function can lead to some pretty odd segues. But anybody who has seen my record collection knows that's just how I like it. I've actually had some conversations that have led me to believe the variety on my iPod isn't all that extreme really. The strange thing about Thursday, though, was in the very lack of diversity of songs on the walk from the MRT back to my building.

I hadn't really been paying much attention on the train, because usually you can barely hear the music over the crowds - even at night. (Nothing in Singapore is ever not crowded!) Anyhow, I first noticed the odd phenomenon shortly after leaving the MRT station. Over 2,000 songs, roughly 200 of them by Jimmy Buffett (yeah, I know, big surprise), and from a guy who specializes in songs about parties and the beach, which one comes on at the end of a really great day? In the Shelter, the one about a runaway teenage smack addict who has just run out of luck. What are the odds? Well, I thought, it can't possibly get much more miserable than that, can it?

I had to go and use the actual word "miserable," didn't I? Next up? "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables." Yes, really. Literally and figuratively, plus miserable. Oh well. Now, remember what I said about odd segues? You probably aren't expecting the next song to be another showtune from a different show. I wasn't. I was wrong. It was "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught," from South Pacific. Is it fair to say that continued the depression-fest? Well, perhaps "depressing" isn't exactly the word for a celebration of racism, but...

I got to the apartment door just in time to hear the opening riffs of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." Part one, that is - not the radio-friendly one, but the slow and even-more angst-ridden one you never hear on the radio.

It was a pretty good weekend, in spite of the bad omen. Maybe I just need to make a happy-songs setlist, but I honestly didn't think my collection at large was quite that angst-ridden.

Now DEFINITELY ain't the time for your tears!

2009-01-13T10:47:00.003+08:00

I've always thought "it's wrong to speak ill of the dead" only goes so far. Is it really speaking ill to tell the truth about someone who just wasn't a decent human being?

You may have heard by now that William Zantzinger, the real-life villain of Bob Dylan's Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, died last week. What you probably didn't hear was the full story behind that one line tucked into the next-to-last paragraph of the obit, about how Zantzinger "later became a foreclosure auctioneer." Yes and no. What he actually did was become a slumlord in the 1980s. When he became delinquent on some property taxes, the bank foreclosed on some of his properties - but his tenants didn't know that, so Zantzinger continued collecting rent from them. When some of those tenants fell behind on their rent, he sued them for the back rent. And he won. He was eventually caught, and spent a year and a half in jail (three times as long as he'd spent for murder!). At least one account I've read of that case mentions that some of his tenants - in shacks without running water or plumbing - supported him at trial, saying they'd be homeless without him. Sounds like a variation on battered wife syndrome to me, but I guess that's beside the point.

As for his claim that Dylan's song is "a total lie," to be completely fair, it does get a few things wrong. Zantzinger's family did not "react to his deed with a shrug of the shoulders," nor was he released on bail "in a matter of minutes". But the main point - that he beat a woman to death and basically got away with it - is true. I guess you can't prove conclusively that his social standing and his victim's race were factors in the injustice, but it's hard not to connect those particular dots. (Tellingly, Dylan never actually mentions in the song that Carroll was black. There's absolutely no need to.)

I understand the rules about being respectful of the deceased, but I find it a bit disrespectful of his various victims that so much was not said in that obit.

Hope they do that for everyone!

2009-01-12T10:36:00.002+08:00

Every now and then, the big question arises of whether someone here is especially nice to those who are obviously foreign. I probably shouldn't worry about it, since I don't go around trying to take advantage of anything, and besides, the issue probably swings both ways, i.e. the guy at the lime juice stand just might try to charge me a bit extra because I'm white. I actually did have a run-in with a lime juice hawker just last night, but I don't think he was racist, just not very bright.

In any case, my story of the week. The entire office went out to lunch on Friday at an Indian place - a very swanky and probably expensive one. (It was on the boss, so the rest of us never saw the bill.) The occasion was that our chief operating officer was in town. It proved to be a good way to get to know the guy. But that's beside the point. The point is, when the waiter came to take orders, we ended up all ordering a lunch formula menu sort of like they have in France. For the main course, I asked if they had my favorite Indian dish, chicken sagwalla (which I hadn't seen on the menu). He said no, but he could talk to the chef about it. I assured him that wouldn't be necessary and settled for chicken tikka. It was quite good, anyhow. But the formula included free seconds of anything we wanted. When I asked for seconds of the chicken, he brought out...chicken sagwalla!

Come to think of it, if there was a deciding factor in whether or not to go the extra mile for the picky American, it was probably that they knew our bill was going to be quite large and they wanted to make it worth our while so we might consider them for our next corporate lunch. I can live with that.

60 Signs you've been in Singapore too long

2009-01-02T17:06:00.003+08:00

Eight months in, some of these make all too much sense to me.
(In the spirit of several of the following, I feel compelled to mention here that I did not write the list. It came to me in an e-mail.)

60 signs you've been in Singapore too long, especially if you come
from a Western country :

1. You know that "cum" means something completely different from what you originally thought.

2. You've lost your sense of irony, sarcasm, and cynicism.

3. You don't know what's lame and what isn't anymore.

4. You think there's nothing wrong with putting chili sauce on everything you eat.

5. You wait for instructions from people in authority before doing anything. Always.

6. You join queues without knowing or caring what the queue is for.

7. You know what "queue" means!!

8. You can type an SMS on your phone as quickly as you would if you had a regular keyboard.

9. Your idea of a good night out consists of having dinner at a hawker centre, drinking beer, and then going to another hawker centre and eating again.

10. You've lost your ability to criticize people in higher positions than you, even if they're wrong.

11. You would buy a $20 product you don't need if it's on sale for $10 just to save the money.

12. You forget to say the last consonant in words like "faCT", "aTE",etc.

13. You think it's okay to have only one meaningful choice on a ballot.

14. Every task you take on and every group you form is incomplete without a mission statement and a cheesy slogan.

15. You think that in a country where young people have little privacy, pornography is completely banned, music and movies are censored, students of the opposite sex in a dorm can't stay in the same room without open doors, and everyone works so much, that people should still want to get laid.

16. "Crossing the country" means taking the MRT to the end of the line.

17. You don't just know what "kiasu" means, you have become it!

18. You think that corn and beans are dessert foods.

19. You would cross the entire country all day to find the places that make the perfect fried noodles, or roti prata, or ice kacang, or chili crab. And none of these places would be close to each other.

20. You have a high tolerance for nagging.

21. Most or all of these acronyms make sense to you: NUS; NTU; ERP; SDU; PAP; MRT; LKY; GCT; PRC; TIBS; SBS; SMS; JB; JBJ; AMK; AYE; PIE; ECP; ISD; ISA; 5 C's; CPF; CHIJMES; SPG; CWO.

22. You use too many acronyms when you talk, or you create new ones.

23. You think that nothing makes a girl or guy more attractive than to dress exactly like hundreds of thousands of other girls and guys who all dress exactly like girls and guys in malls.

24. You think that $100,000 is a reasonable price for a Toyota Corolla and $1,000,000 is a reasonable price for a bungalow, but $5 for a plate of fried noodles is a barbarous outrage.

25. You believe that not being able to get decent roti prata outside Singapore is enough to keep the best and the brightest people from leaving.

26. You see nothing wrong with forming committees of select elite people to deliberate and study ways to stimulate creativity and spontaneity.

27. You justify every argument with the phrase "in order for us to be competitive in the 21st century".

28. You think everything should be "topped up".

29. You have a naive belief that the war against ants will somehow be won.

30. You don't think any dish of Western food is complete without baked beans.

31. You see nothing unusual about an organization of trade unions spending more time owning and operating supermarkets, drugstores, amusement parks, nightclubs, and financial services outlets than planning the next strike.

32. You believe that a lack of land is enough justification for the goverment to do what it wants.

33. You wear winter clothes indoors and summer clothes outdoors.

34. Durian and belachan no longer stink to you.

35. You like to have fun, but not too much fun, since you need to correctly gauge the amount of fun necessary to achieve the optimal result. Any more fun that that would bring shame to your family and your country.

36. Seven french fries with lunch are more than enough for you.

37. You forgot what a city organized around a grid looks like.

38. In a country where people use smart cards for public transit, you have no problem with construction workers riding in the open backs of pickup trucks.

39. You think paying $50 for a bottle of booze that costs $15 at home is a bargain.

40. You're not confused by a street naming system that locates streets like Clementi Road, Clementi Street, Clementi Crescent, Clementi Lane, Clementi Drive, Clementi Way, and Clementi Avenues 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 all within walking distance of each other.

41. You think that skinny girls and guys are the most attractive of all. (How did they get so skinny in the first place?? Do you know how much oil is in nasi lemak, char kuay teow, duck rice, and your average curry??--ed.)

42. You get irritated if you don't see a sign telling you how long your wait's going to be for a bus, a train, or the expressway to take you where you want to go.

43. You're certain that Holland Village is for hippie bohemian artist types and not overpaid yuppies.

44. When you cross the border into Malaysia, you automatically and deeply fear for your life and your wallet. Especially your wallet!!

45. You think that no vegetable should ever be eaten raw for any reason. Except for cucumbers.

46. No matter what you're doing at the moment, you'd rather be shopping.

47. No matter how miserable you may be here, you thank God you're not in Indonesia.

48. You're impressed by high-rise apartment buildings with actual lobbies instead of bare exposed pillars on the ground floor.

49. You don't have a problem with four different direct payment systems spread out over seven different cards in your wallet.

50. You forgot what chewing gum tastes like.

51. You say "handphone", not "cellphone" And you think there's no such thing as a handphone that's too thin.

52. You're not bothered by the fact that government cares whether you know how to use a toilet or urinal correctly. (People squatting on toilet bowls? What the...???--ed.)

53. You're sure that the best way to change social behaviour is through consistent and comprehensive government-sponsored campaigns that permeate as many aspects of daily life as possible. And when they don't work, you never speak of them again.

54. You think chicken floss, corn, mayonnaise, and tandoori spices are proper pizza toppings.

55. You agree that what the government thinks of your personal habits and lifestyle should determine whether you get a condo and how much you pay for it.

56. You've become a fan of either Arsenal, Man. U., or Liverpool when you barely knew what soccer was before you came to Singapore. And you don't care that none of these teams are Singaporean!

57. You think a bus is incomplete without a TV.

58. You accept that expressways here are cleaner than toilets rather than the other way around.

59. You know why this list needs the following disclaimer: "This list is intended only as an amusing, light-hearted, and exaggerated look at life in Singapore and is not meant to be taken seriously. There is no intention on the part of the author of this list to make any untrue, misleading, or defamatory statements concerning any person in particular, nor to make any statement intended to cause offense. If any such offense has been caused, the author apologizes and retracts the offending statement. In any event, the author's NOT WORTH SUING, so don't trouble yourself."

60. You understand everything on this list!!

A rather long and rambling series of thoughts on Christmas

2008-12-30T18:25:00.002+08:00

Christmas 2000. (Yes, just eight years ago, much too recent to be nostalgic. Just work with me here!) The end of finals coincided with a big snowstorm, and heaven knows New Haven looks a lot better under a blanket of fresh snow. I’ve been out Christmas shopping, and on arriving home I park the car and looking up at the kitchen window to see the lights on while the roomies are cooking dinner while the snow falls beautifully in the dying gray light. Inside, I hear a CD blasting on my roommate’s stereo – a CD I had bought for her and left on her pillow that morning. When she sees me stumbling in the kitchen door with an armful of gifts, there’s an enthusiastic thank you that greets me along with the heady warm air from the stove, and my cup of cheer most certainly runneth over.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to let this memory get too treacly. You see, that shopping trip was the one on which I bought my then-sweetie a pair of gloves for Christmas. She’d said she needed a new pair, and these were her favourite color. They matched the scarf she used to wear all the time. But...and here I must pause and remind those of you who knew me in 2000 that you know which ex this is, and of course there was going to be a “but” here...but being who she was, Christmas morning, she took one look at the gloves and asked me if I had kept the receipt. (I had, but I don’t recall if I ever gave her a straight answer or not.)

And that’s perhaps the all time best example of why every Christmas, I look forward to the big moment when you know the craziness is over and you’re free to just enjoy the moment on your own. Really, the whole Christmas season tradition was always a bit oppressive to me even when I was a kid. I always looked forward to the peace and quiet of whenever the craziness ended. The downright sadistic parties at school, the get-togethers with neighbours and family that nobody really enjoyed, and the constant barrage of saccharine television commercials that just screamed “your Christmas sucks and everybody else is living in a Thomas Kincaid painting”...sooner or later all of it would finally be in the rearview mirror and wherever you were, that’s when you could bask in the Christmas Spirit in your own special way, remember?

Usually I didn’t – and still don’t – know just when moment would occur, but I would know it when I felt it. Watching a favorite Christmas episode of some show on TV maybe, or listening to the oldies station under the covers after bedtime, that’s a fine memory. In college, it was usually sometime after Waltz. For the vast majority of my readers who did not go to Grinnell, Waltz is...well, think of the senior prom, only with decent music and nobody bothers with pretending not to be drunk. It was usually a lot of fun, but usually really tedious too. Every semester I would seriously consider not going, and then I would go and have a wonderful time in spite of myself, but I also found I was always a bit relieved the whole thing was over. Yeah, I’m a lump of sugar and all that, but I usually do a pretty good job of hiding it even from myself. Anyway, after Waltz it was usually about two weeks to finals, and after the calm inevitability of finals and the slow realization that they hadn’t really been that bad, and then there would be a glorious three or four days before heading home where you could just hang around with your friends and bask in the relief. And the seasonal joy, if you wanted it.

In DC, Christmas usually coincided with a bunch of housemates leaving. It put a bittersweet damper on the barrage of Be happy, dagnabbit!, but it was also an excuse for spending plenty of quality time with people you actually enjoyed spending time with. I have a number of especially fond memories of dinner at Childe Harold on Dupont Circle with various soon-to-be-scattered friends, and then there were the late drinks at Eagan’s. That’s one of the few things about DC I still miss since I wore out my welcome there last time around. At Yale, well, see the beginning of this entry. And since then? Well, it’s been almost too low key for the past several years, usually because I was either busy studying right up to the last minute or living in a country where Christmas wasn’t a big deal.

But what about this year? Actually, this Christmas season has been just as quiet as the last several, and I like it that way. But this time around, there was no real “moment,” because for once there was no serious buildup of gun-to-the-head cheerfulness. There’s been plenty of garish decor (Singapore being Singapore, there always is anyway), but the hot weather has kept it from feeling like the cheer-up-or-die business I had come to identify with the 25th and the several weeks before it. With work keeping me fairly busy up through Wednesday and the better half off visiting her parents in Abu Dhabi (yes, I’ve been seeing somebody and yes, there’s a reason why I haven’t mentioned it on here before, but it’s nothing the least bit sordid), it was easy enough to forget the whole thing. Wednesday night, it was off to the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner – my gift to myself, and I was quite happy with it. It was raining, but the lights strung across the street were beautiful despite (or even because of?) the weather. After dinner, it was across the street to an Irish pub where I had a bit too much, ensuring a late Christmas morning while my roommates celebrated the big event with their two year old.

Okay, that’s actually a little depressing, isn’t it? Trust me, I had a nice time whether it sounds like it or not. Hope everyone else had a happy holiday as well, wherever you all are and whatever you’re up to!

Smart baby

2008-12-24T10:21:00.003+08:00

Passed on without further comment...

Every time a kid shoots his eye out, a bell rings

2008-12-22T14:27:00.002+08:00

I see the annual love-to-hate-It's a Wonderful Life fest is in full swing at the New York Times. This might surprise some of you, but I agree completely with the article. I had thought of some of those things before, of course, especially the fact that the "bad" Bedford Falls looks like a lot more fun. But it had not occurred to me before that all those manufacturing jobs George brought to town arrived just in time for an economic slump in Upstate New York that is still in full swing six decades later. So he just set the town up for an even bigger fall than it otherwise would have had. Ouch. Note that he also makes the case that the movie has some brilliant acting and some well-crafted scenes - just that the "happy" ending is still pretty depressing. (And also inaccurate, since he still probably would have gone to jail.)

Now, here's what I want to know. When are the Scrooges (and Potters) going to start in on A Christmas Story as well? Take away the warm fuzzies and what is the real Christmas Story? Well, Dad goes behind Mom's back to buy their son an extremely dangerous gift - with some potentially ugly hints at his future to boot - and then the kid comes within an inch of exactly the disaster that everybody warned him about, but he escapes any consequences by lying to his parents about the whole thing. That's it! It makes me want to run and hide behind a stack of videotapes of Very Special Episodes of every bad eighties sitcom.

On a less cynical note...I've been saying for years, the best way to illustrate who was the creative genius of The Beatles was to listen to John and Paul's respective Christmas songs back to back. It hardly even seems like a fair comparison, the former is so superior to the latter. Apparently somebody else has figured that out too, because twice in the past two weeks I've heard both songs played back to back in stores and restaurants. Don't take my word for it, listen
here and (or not) here. Not even close, huh?

Just a friendly reminder of what we're still up against

2008-12-15T15:40:00.003+08:00

One of the many interesting things about living with three Ukranians is their unique, mostly blank-slate perspective about American politics. I was reminded of this just the other night, as the latest wingnut cause celebre - "Obama wasn't born in the US" - made its way over here. It was just a minor story in the paper, nothing that would surprise anyone who paid any attention during the Clinton administration (and its accompanying sideshows with congressmen shooting pumpkins in their back yards to prove something or other about Vince Foster, etc.). You and I know nothing is going to come of it.

Not everybody who read that article did, though, and when I arrived home the other night, my roommates were dying for the inside scoop. "Dave. What is this with Obama not becoming president because he is not really American?!"

That's right, they believed it. I don't mean this as a knock at them in any way. They're intelligent, educated people who read in the paper that there may be a wrinkle in US law that keeps Obama out of office. Not the kind of thing people from a place like Ukraine expect to pop up in the Land of Liberty unless there really is something to it. And that's their first mistake.

Anyhow, just wanted to bring this up because I know a lot of Obama supporters out there seem to think the partisan excesses of the past are now going to stay in the past for some reason. Not as long as the right wing s**t machine can still generate enough momentum behind a completely baseless story to send it halfway around the world and fool anybody who trusts America to live up to its reputation. Here, you don't even get Act II, in which the manstream media wrings its hands and wonders how these ridiculous tall talles always slip into the public consciousness, totally oblivious to their own role in making it happen. All people here see - unless they really go looking for more information - is an article in a mainstream paper reporting that somebody somewhere thinks Obama was born in Kenya. Or Indonesia. Or England. Or something.

It hasn't snowed a single flurry (and it won't), but...

2008-11-15T21:58:00.002+08:00

It's happened a couple of times now, going back a couple of weeks. Christmas decorations, everywhere. There is, after all, no Thanksgiving to get in the way here. A city obsessed with shopping is even more susceptible to the decorations, of course, and a shopping-obsessed city in Asia...well, you can imagine.

Right, but what is it that has happened a couple of times now? Well, I'm walking past some elaborate storefront with garlands and ornaments everywhere, or a Christmas tree at the mall. And I think - just for a second, but I think it just the same - "But it hasn't even gotten cold yet!"

Power of suggestion is that strong, sometimes.

Equally amusing, I think, is an ad I saw recently from some credit card company, encouraging us all to do a list of extremely expensive things at least once before we die. One of them was "spend Christmas on a tropical island." Technically, I will be doing that this year.

Goodbye 1994, hello 1964!

2008-11-06T13:09:00.004+08:00

Well, it wasn't the one-sided blowout some of us (myself included) were hoping for, but I'll take it. Right up to the bitter end, I wasn't quite sure it wasn't going to slip through our fingers. Of course, now we have to see if the Dems don't let the ball drop again like they did in 1993-94. I find it hard to believe anybody anywhere near Obama could fail to appreciate what the right wing s**t machine has in store for the next two years at least. But one should never be surprised at the Democrats' ability to underestimate how dirty the other side plays most of the time.

Then again, they didn't underestimate the threat this time. I'm still a bit surprised they didn't fall into the trap of refusing to criticize Gov. Palin...it's all too easy for me to imagine her getting away with one stupid comment after another without a peep in protest. Maybe something really has changed.

Anyway. Dave's picks and pans:

Most gratifying win: North Carolina (there's still a slight chance it won't go to Obama, but it's looking like a very slight chance just now). Not just at the presidential level, but across the board - Senate, governor (for the fifth time in a row!), and we picked up a House seat. That "godless" ad from Sen. Dole was disgusting, but back in the days of Jesse Helms, it probably would have worked. My only regret is that Helms isn't around to see his home state vote for a...well, you know what he would have called Obama.

Biggest surprise: Rep. Virgil Goode, R-VA, may yet hang on - he was down by somewhere between 80 votes and 522 votes last time I checked, depending on which source you believe - but even if he does squeak through, it's a pretty shocking outcome. Goode was perhaps the last of the old-fashioned right-wing Democrats elected to Congress (he switched parties several years ago), and he has embarrassed himself repeatedly in the past few years with a number of openly bigoted comments. But his district is exactly the sort of place where conventional wisdom holds that a real Democrat can't win, which is perhaps why his far-right profile was tolerated back when he was a Democrat. His big mouth never got him in any trouble before (and neither did his party switch), so it's nice to see it probably catching up with him at last. The Dems definitely won two other seats in Virginia, so if Tom Perriello hangs on against Goode (and I'm guardedly optimistic that he will), they'll have gone from an 8-3 minority in their House delegation to a 6-5 majority - as well as having both Senate seats for the first time since 1966. No wonder the Republicans don't consider it "real America".

Biggest disappointment: There's still a slight chance Al Franken will come out ahead in Minnesota, but it's not looking great there. It's not just that he (probably) lost that bugs me, it's the matter of whom he lost to and why Norm Coleman is a senator in the first place. Coleman won in 2002 almost entirely because the right wing s**t machine got away with lying about Paul Wellstone's funeral turning into an inappropriate political rally. Guess who eventually got the truth out and set the record straight? Yep, it was Franken. Heartbreaking.

I guess I could also throw in a word here about being disappointed with McCain for selling out his principles to get the GOP nod. It's easy to forget now, but a lot of progressives used to consider him our favorie Republican. But from what we've learned about the guy during this campaign, I'm not so sure we were right about him in the first place.

The "if so many Republicans had to lose, why him?" award: I'm blanking on this one this time. There just aren't that many moderate Republicans left. I guess I could name Chris Shays, but he's not as moderate as he has been pretending to be for the past few years. Besides, the sheer symbolic value of having not a single House Republican left in New England is worth it. I'm all but certain that having a party completely shut out of a given region is unprecedented since the Civil War - even at the height of the Solid South era, parts of Tennessee remained reliably Republican. You might think the Republicans would accept this as the price of having some of their more outspoken members argue that the Northeast isn't really American at all...you might think so, but I don't. My theory is that they really and truly believe progressives do hate America and thus shouldn't be offended when they accuse us of as much.

So, no, I'm not too sorry to see Shays go down. A somewhat more legitimate candidate for this title would be Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, R-MD, but he lost in the Republican primary. (The Dems do appear to have won his seat by a tiny margin over the guy who ousted him, though.) Everything I've ever heard about Gilchrest has suggested that he was a decent guy and a good fit for his conservative-but-not-right-wing district. But he was a moderate (I've always expected he was only a Republican because a big plurality of his constituents were too), which was bound to be a problem in the primary for him sooner or later. In fact, although MD-1 is a Republican district (it's the Eastern Shore and some of the more remote exurbs of Baltimore and DC), Gilchrest probably would have been better off switching parties once he was personally popular enough to get away with it, which has been the case for quite a while now.

Quote of the year: "Can I call ya Joe?"
Short, but packed with accidental eloquence about its speaker and exactly who and what she was, that little question didn't just talk, it screamed. It showed just how careless McCain had been with his VP pick. It showed how oblivious she really was to what a laughingstock she was outside the far right. And it showed why plain-folks appeal is a subtle art, best left to folks who aren't really plain. There's a reason why Bill Clinton the Rhodes scholar and Yale Law grad could out-folksy a pig and still be taken seriously: he knew when to turn the populism off. Even George W. Bush's faux-cowboy baloney was more convincing than Failin' Palin.

I was tempted to go with another quote from the same debate, about Biden's wife being a teacher and how her reward was in heaven (I'm leaving off the quotes here because I can't recall her exact words offhand). But where "Can I call ya Joe?" spoke volumes, that comment was just terrifying. The combination of Biden/wife/heaven was also in incredibly bad taste, but I concede it's probably not common knowledge that his first wife was killed in a car wreck unless you're a political junkie like myself. That said, somebody should have told Palin about it so that she wouldn't say a thing like that.

Blessing in disguise: I supported John Edwards in the primaries...and am I ever glad in retrospect that he lost! I know cheating on one's wife is a private failing and it's not really our place to judge - but what if he were the Democratic nominee for president when word had gotten out? He probably would have been on the short list for Obama's cabinet (attorney general, maybe?) if he'd kept his pants up, so I guess the price is paid. But still, what a disappointment from a guy I used to have so much respect for. That said, anybody who has ever cared about DC does owe the guy some gratitude for retiring Lauch Faircloth.

What's left: There will probably be a runoff in the Georgia Senate race, and if Ted "Tubes" Stevens hangs on in Alaska, word is that he'll be either expelled or persuaded to resign his seat. Either way, we could get another crack at that seat...but really, if we can't beat a senile old man who's just been convicted of seven counts, and keep in mind who they elected governor...let's just say I don't like our chances too much!

And in closing...I was impressed with McCain's concession, very classy and conciliatory. I was not so impressed with his audience. It's more or less traditional for the audience at a concession speech to boo at the first mention of the winner's name (I've seen it happen with Democrats and Republicans alike), but only at the first mention, not repeatedly like that. We see how well that disrespect served them this year, so it'll be fun to see if they ever figure it out.

Oh, by the way...

Colorado: 53-46 Obama
Connecticut: 60-39 Obama
DC: 93-7 Obama
Iowa: 54-45 Obama
New Hampshire: 55-45 Obama
Pennsylvania: 55-44 Obama
Virginia: 52-47 Obama

Looks like I did my share. ;)

Is it wrong that I find this offensive?

2008-11-03T22:33:00.002+08:00

Getting a work visa almost has to be a hassle, and that's okay. It's the price of being an expat. I also knew when I moved to Singapore that the place was something of a benevolent dictatorship, and I can live with that too. Cultural differences are also bound to pop up, and I'm perfectly used to that. But. One of the hoops we have to jump through to get an Employment Pass for Singapore is an HIV test.

I wasn't scared, much. Obviously an HIV test is always going to be nerve-wracking, but I've been careful, and I knew I was about as likely to be HIV-positive as I was to be pregnant. But that's beside the point. It seriously rubs me the wrong way that the government wants a record of that particular issue when it comes to foreigners. Or anybody else, really. It ain't right, cultural differences or not.

On the bright side, I will get my EP finalized tomorrow, and my raise with it. Which almost makes it seem worth it!

Happy Deepavali

2008-10-24T13:37:00.002+08:00

One of the great things about living in a new-to-you country is that the holidays come as a pleasant surprise - who knew you were getting Monday off? This coming Monday, as it turns out, is Deepavali. Deepavali, also called Diwali, is a major Indian holiday, and Indians are a big presence in Singapore (including all but one of my work colleagues). It's a "festival of lights" which may have originated as a harvest festival, or may mark the anniversary of the release of a group of political prisoners 2,500 years ago, depending on whom (and what) you believe. Whatever its origins, Deepavali is now celebrated by lighting oil lamps - and now in some places, fireworks - to celebrate the triumph of good over evil in all people. And of course, being an overeducated expert on world cultures, I knew all that without resorting to Wikipedia. Yessir.

But seriously, I really find the whole thing inspiring. Maybe it's the elections and the extremely ugly rhetoric we've heard from some quarters, or maybe it's more personal than that, but I really like the idea of everybody taking a minute to consider the good and bad within and making sure the good side wins. I've had a few wins and a few losses in that area myself lately. Nobody's perfect, huh.

The 401K(eg) Plan

2008-10-14T17:43:00.002+08:00

From a friend back in DC:

If you had purchased $1000 of Delta Airlines stock one year ago, you would have $49 today.
If you had purchased $1000 of AIG stock one year ago, you would have $33 today.
If you had purchased $1000 of Lehman Brothers stock one year ago, you would have $0 today.
However, if you had purchased $1000 worth of beer one year ago, drunk all the beer, then turned in the aluminum cans for recycling, you would have received $214 today as redemptions. Based on the above, the best current investment plan is to drink heavily & recycle. It is called the 401-KEG Plan.

Taking the VERY scenic route

2008-10-09T18:13:00.003+08:00

A couple of weeks short of six months since I arrived in Singapore, and now my worldly posessions have joined me. I've managed well enough without my winter clothes, and books I've mostly already read and CDs I have saved to my iPod, but it's still nice to have everything in one place again. As it looks more like my stay here is going to be longer and more stable than I'd hoped, I guess there's poetic justice to having it all finally arrive.

But still, six months? I know it's an awfully long way, but six months?! Really, there was no choice. During the past few moves, I have intentionally kept everything with me regardless of the hoops I have to jump through to get it there, since it's always been unclear where the fates were going to send me next, and how long I would stay there. (The colossal false start that was Luxembourg is the perfect example of this, but it's not the only such example, only the most extreme one.)

But this has led to jumping through a lot of those hoops, and it was only going to get worse. When I first decided to move to France, I went to a great deal of trouble to pack everything neatly back in Denver and rented a minivan to drive it all to the post office...only to discover that I had misread the guidelines and most of my boxes had to be re-packed. I bought the appropriate boxes and did the repacking right then and there, out of the back of the van in the post office parking lot. It took well over two hours and was awfully tedious, although the woman behind the counter complimented me for my patience. ("Most men would have gone off the deep end by now." I was so relieved to be done when she said that that I managed to let it go by - barely.) While decompressing over a well-earned lunch at Red Lobster afterward, I vowed never to put myself in a position like that again.

Only I did. First of all, there were two moves within Denver before I took off for Paris, with everything I still had with me at that point. These were completed by taxi, which ought to earn me a few Palin-points for acting like an ultra-average American on some level or other. Then, when I got to France, all those boxes I'd repacked at the last minute had gotten there safe and sound...but they were delivered to the temporary MBA building at the far end of campus as the real MBA building was being renovated at the time (my colleagues will, by now, have envisioned the long walk back to Expansiel that involved...maybe some of them even saw me lugging those boxes up from the grande ecole).

Never again? Wrong. Luxembourg. That time I rented a truck, which wasn't too bad. Of course, since the whole sojurn in Luxembourg was cursed from start to finish, it's only fair that moving back to Paris couldn't be too easy either. I didn't really make it clear at the time, but the move back to Paris was on extremely short notice. (I wrote that entry immediately after the decision was made, and was too stressed out and depressed to dwell on the whole thing at the time...the fact that I was depressed about moving to Paris shows I wasn't thinking things through very clearly, I suppose!) I found out on Monday morning that I would need to take another class, and by Thursday I was back in the city of lights prepping for class and making appointments to look at rooms.

A week after that, I'd already been back with my rented Citroen to drag most of my stuff back to Paris, but not quite all. I had to come back to close out the apartment anyway, and figured I'd carry the last of my clothes and such in my suitcases. No dice. I overestimated what would fit in the suitcases. Luckily, I had a couple of boxes lying around, so I texted my new roommate for her postal address, ran to the supermarket for packing tape, and just made it to the post office with my two boxes of clothes before a rather nasty rainstorm. The storm meant I was pretty wet for the last train ride back to Paris - all too fitting considering the way things had been going at that point - but I'd conquered the moving beast once again.

Never again? Close enough. I mean, one can't very well mail 20 boxes of CDs, books and clothes from Paris to Singapore on a reasonable budget, especially without an address to send them to. So I broke down and hired professionals, after once again meticulously packing everything...only to be told they could have done that for me. Just as well, I'd rather have them packed so that I knew where everything was.

Not so fast. The moving rep told me he would have to break down all the boxes, take inventory, and re-pack them at the warehouse in London before they got on the boat for Singapore. He also told me not to send any DVDs because anything more risque then your average Disney movie wouldn't get past the censors in Singapore. (I now know he was wrong about that, but my DVDs are at least safe back in America where I sent them instead.) At least my job would end with the boxes being picked up.

I think they told me to expect the trip to take about three months. Not unreasonable, as long as that sounds, but hopelessly optimistic as it turned out. Other observations, now that it finally has arrived, include the fact that they did not really have to repack anything. Everything arrived just as I shipped it, in the same boxes with my handwriting on the sides and no evidence that they'd ever cut the tape on any of them. Which no doubt means I'd have had no trouble getting the DVDs into the country anyway, even if I did have any porn (which I don't!). At least it's here, in any case.

Amusingly, after the trip took months longer than it was supposed to, the delivery company told me to expect them "between 2 and 5" on Monday afternoon. They arrived at 2:15.

Why I love the progressive blogosphere

2008-10-03T13:09:00.003+08:00

There's lots I'd love to say about Gov. Palin and the debate, but I'm too busy at work right now to go into it in much detail. But I did want to offer this up right away.

From Jonathan Chait at the usually-mediocre New Republic:

Palin's final quote was from Ronald Reagan, warning that without vigilance, "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."

In fact, Reagan was not warning about a general lack of vigilance about freedom, he was warning what would happen if Medicare was enacted.

I don't know how much the right still goes around predicting that the progressive blogosphere will be the death knell of the Democratic party, by way of pulling it too far to the left or creating an echo chamber or whatever...my guess is it's still pretty common. But Palin's misrepresentation of Reagan is exactly the sort of thing they used to get away with all the time (in fact, Reagan more or less built his career on such intellectual dishonesty). Her fans will still believe what they want to believe, but those of us who are interested in the truth can now set the record straight next time we hear people reciting the soundbite in line at the supermarket.

Incidentally, I don't think Palin was lying. I think, like most Reagan-worshippers, she doesn't know much of anything about the truth of his record. It's all too common on the right - when they want to drum up support for a particular point of view, they just say "that's the way Reagan saw it" and there's no further need for discussion. The issue of whether or not he really would have supported the issue in question doesn't matter at all (and, often as not, isn't really answerable anyway since his record is so convoluted and inconsistent, and he spent so much time lying about his own past). In any case, this article has the truth about that quote and what he really was getting at.

You mean they listened?

2008-09-30T12:17:00.003+08:00

Every time I try to steer the blog in the direction of something other than politics...well, there's not a whole lot going on just now over here anyway (rainy season, but I'm pleasantly busy at work without being overwhelmed, etc.). In any case, I had given up the bailout for lost (that is, I expected the stupid thing to sail through the House), but it's been stopped for now. A nice surprise, but just what were the Dems thinking?! They're poised to gain another 20 seats or so, public opinion is wildly against the bailout, the entire world is counting down the days until Bush goes back to Texas...and they give him a majority of their votes while the Republicans supply the votes against it? Way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, guys! I guess I have to give the Republicans credit where it's due for living up to their claims of fiscal conservatism for once.

What should be done instead? I don't know. I do know that taxpayers shouldn't foot the bill, and I also know that the number 700,000,000,000 was chosen at random because they needed "a really big number". One thing I'd like to see changed immediately is the principle of "it's too big to fail." If a bank is too big to fail, it's too big, period.

The selfish bastard in me can't wait to see how far the US dollar sinks against the Singapore one.

The whole world is watching

2008-09-18T22:42:00.004+08:00

Among my guilty pleasures of late is an American-style diner at one of Singapore's numerous malls. (I suspect Singapore probably has the most malls per capita in the world.) You know the sort of place, kitchy and over-the-top with its decorations from several different long-ago decades, but the food is great nonetheless. It's not really that unusual for Asians to try too hard in their own way to act American, but this place takes it to extremes. Tonight, though, I was in the mood for some comfort food after almost making it through a good but fairly tedious week, so off I went to the diner.

They have a rather wide selection of burgers. I usually don't order a burger because I'm trying to watch my weight (and I'm also now old enough to see that some of the more elaborate specialty burgers are, well, gross), but just out of curiosity I checked that part of the menu tonight. They had a new addition to the lineup: the Obama Burger. Just a reminder of whose side the rest of the world is on, I guess. I did check to see if they had a dish named for McCain...maybe a mooseburger, or something involving extra-aged beef...but they didn't, although their fries are made from McCain potatoes. (I don't think there's any relation, though...isn't the potato company Canadian? I do know they have a big processing plant on Prince Edward Island.)

I chose not to read anything into the fact that the Obama Burger comes with black pepper sauce. If they were trying to be offensive, they probably would have topped it with collard greens or some such.

Look out, you might get what you're after

2008-09-15T09:39:00.003+08:00

Senior year in high school, my advanced English class read parts of the Canturbury Tales. I suppose the most precise thing to say here is that we read "selections from the Canturbury Tales, but for reasons I can't really explain, "selection" is one of two literary terms that I have always actively disliked. (The other is "extended metaphor." But I digress.) As my fellow literary snobs know, the prologue to the Tales is a character sketch of all the pilgrims Chaucer met on the road to Canterbury. After we'd read the prologue in class, we were assigned to write a series of character sketches modeled after it, a tale of a chance meeting with a group of people on a journey and a more detailed look at at least three of them. You might say we were asked to write an extended metaphor of the prologue. You might, but I'd rather you didn't. The tale could be told in rhyme, like the original; but it didn't have to be, as our extremely arrogant teacher wasn't sure we'd all be up to such a challenge. Best of all, we were allowed to work in groups of up to four.

Now, I had four best buds in that class - three guys and one gal - and I always did my group projects with some combination of them. However, on this occasion, the four of them teamed up before I even had a chance to talk to any of them, so I was left to do the assignment on my own. That's high school for you! I was down, but not out. After a healthy dose of teenage angst, I sat down one afternoon at my parents' 1987 Atari 1040 and, in one sitting, pounded out seven or eight pages in rhyme and iambic pentameter about a guy who's driving to the beach and meets a busload of rednecks at a roadside diner. I set it aside to edit and/or rewrite as necessary, but never thought of any way to improve it and just hoped for the best. On the day the assignment was due, we had to recite our compositions in class. After each group (and they were all groups, except for yours truly) had one member read their work, the teacher would provide some positive comments and some critical ones.

But when I read mine - coincidentally just after my four friends who had forgotten me - there was no criticism forthcoming, from any corner of the room. What did the notoriously hard-to-impress teacher say? "Well, what can we say after work like that? Incredible." The four friends? "We don't call him The Venerable for nothing!" By the end of the week I was getting compliments from friends who weren't even in that class. (The teacher had taken the liberty of reading my work to the other classes, as an example of what they could do if they tried harder.)

Six months later on the morning after graduation, as I was leaving the all-night grad party, a girl from the class - whom I had barely known - hugged me and said, "Bye, Dave, it was great listening to all your stories this year." That remains the closest I have yet come to what I'm guessing John Lennon felt at age 15 when he saw Elvis getting mobbed by girls on television and decided to go buy a guitar. Thanks, Laura, wherever you are. Hope you like my book if I ever finish it.

Why, you ask, am I bringing all this up now? Two words: Lehman Brothers.

Of course I was delighted when I got the chance to come to Singapore last spring, but I had been hoping to get a job in a bank. I did make the first-round cut in a couple of places (not Lehman's, though - I don't think they hired anybody from my class), but with no prior banking experience, it just wasn't going to happen in this economy. I didn't feel too sorry for myself over that this summer, as I was just glad to be employed somewhere. But I now feel secure enough in my current job to admit that I really didn't think it was going to fly for a while. It was boring (sometimes it still is, but things have picked up), it wasn't what I had planned to do with my degree (but then I always knew I might have to fall back on something else at least temporarily), it wasn't very well-paid (that's about to change), and I missed Paris. Who wouldn't miss Paris, of course? I told myself getting a job there without an EU passport is just about impossible anyway, but it isn't really. Difficult, but not impossible...if you can afford to wait around until somebody turns up willing to sponsor you. I, of course, could not. On top of everything else, after the false start in Luxembourg, I figured it was just a matter of time until the same happened here.

As I've discussed before, things have improved quite a bit after that slow start. I'm not rich yet, but business is picking up and it looks like there's going to be a lot of business-travel around Asia coming up pretty soon (not to mention a possible trip to Las Vegas in February). But that's beside the point. Whether there's a pot of gold down at the end of Orchard Road or not, it's a steady income that I can count on for the time being. If I had gotten a job with a bank...well, no need to dwell on that right now!

Where have I been? What do I think of Palin?

2008-08-31T09:16:00.003+08:00

Apologies for my long silence. Things finally started to get busy at work. Before they got busy, I was seriously considering chasing after other options, but the current job came together a bit more at last before any such options really presented themselves. Working for a startup agrees with me so far. We release our flagship product in October, and after that it looks like there'll be a lot of business travel around Asia. Having not left Singapore since April, I'm definitely looking forward to that. In better-still news, I got a big raise this past week, although I won't actually see the money until the end of October. There will probably be more in store shortly after that, as that's when we start selling our software.

So...after going back and forth on the issue several times, I have tentatively settled on sticking around here for a while yet.

I didn't see any of the Democratic convention last week, but I read all the major speeches and was mostly quite impressed. It's about time Democrats start talking like Democrats again for a change. So what of Sarah Palin? I'm really trying to figure out what McCain must have been thinking, but I can't. I don't get it. If I had to guess, I'd go with the theory of appealing to disgruntled Clinton supporters. That at least makes the pieces fit together a bit better: he thought picking a female running mate would do the trick (and yes, that's ridiculous...but it is the way right-wingers tend to think about these things), and Palin is the only prominent female Republican out there at the moment who isn't either pro-choice or too close to Bush. He doesn't appear to have considered much else about her, but then there isn't a whole lot else to consider.

I have to admit that I am a bit concerned about the VP debate. I already wasn't very fond of Joe Biden because of his incredibly inept performance in the Clarence Thomas hearings, and having him debate a woman is only going to make that issue that much harder to forget. The fact that said woman is to the right of Thomas should neutralize that issue, but I'm not sure it will.

And since the misogynistic comments and "jokes" are already appearing around the net, this site is worth a look. I am curious as to how many of the offenders are McCain supporters, and how many of those will think twice about voting for a ticket with a woman on it. I don't want that to be the reason why Obama wins, but the poetic justice would be delicious at the same time.

Bikini mud-wrestling, DC style!

2008-07-12T10:29:00.002+08:00

As a loyal member of the party that is best known for infighting among its own members, I can imagine all too well what the House Republicans think about this...but I have to hand it to Rep. LaTourette, what a comeback!

Rep. Dean Heller, class of 2006:

The Republican Party lost its majority in the House of Representatives in 2006, and is likely to lose more seats in November, but Nevada Republican Dean Heller says he doesn't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

"I'm of the position that we really need to clean house in this Republican Party, and I think the next couple of election cycles are going to do that," Heller said.

Republicans who should be swept out, in Heller's view, include some from the historic class of 1994, which gave the GOP a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years.

"It's an old mantra: they came to change Washington, and Washington changed them," Heller said several weeks ago. "I think we got to the point where the majority of Republicans were trying to change America and tell (Americans) what they wanted instead of listening to ... what they need."

And in response, Rep. Steve LaTourette, class of 1994:

The fact is, the Class of '94 created the longest serving Republican majority in recent history, and we didn't lose it until Dean showed up.

Eeeeeyow!

There ain't no voices louder than the one inside your head

2008-07-09T22:17:00.002+08:00

In a decade or so of spending almost all my time in consciously international settings (even if they're only "international" to me), I've run into a couple of recurring oddities. One of these is Canadians bearing tales of how excessively friendly other people suddenly become when they say they're not Americans. I don't doubt that it really does happen now and then, but seeing as I have never been treated rudely for being American while I was elsewhere in the world - that's right, not a single time - I have a hard time believing it happens as frequently as they seem to think it does.

I ran into another incidence of that tonight, with a Canadian woman I had dinner with after a supply chain conference. (Yes, the conference was just as boring as you're probably thinking. But a job's a job, and I ate and drank for free!) We got to talking politics, of course, and when she gave me the usual snide remark about how Americans will never elect a black man president (and became even more skeptical when I said I expected Obama to name Gov. Sibelius of Kansas his VP nominee - "There's no way America will elect a black man and a white woman!"), I bet her $10 that Obama would win.

The story only begins there. You see, after we shook on the bet, we got to talking about the election in more detail, and only then did she discover how closely I follow politics. She could have picked up on it earlier if she'd paid a bit more attention; I mislead nobody. Perhaps feeling a bit insecure now that she realized the bet was a fairly informed one on my part, she delved into some personal anecdote about somebody, somewhere, sometime, who had asked if she was American and, on finding she wasn't, gushed about how wonderful that was. Which took away any sympathy I might have felt earlier on toward her for entering into a bet with someone who knew a lot more about the issue at hand than she did. "I'm sure you know you're not very popular in the outside world," she chirped, in response to which I explained that I've lived overseas for four of the past five years and have never been mistreated by anybody who knew where I was from.

Like I said, I don't doubt that it does happen, but does it happen that often? I have my doubts. For what it's worth, I've been on the receiving end of the same reaction once, when a guy at a bar in Paris found out I was American. He asked if I was English, and on finding out I wasn't, he let loose with a tirade about les rosbifs and then paid my bar tab.

I took the snotty comment as a compliment in disguise, though, because really, my rattling off of a dry list of statistics about states that haven't gone Democratic since 1964 where Obama is now ahead in the polls rounds out my trilogy of the best comebacks ever.

The others? One of them featured almost exactly the same dynamic, actually: during the Monica Lewinsky mess, a Canadian gal I knew remarked that "Hillary ought to be running the country, but Americans aren't ready for a woman president. Jerks." All I had to do was say "Kim Campbell" and, well, I've never seen anybody bus her tray and disappear quite that quickly. The other involved a guy at a party who overheard me say I was a Jimmy Buffett fan..."Oh yeah?" he asked incredulously, "Name three of his songs!" The printed word can't do justice to his tone, which made it clear that he was certain I would name "Margaritaville" and maybe "Cheeseburger in Paradise" and then get stuck. Instead, I rattled off three extremely obscure songs, one of which has never even been released officially, and of course he accused me of making them up. I got as far as explaining the story behind two of the three (if any parrotheads are reading this and wondering, they were "Don't Bring Me Candy," "Richard Frost," and "Peddlers and Pushers") before the guy suddenly remembered he needed another beer and never returned.

Careful who you question, folks!

You can't make this stuff up!

2008-06-28T22:11:00.002+08:00

During the Monica Lewinsky mess, there was a lengthy list of right-wingers who supported the impeachment and who also turned out to have infidelities in their past. Those of us who followed the impeachment closely can probably still recite the list. Henry Hyde was the favorite of many: he claimed "youthful indiscretion" as the justification for an affair he'd had in his mid-forties. (A few years later, he admitted what a lot of Republicans still haven't: that the real motivation for the impeachment was getting even for Watergate.)

In the years since then, I know some folks on the right who will immediately recite "I did not have sexual relations with that woman..." as an excuse for anything Bush et al are caught doing. In response to that, a lot of us on the left will say we miss the days when there was even time to worry about politicians' sex lives, as opposed to major cities being destroyed and illegal wars and such.

Lucky for us, those days aren't gone completely:

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Sens. David Vitter, R-La., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, have signed on as co-sponsors of a proposed Marriage Protection Act that would amend the constitution to declare that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.

What is there to add to that? I am going to miss seeing Mr. Wide Stance in stories like this, but at least we'll have Diaper Dave to kick around for another two years or more.

Quote of the Week

2008-06-26T00:08:00.001+08:00

"The federal government should not be in the public education business."
-Jason Chaffetz

Who is Jason Chaffetz? He's a gadfly, insurgent candidate who ran for Congress in Utah this year, challenging a six-term incumbent in the Republican primary. As an underfunded longshot challenger to a longtime incumbent, he didn't surprise too many people with his extreme rhetoric. That happens all the time in primaries with incumbents. The loon gets 10-15% of the vote and is soon remembered only by people who buy those books of dumb quotations by politicians of the party they don't belong to.

Except in today's Republican party, if the incumbent doesn't hate immigrants.

That's right, Chaffetz won. The Utah 3rd is the single most Republican district in the country (Bush got 77% of the vote there in 2004), so next January we are all but certain to have Chaffetz come to DC to share pearls of wisdom like that for at least two years. Given how conservative the area is, I guess it's not too big of a shock, really. Rep. Chris Cannon barely survived the last two primary seasons as well, because he ran afoul of immigration hardliners in his district. (This is politically incorrect, but I am honestly pretty surprised immigants aren't more popular in rural Utah. More Mormons just waiting to be converted, after all.)

I don't feel too bad about the outcome, really, for three reasons. First, the Dems have been doing the same thing with mushy-middle representatives in safe Democratic districts (most recently in Maryland in February) and I've been a big supporter of that, so I don't feel I should complain now with the shoe on the other foot.

Second, Cannon won the seat in the first place in an anti-environmentalist protest vote in 1996. (The area was, amazingly, represented by a Democrat back then; Cannon won the Republican nomination when it looked worthless, but then Clinton declared much of the district off limits to development that summer. Cannon ended up with 51% of the vote because he had an R after his name.) While Chaffetz will probably be even worse on environmental issues, at least he won't be the area's congressman specifically because he opposes keeping beautiful Southern Utah beautiful.

Third, if there are going to be places that are that deep red on the Congressional map, I'm all for them being represented by the most extreme right wingers the GOP can possibly dredge up. It'll make it that much dicier for the likes of Chris Shays and Dave Reichert to explain why their moderate-to-liberal constituencies should be sending them back to DC when that amounts to putting guys like this in the majority.

Okay, four reasons. That quote is really funny, and I'm looking forward to many more like it. Utah has long been a great source of such things. I've written before about my work for Rep. Jim Moran's first campaign when I was in high school...shortly after he took office, I recall reading in the newspaper that he was involved in a fender-bender on the way into DC. The driver of the other car was a woman who worked for one of Utah's senators (I can't recall which one offhand), and Moran said later that she joked about how the accident was a hint from God about Moran's support for abortion rights.

It is an amazingly beautiful state. "This is the place" indeed.

And now for something nonpolitical (and I hope funny)

2008-06-17T14:12:00.003+08:00

I am currently a party to an ongoing online discussion of made-up terms. When it started, my first thought was that I didn't have any, except the occasional political one. But as the thread has worn on, I've come to realize I actually have quite a few. I've been thinking I ought to write them all down so I'll have the list to refer to next time around, and some of them are pretty amusing. You'll notice that many of these are based on people's names...rest assured that I won't be referring to anybody there's any risk of my crossing paths with again. Nor do I particularly care if any of the people I do refer to here happen to read this (which they almost certainly won't) and recognize themselves (which is even less likely).

Pulling a Wilda - Criticizing somebody for doing a lousy job on something when in fact they did a fine job, and you're reaping the rewards of their work without even realizing it. Wilda was an ex boss of mine who once gave me a lecture about how I shouldn't have rearranged the mail flow in our office because everybody was used to the old method. As she was hassling me about this, she filed a stack of letters in about half the time it would have taken before I made those changes she hated so much. You might not think this happens often enough to warrant a term of its own, but there is a reason why Dilbert and The Office have been so popular for so long.

Don't be a f***, bring it back! - A cry of frustration in hopeless situations. Inspired by an incident in college where I left a slice of pizza in the dorm refrigerator and of course it disappeared before I came back to collect it. Just to be funny (and let people know there was a moocher in our midst), I put up a sign on the fridge: "Whoever the f*** took my pizza Sat night, don't be a F**K, bring it back!" Various girlfriends have since found this uproariously funny, or have used it as an excuse to tell me to get a life, or both.

The Suzanne Dance - (I didn't make this one up; I just used it rather frequently with those who did.) Stand with your legs apart, bent at the knees, and wiggle back and forth looking agitated and uncomfortable. Swing your arms one by one up against your forehead, slapping yourself gently with the back of each hand, and say things like "Oh! My life is over! Oh no! I'm ruined!" in a high, tragic voice. That's the Suzanne Dance. I would like to explain Suzanne to you all, really I would, but I can't. If I told you even one of the numerous illustrative anecdotes about her, you'd just insist that I must be exaggerating or that she must have been joking. Those who knew her could tell you otherwise, but they don't need me to tell them anything about her.

Something in the Mail - A euphemism that hides its meaning too well, so that nobody knows what you really mean and you end up embarrassing yourself more than you would have if you'd just said the real thing out loud to begin with. "Getting something in the mail" was my ex's favorite euphemism for her period. The first time she used it with me, I thought she was hinting at a credit card bill she didn't want to have to see or something like that.

Itsplaining - Trying to smooth over hurt feelings without actually apologizing, in a situation where you know you really should just apologize but won't do it for whatever reason. (This happens all the time in DC, not surprisingly.) This one comes from an office meeting I sat in on just before Thanksgiving several years ago. A newly married colleague mentioned that she and her husband were staying in town for the holiday rather than going home, but she wasn't looking forward to cooking dinner and maybe they wouldn't have one. She lived in the same neighborhood I had lived in back when I first came to DC, and there was a great Mexican restaurant just a few blocks from her building which had been a T-Day tradition for my friends and me. I told her about it and suggested it as a possible alternative, but she rolled her eyes and said, "Oh, I hate that place!" Realizing a second too late that she'd been rude (which happened a lot with her!), she quickly added, "I mean, it's plain. Don't you think it's plain, Dave?" Naturally, I didn't answer. She knew perfectly well that I didn't think it was plain, otherwise I wouldn't have recommended it!

Missed by an enchilada - To just miss something very unpleasant. This one comes from the same Mexican restaurant mentioned above. One Thanksgiving, I went to a big group dinner at an estate out in Maryland. When we got back to DC, three friends and myself decided to go to said restaurant for a midnight snack. (It was the only open restaurant in the neighborhood; even McDonalds was closed.) Everybody else who had been to the estate for dinner got food poisoning, but the four of us were fine.

No-trayers - People who ask for something without really knowing what it is, and who then get upset when they get exactly what they asked for. This one goes all the way back to Arby's. I probably got at least three customers a day who, when I asked if they wanted their food "for here or to go," would answer "to go," but when I presented their food in a bag, they'd snap, "What, no tray?!" Another example of no-traying at that job was people who ordered a Super when they really wanted a Giant. That was even more common, but I never came up with a pithy term based on that one. Supering? Nah. My own determination to never be a no-trayer is such that I ate a raw steak once in Luxembourg, having ordered it by accident. It was actually pretty good.

Can't-do-everythinging - When you call a co-worker on his or her failure to complete a job on time and the response is "But I can't do everything, when the real problem is that s/he hasn't done anything. That's can't-do-everythinging.

Gina bad - Gina was a colleague of mine from when I was teaching. She had a real mean streak, and the kindergarten kids were terrified of her. When a kid misbehaved, it was standard procedure to send hir to a different classroom for a time-out, but we didn't send them to Gina's room unless they had really been way out of line. Talking out of turn, not finishing your lunch quickly enough, not sharing the toys...these were minor infractions, and they deserved only a mild punishment if that. But if somebody hit another kid, threw food, yanked up a girl's dress, etc., well, that was being Gina bad.

A Jeff apology - In honor of my ex-best friend/roommate from hell. A Jeff apology is essentially, "I'm sorry it happened, but it's really your fault and there's nothing I can do about it now anyway." (He actually said that to me once after locking me out of our room when I was in the shower.)

Rachelisms - Extremely lame excuses for not doing your homework, i.e. "I meant to do my part of the group project that's due today, but there was this party I just had to go to, and I got back at 4:00." The Rachel who inspired this one was not the one I knew in DC or the one I worked with in Taiwan, so if you knew me during either of those periods, it's not who you think. Interesting, though, that I knew these three different yet like-named women in the space of less than six years and they were all incredibly irritating in one way or another.

I see your true colors...

2008-06-17T12:13:00.001+08:00

Reportedly for sale at the Texas GOP convention:

Can't wait for November!

Doesn't anybody ever remember anything in politics?

2008-06-15T22:33:00.002+08:00

I know I'm reaching the age where I can't really say I'm "young" anymore, but really, 1990 wasn't that long ago. Every now and then, though, I'm reminded that for people who depend entirely on the Internet for political news and history, it might as well be 1890.

I just experienced one such moment when I read about this on Daily Kos. Ol' Claytie Williams and his "rape joke" were huge news at the time. How on earth could that have escaped the attention of everybody in the McCain campaign who could have put a stop to it? I don't get it. Some of you are probably expecting me to argue that Republicans in general must not find rape jokes offensive, but my opinion of the party overall isn't as low as my friends tend to think. They're not all that bad. Which makes me wonder how they could have let the ball drop on this one. But that link has McCain's spokesman saying the campaign "was unaware" of the notorious remark.

Sadly, I do find I can believe that McCain himself wouldn't find Williams' "joke" all that bad. He might not have really said "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c**t" to his wife in public (I admit I find it suspicious that word didn't get out for sixteen years and then three people were willing to come forward at the same time), but then he might have. He did make that tasteless joke about Janet Reno being Chelsea Clinton's father about ten years ago (and, to his credit, he apologized...but still, he said it). This fits that pattern all too well.

By the way, another thing I remember - but which that link fails to mention - is that Williams' loss to Ann Richards was not because of the rape joke. He continued to lead in the polls for months after making the joke, and Richards pulled ahead of him only after he refused to shake her hand at a debate. Apparently it was okay to make light of violence against women in general in Texas, but you still had to treat an individual lady like a lady. That makes it just a little bit easier to understand why their next governor after Richards was who he was, doesn't it?

The McCain Clinic

2008-06-12T22:35:00.004+08:00

">Brilliant!

It still irks me when I think of the newscast I saw on Election Day 2000, with the all-female focus group in suburban Chicago...one woman after another chirping "I disagree with Bush on abortion but I'm going to vote for him anyway because I trust him not to be actively against abortion." Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?
This is what I love about the progressive blogosphere; no more faux moderation!

If the embedded video doesn't come through on your computer, see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arw-yNas2xc

Of dirty tricks and old wounds

2008-06-11T17:42:00.008+08:00

As some warn victory, some downfall,
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all except hatred

-Bob Dylan, "It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding"

After a rather nasty e-mail exchange I had this morning, I'm curious about what others think of this.

I was reading an acquaintance's blog post about Obama's possible running mates. John Edwards was listed among them (rather disingenuously, since he has already said he doesn't want the VP slot again), and he was immediately shot down as a poor choice because he "attacked Cheney for having a gay daughter" in 2004.

Now, I already felt Edwards would not be the best choice for Obama, mainly because he didn't do a particularly good job as the VP nominee in 2004. (I hate to have to say that, and I did support him for president this time around, but it's true all the same.) But the claim that he "attacked" Cheney is just ludicrous in my opinion. For what it's worth, here is an account of the exchange in question. And the "offending" remark from Edwards:

I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can’t have anything but respect for the fact that they’re willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It’s a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy.

Now, I do see how that can be seen as a bit passive-aggressive. It reminds me a bit of Clinton's brilliant comeback against Bush Sr. in the first 1992 debate regarding the "issue" of his patriotism ("But a senator from Connecticut stood up to Joe McCarthy, named Prescott Bush! Your father was right...") Both were obviously more about rousing the base than addressing the real issue at hand. But then again, one could argue that there was no "real issue" in the first place in both cases: Clinton's patriotism was only ever in doubt among people who hated his politics, and unfortunately, Kerry and Edwards were only marginally less hostile to gay rights than Bush and Cheney were. But still, does that make it "an attack for having a gay daughter"?

I don't see how, unless you're a homophobe. I really don't. I do think it's fair to call it an attack on someone for being a bigot against a group that includes a member of his family, but why is attacking that a bad thing? More to the point, why is an Obama supporter making excuses for Cheney's bigotry? I see it all too often, really: people who claim to be Democrats - or at least not Republicans - will feel compelled to regurgitate GOP propaganda like that. I call them the "I'm not a Republican but" crowd, and I really wish I could understand what inspires them. For one thing, maybe people like me could get through to them better if we could understand their perspective.

I did try to reason with this person about that. It didn't work, but this person did, I think, end up revealing a bit more than intended. Apparently Edwards was unreasonable because we can still love our children even if we "don't approve of their lifestyles." True, but that still doesn't make the above an attack on somebody for having a gay relative.

In any case, that exchange having devolved into a round of gratuitous insults without finding any common ground, I am curious as to what others think. I'm a bit disappointed that I wasn't able to make my own case any more articulately (is that a word?) than I did, but I guess that's what happens when two people look at the exact same quotation and see two completely different things. Was I off base? If so, why?

Oh, and the final parting shot from my friend? "It's my blog and I can write what I want there!" Yes, yes you can.

A tale of EPic proportions

2008-06-05T12:38:00.002+08:00

I got my Singapore Employment Pass yesterday.

It had been in the works for quite a while, of course, but the deal wasn't finalized until yesterday. We received the requisite letter about two weeks ago, but the boss reminded me that I needed to go get a physical exam at a local medical clinic. I went off to the clinic to do so, only to read the fine print on the way there and discover for the first time that I did not need a physical. Apparently that is usually a requirement but it wasn't in my particular case for some reason. With that out of the way, I settled on Monday to set aside an afternoon to sit in the consulate waiting for my number to be called.

Monday came, I waited, and finally got to the desk with all my papers. The lady behind the desk said everything was there except the "white card" from immigration that I needed to fill out when I got off the plane. Nobody had told me up to that moment that I would ever need that card again, naturally. Luckily, that's just the sort of thing I have learned never to throw away, so I found it in my desk that night and then headed back to the immigration ministry on Tuesday. This time, another lady behind the same desk told me that I also needed my certificate from Yale. I had the HEC one with me and I thought I also had the Yale one, but I didn't.

That's where things start to get interesting. I went home and couldn't find a hard copy of the diploma translation anywhere, but I did have a scan of it saved. So yesterday morning I came to the office just long enough to print out the scan, hoping they'd accept a copy.

They did, but there was definitely a communication breakdown along the way. When I got to the desk, yet another woman took a look at the translation and asked me for my certificate.

"That's an official translation of it," I told her.
"No, this isn't a certificate."
"The diploma isn't in English. That's the official translation."
"We don't need a diploma, we need a certificate."
"What exactly do you mean by 'certificate' if it's not a diploma?"
"It's a...certificate!"

Now, I never did learn quite what she thought a certificate was. When I made it clear that I had no idea what she wanted, she told me to wait and went back to speak to someone or other in the back office. When she returned, she asked me to write on the copy where the original was and sign it. I wrote, "Original diploma is in USA and is not in English."

She looked at it. "USA, does that mean France?"

I'm not joking. Neither was she. Nearly everybody in Singapore speaks English fluently. Leave it to one of the few who don't to end up in a job that involves dealing with people in English all the time!

Nevertheless, the papers were processed at that point and I got the EP later on yesterday afternoon with no further troubles. I think she may have been confused by the fact that I had one degree from an English speaking country and one from a non-English speaking country, but the latter correspondence was in English in the original while the former wasn't. (In keeping with Yale's deliberate pretentiousness about almost everything, its diplomas are in Latin. This is not the first time that has gotten me caught up in red tape.) I doubt she ever quite caught on to my situation, and I still haven't got a clue what the difference between a certificate and a diploma is.

It was still a lot easier than it was in France!

RIP General Odom

2008-06-02T16:32:00.002+08:00

For the past eight years and change, I have had a problem a lot of people would probably welcome, and which I find I can't complain about too much. I'd rather have it than not have it, I suppose, but there are times when it can be irritating all the same. The problem: inability to refer to where I went to school by name without people accusing me of snobbery or worse. My friends can refer as casually as they like to "a friend of mine from GWU/Georgetown/Duke/etc.," and nobody will bat an eye. But the minute you refer to Yale, you're a pretentious, namedropping blueblood.

I got a taste of it even before I actually started there...in that otherwise great spring and summer of 1999, I recall any number of times I told people I was going back to school "up in Connecticut," whereupon a friend in the know would say, "Stop being so modest, he's going to Yale!" So after a while, I went ahead and said that...but no matter how low-key I tried to be about it, it was never enough for some people. It was a no-win situation if there ever was one. Surprisingly, that doesn't seem to apply to all of the other Ivy League schools, as I knew long before I had anything to do with Yale. How did I know? Anybody who went to Grinnell will tell you, 95% of the time when you tell people you went there, they think you said "Cornell." Annoying as heck, but nobody ever gave me a hard time about that one. (If anything, it was the other way around..."No, Grinnell, in Iowa...no, not the potato state...no, it's hundreds of miles from Cleveland...") No, it's something about Yale that makes people think you ought to keep your fond memories for the tables down at Mory's - wherever that may be - to yourself.

Of course, some of them were probably just jealous. Which is okay. But still, it could be annoying, and still can.

But there are times when it's only right to refuse to let such things bother you. Sadly, such a time is upon us, with the passing of Gen. William Odom. If you've followed the anti-war movement over the past few years, you've probably heard of him. Such are the perks of Yale that, fair or not, he's not just a name on the blogs to me. I had the honor of sitting just a few seats down the table from him once a week in the spring of 2000 in a class on security policy. And what an honor it was!

I did not look upon it quite so kindly at the time, I must admit. To be honest, I can't even recall exactly why I was interested in the class in the first place. Yale has what they call a "shopping period" during the first week or so of the semester, during which you can go to as many classes as you like and make a more informed decision on which ones you want to take. Odom's class was one of several that I sat in on during that particular shopping period in which far more people showed up than there were spaces in the class. He therefore had everybody fill out index cards with their contact information and a paragraph or so on why they wanted to take the class.

Although his lecture was quite interesting during that first session, I was somewhat indifferent about taking the class by the time it was over. Then, just after it was over, something happened that made me decide I definitely didn't want to take it: a female undergrad approached Odom and made a direct appeal to be allowed into the class even though she was a freshman (and thus at the biggest disadvantage of all for getting in) because she was hoping to transfer to West Point after that semester. Odom, himself a West Point grad, let loose with a barrage of just about everything short of "machine guns and PMS don't mix" (and I imagine he was thinking that too) about why women shouldn't be going to West Point. Anybody who knows me can imagine what I thought of that.

Nevertheless, when I unexpectedly got into the class, I ended up enrolling. Like I said, I don't remember exactly why. It might have been something as mundane as how it fit with my other courses, most of which were rather tedious that semester. In any case, I took the class and ended up loving it. He was blunt (in the "I can laugh about it now" department, I made an incorrect point about Clausewitz in my first paper for him, and he wrote "Poppycock!" in the margin), but not as unreasonable as that outburst the first day had made me expect. I did end up locking horns with him on women in the military and some other issue that was near and dear to his heart - I can't recall what it was, but I do remember there were two incidents that made me conclude I'd never get an A but it was worth it to stand up to the guy. As it turned out, I got an A anyway, or maybe even because of that. And yes, there were war stories, including some tales of Oliver North and how Odom knew he was trouble years before any civilian had even heard of him.

Along the way, I picked up that, gender issues aside, he was anything but your typical career military guy politically speaking. Nice surprise! So it wasn't such a big surprise when he emerged as a voice of opposition to the war. Every time his name has popped up since then, I have gotten a kick out of imagining Bush's cabinet sitting around his classroom table and him letting them all have it. (Odom was not at Yale back in the '60s, by the way - he was at Columbia then - which is too bad, as the idea of Dubya himself as a "student" in his class is just priceless.)

Getting back to my earlier point, when I've seen his name in the news since the war, I have often been tempted to mention that I studied with him, but have mostly restrained myself to avoid any accusations of wearing Yale on my sleeve. But not today. Thanks for the memories, General, and thanks for doing what you could to get the truth out about the war!

I'm sure he'd be disappointed in me if I didn't add that I still think he was a sexist pig. But what an education.

I didn't vote for him but...

2008-05-31T10:36:00.002+08:00

I'd nearly forgotten why Bob Dole is my favorite Republican...

"There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues," Dole wrote in the personal e-mail. "No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits, and spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique."

"When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, 'Biting The Hand That Fed Me,'" he wrote. "Another thought is to weasel your way back into the White House if a Democrat is elected. That would provide a good set up for a second book deal in a few years."

Dole also made clear he has no plans to read the book.

"I have no intention of reading your 'exposé' because if all these awful things were happening, and perhaps some may have been, you should have spoken up publicly like a man, or quit your cushy, high profile job," he wrote. "That would have taken integrity and courage but then you would have had credibility and your complaints could have been aired objectively."

"You're a hot ticket now but don't you, deep down, feel like a total ingrate?"

Okay, I know he's just upset because the partisan wall of silence has been breached (again), and that link shows he also threw in some predictable whining about "the liberal media," and I can't help being bugged by his judging the book when he hasn't read it (that always makes me think of a prof I knew in Iowa who once told me she would never watch Forrest Gump because "it's a celebration of anti-intellectualism" - how could she know without watching it?). But that said...

First of all, while McClellan's disclosures have been music to my ears this week, thee's nothing there that everybody who cared wasn't aware of years ago. Speaking of years ago, Dole is right, that's when he should have quit if he's known all along about the lies he "exposes" here. I really hope nobody out there thinks he's a hero for speaking up now, but I'm getting the impression some folks do.

From a more selfish but realistic point of view, there's also the matter of partisan loyalty here, and I know how that feels. Now Republicans everywhere know what it's been like every time Joe Lieberman has opened his mouth for the past five years or so.

A month, already?

2008-05-23T10:08:00.002+08:00

Actually, it's been more than a month, hasn't it? Today does mark one month on the job, which means it's been a month and a week since I arrived. And it feels more like three days, except when I'm in the neighborhood of the hotel where I stayed during those first several days. (I still go back there quite a bit for dinner and such.) That area, of course, already felt like old times to me on the morning I arrived, since it was also the area I knew best from my prior visit here. It's still a comforting escape anytime.

So what can we make of the first month and change in Singapore? Since I am still job hunting (or really, "job hunting again" would be closer to the truth, since I did stop trying for a while there in order to concentrate on finishing up in Paris), I don't think it's appropriate to talk much about my current job in public. Suffice to say it's going pretty well for an internship. I am learning a lot about strategy, as well as making one's own way in a startup business. While I do like it, I don't see myself staying here long term, which is a pretty good incentive to get back into the swing of looking elsewhere. Now that I've had a week to get used to the idea that I really am done with the MBA and now I need to pay for it, it's on to finding ways to do that.

I am planning to look primarily here and I figure my chances are best here, but I am also still looking elsewhere. For now I'm thinking of my stay in Singapore as a six-month trial sort of thing (I'm not wedded to that length of time; it's just a good working number). I knew before I even got here that I wouldn't necessarily love it on a permanent basis just because I loved it as a tourist. So far I do like it - the weather is a bit muggy sometimes, but one thought of December in Luxembourg is all I need to get over any complaints about that! I do miss Paris like I knew I would, but the job market is probably much bigger here. We'll see soon enough. I can't say I really feel at home just yet, but that's probably mostly because I'll be moving again at the end of June and most of my stuff is still on its way here.

The only thing I really don't like is that, having won the epic battle over finishing my degree on time, my only reward is another battle to find a job in this economy. But that would be an issue no matter where I'd moved to. So yes, it's been a pretty good first month.

Wonder what they dip the fries in

2008-05-21T08:01:00.002+08:00

This may have made the rounds on the Series Of Tubes a few times already, but...a New York restaurant now has a $175 hamburger. Times obviously aren't hard for everybody. Note the foie gras bit...why would you do that with foie gras?! (Yes, among my souvenirs from Paris is the fact that I now really love the world's most inhumane food. Don't knock it till you've tried it.) The whole thing is just wrong, though, isn't it? I'm reminded of the Hardee's Monster Thickburger from a few years ago (never ate one, never will), where the whole point was to be as anti-nutritious as they possibly could - here, the name of the game is being as wasteful as you can get.

It does make me feel a bit less guilty about the "gourmet burger" I bought in London that time for thirteen pounds. It was good, but not that good...but it also didn't cost more than a week's worth of groceries!

A stake through the heart of finance class, and pass the sheepskin

2008-05-16T23:08:00.001+08:00

It's officially over: I will be graduating from HEC in June.

You might have thought that would be a done deal, since I finished my last class a month ago. Time was, I thought so too. For all I know, maybe it was. But immediately after I finished that last exam in April, I had the rotten luck to run into a well meaning but overzealous administrator who proceeded to give me an unwanted pep talk. I am almost certain she meant to be encouraging, but all she really did was make me think it'd be just short of a miracle if I ever got my diploma. I wrote a rather long entry explaining the story behind the story here. But having just re-read it, I think it's a bit dirty-laundryish for me to explain everything. Besides, I probably was worrying a lot more about the whole issue than I really needed to. But there is a reason for that, rational or not.

The whole uncertainty issue really cast a cloud over my last week or so in Paris (which admittedly wouldn't have been a very happy time in any case - long goodbyes are tough) and made me ponder the possibility that the past three years could end up being a dead loss. Happily, they weren't. But how uncool is it that the possibility ever even existed? Perhaps because I was dealing with this whole thing for so long, I still haven't really gotten over my panic about it all. I actually received the good news yesterday afternoon, but opted not to share it on here just in case I got another e-mail saying there had been a mistake. Yeah, I know, paranoid...trust me, you probably would be too!

Graduation is in June, but I won't be attending. I don't have the money or the time to get back to France, and I also find I really don't want to go. You'd think the happy ending would make me want to go back and indulge a bit, and I'm actually kind of surprised that I don't feel that way, but I definitely don't. The bad side of the whole thing is still pretty raw in my memory, and will be for a while. I wouldn't wish the past six months or so of my life on my worst enemy, and I certainly don't care to celebrate anything about them just now!

Since the ending was a good one, I am sure that the whole episode will come to be nothing worse than a memory of a rough time that I survived and a reminder of why one should never give up. To some degree, that's already happening: while moving back from Luxembourg to Paris in February, I stopped at a lovely little hotel in Verdun. It was wonderfully quiet, there was a dusting of snow on the ground and no traffic anywhere, the lobby was quaint and pleasant looking, the desk clerk looked shocked when I handed him my American passport and told me my French was terrific, and the room was as cheap as it was cozy. I knew as I drifted off to sleep that the idyllic and quiet setting amidst all the nastiness in my life right then made for a great turning point - maybe the worst was over. I know now that it was! But it's too fresh in my mind for me to want to bother with graduation.

Certainly, though, I do appreciate the offer.

Bruuuuuuuuuce endorses Obama

2008-04-29T22:36:00.000+08:00

An interesting piece of news I missed during the big trip. (There's no hyperlink; scroll down just past the tributes to Danny Federici.)

After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.

Over here on E Street, we're proud to support Obama for President.

Bruce Springsteen

Now, I don't much care what a rock star thinks about politics, no matter how much I like his music. (I do continue to be perversely amused by the irony of Reagan using "Born in the USA" as a campaign song, but that's another issue.) While Springsteen is more well-read than most of the others that I know of - I'm thinking in particular of Paul McCartney's clueless pontifications about animal rights - I think he'd probably be the first to say being popular for something completely unrelated to politics doesn't make his opinion any more worthwhile than yours or mine.

What I do admire here is that he's not pretending to be "above politics" as so many non-political public figures do. Every campaign season seems to include at least one case of a candidate being asked to stop using a song because the singer or band whose song it is "doesn't want to get mixed up in politics." For whatever reason, they can't just say "I don't want you using my song because I disagree with you politically."* Instead, it's usually "I'm not political." I've always believed everybody is political in one way or another, and people who say they aren't usually are and just don't quite accept that they are. Worse, in my experience they tend to look down their noses at those of us who are, well, honest with ourselves about having opinions. I can at least sort of understand that mentality - even if I still don't approve of it - coming from people in academia for example. (The first and most memorable example I was ever exposed to was my spectacularly pretentious 12th grade English teacher...you don't want to get me started on her.) To hear it from people who play three-chord music for a living is just absurd.

In any case, it's good to see someone I already admired isn't afraid to share his opinion. (He was also one of the few I can recall who openly supported the Dixie Chicks when they made the mistake of not taking marching orders from Bush in 2003.) And yes, that goes for Republican rock stars as well, though there aren't very many of them that I know of. I do recall an amusing incident several years ago when Goldmine magazine ran an interview with Ted Nugent in which he made several characteristically right wing remarks. The next issue featured several letters to the editor taking Nugent to task for his views. The issue after that printed one letter to the editor from a conservative reader demanding to know why so many liberal letters had been printed bashing Nugent and not a single one in his defense.

The editor responded that he hadn't received any pro-Nugent letters.

*To his credit, Tom Scholz of Boston did do that when Mike Huckabee used "More Than a Feeling" for a campaign song earlier this year. Scholz supports Obama too, but Obama apparently is smart enough not to liven up his pep rallies with a song about a long-lost girlfriend.

An honorable retirement

2008-04-29T17:40:00.000+08:00

Back in Paris recently, I was asked to consider saying goodbye to a dear old friend of mine.

It was an uncomfortable moment, for I had known for some time that the day was coming when I would be so advised. For some time now, I've been unable to deny that although we've been through some great times together, my friend is rather the worse for wear. Wrinkles and blemishes abound where once there were none, there are even a few permanent injuries here and there, and not all is quite right anymore on the inside either. Perhaps things could be fixed to some degree, but my friend will never be young again, and you know how so many people feel about subjecting one to great indignities just to prolong a not-very-happy life a bit longer. I had a feeling things would change in our relationship once I got to Singapore anyway, so I was able to fight the urge to part ways with my old friend.

I am talking, of course, about my leather jacket. It's beat, but it's served me so well for so long, how could I give up on it now? A shoe salesman I stopped to see in St. Michel didn't see it that way. "It is worn out!" he said in classic too-precise non-native English. "Look at these new ones I have! Half off and they go with your new shoes!"

They did, too. But an old friend is an old friend. Oh, I admit it helped that I had no business buying a new leather jacket - even on sale - when I was a poor student who was just a month or so away from moving to a city just a few miles from the equator. But mostly it was a matter of loyalty to old friends.

We do go back a while, after all: all the way to Christmas 1998, the end of a year that started out rough but ended very well indeed - just the sort of precedent I'm hoping to follow a decade later, actually. It was a gift from my incomparable Great Aunt Lillian, once she forgave me for being a Democrat. Aunt Lil has since gone to heaven (even though she was a gym teacher - hope she's not too lonely up there), which is another reason not to part with it. But that's only part of its sentimental value. It's been with me through all kinds of weather since that Christmas day. It joined the ride just in time for those heady last days of the International Student House era, and the many road trips with Sarah, Pat, Lathan and Barbara - Shenandoah, Annapolis, Harper's Ferry...and Niagara (inside joke - I don't mean the waterfall, though it's been there too). It saw me to Yale and back to DC, with all those chilly winter afternoons organizing for the union in the Grad Ghetto in between, countless trips to New York, three times to Canada, and one frigid New Year's in the hills of North Carolina (Cold Mountain was a good book, but the title is an understatement), through all the thick and (mostly) thin of my second round in DC, on to Taiwan (where the zipper broke and it spent most of the two years on the extra bedroom floor), to Denver (where I finally got the zipper fixed), and traipsing across much of Europe with me since then. The scuffs and discoloration and the holes in the lining are just badges of honor picked up along the way.

I won't be needing it here in the tropics. But I sure as heck won't need a replacement either, and I can't think of one good reason to throw it out. When I moved into my room here, it was the first thing I put away. I very reverently hung it on a hanger at the far end of the closet where I hope my old friend will enjoy a peaceful retirement in this nice warm climate.

The first few days

2008-04-21T13:54:00.002+08:00

Somewhat coincidentally, the hotel where I had a room waiting for me when I arrived here (thanks to some help from my parents) was just up the street from the club where I stayed last time I was in Singapore. I say "somewhat coincidentally" because it's not really that big a surprise: all the nice hotels are right downtown in the shopping district. No surprise there.

Naturally, since that last trip was over three years ago and I was awfully tired when I arrived, I didn't recognize everything right away. But it didn't take too long to realize I was in the same neighborhood I had gotten to know way back when. That made for a nice surprise, though; it meant I already knew where quite a few points of interest were. For starters, it meant I knew where the nearest bookstore and coffee shop were, so I could go there and kill time until my room was ready. It also brought back some nice memories at a time when I needed something like that to relax!

There were a couple of things I had to get done over the weekend, chief among them being to settle on an apartment. But the first order of business was getting some sleep. I'm a bad international traveler - I never bother with that whole rule about waiting until the time you would normally go to bed. So far I have never run into any trouble with going to sleep when I'm ready to, even if it's in midafternoon. It didn't hurt this time either.

Finding a place to live is never much fun, especially when you're in a rush to do it. In the age of Craigslist, it can be a bit easier but it also now has considerable scam danger. Luckily, I'd met a prospective roommate online and she had already staked out a few places we'd "found" - two of which turned out to be too good to be true. (One of them led me to go have a look at the apartment by peeping in the window while the owner was off on business! Luckily, I found the building and then realized the apartment number didn't exist, so I didn't have to subject myself to any such thing anyhow.) I did end up finding a nice little room in an apartment shared by three French guys, of all things. Hey, at least the culture shock will be eased! I moved in this morning and all is looking pretty good at this point. The lease is up in two months, at which point the gal I mentioned earlier and I will probably get a group house together somewhere. (She's staying with her family in the meantime. We met Saturday night and had a nice long chat.)

I'm not thrilled about having to move again in June, but at least this way there'll be time to do it the right way. Meantime, my current digs have all the essentials: a bed, air conditioning, and a swimming pool just outside! No complaints there.

One worry I do have is getting used to actually working in Singapore. I have a fair bit of experience as a tourist here, but now it's a new ballgame. But since I haven't worked in six months and I've spent most of that time wishing I could, I don't think it'll take too long to adjust. We'll find out the day after tomorrow, which is set to be my first day on the job.

But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Now that I'm moved in, it's back to enjoying one more day of what amounts to a rather nice little vacation. I am going to miss the hotel downtown...if I do end up staying in Singapore long term (and there's no reason to think I won't; everybody tells me there's lots of work available), I can definitely see the Marriott becoming a nice sentimental spot to think of whenever I pass by it. The Marriott in Denver served the same purpose throughout the year I was there, always reminding me of the welcome back to the States it provided when I got back from Taiwan.

There is, of course, no telling yet if I'll be staying in Singapore for even a year. But the early reviews are good enough to make me think I will.

Au revoir, ma belle France!

2008-04-09T00:45:00.005+08:00

I hadn't been back to the insane asylum known as De Gaulle Airport since the morning I first arrived in France. (I flew through Orly when I went to Morocco last year, and all my other comings and goings in Paris were by ground transport.) So it definitely appeals to the storyteller in me that this particular story ended with my one and only return to the scene where it began a year and a half ago.

A year and a half...it feels funny to type that. It seems a lot longer ago than that, and yet it doesn't seem like it's been any time at all. My wonderfully poetic and introspective response to that seeming paradox is, it's both. It really is. I'm not feeling up to expanding on that just now, but I figure anyone who's been on an adventure like moving overseas knows what I mean.

In any case, it was with equal parts joy and sorrow that I arose one last time in my rustic prewar flat in Paris (April in Paris, no less, but I didn't take notice of any chestnuts in blossom) and headed up the block to the Metro to make my way out to the airport. It's endlessly fascinating to me the way so many different stories run together for those few extremely busy and crowded moments on a city sidewalk or a subway train...most of us are just going about or daily routine, a few of us are tourists heading off to the usual fun and/or educational spots, and one or two of every crowd is embarking on a major change like moving to a different continent.

For reasons I prefer not to discuss at this point, there is a slight chance I'll be going back to Paris in the not-too-distant future. While going to Paris is always a good thing on some level, if that does happen this time it'll be for a rather unpleasant reason. That tempered my joy at getting on with my life, especially at first as I dragged all my bags down the block to the Metro in the very gray morning light. I really had hoped my departure would be a trimphant one, and it probably will turn out that way in the end - but it wasn't something I knew for sure on that last train ride that mirrored my very first train ride in France almost exactly.

Still, I'd lost most of my blues by the time the RER got out into the northern suburbs, which I hadn't seen since that first ride back from de Gaulle. The sun was breaking through, the scenery was about as un-romantic as you can get in France, and the worst of the heavy lifting of my suitcases was over. This was not a time to feel sorry for myself! The trip, of course, was quite a bit shorter than the one on my arrival had been, since I was only coming in from Paris rather than from Jouy.

Given the amount of international flying I do and the state of airport security these days, it seems inevitable that I will one day have some kind of horror story to share about getting through immigration or security. Thankfully, my number was not up yesterday. I got my newly renewed passport stamped for the very first time, no questions asked, sort of an odd ending to my European saga really - just that one little stamp on the first page. Getting everything back in my pockets at security took a while, but I didn't even have to take my shoes off like you usually do back in the States these days. I was left with the pleasant problem of having two hours to kill in the terminal.

Singapore Airlines is great. I'd never flown with them before, but I'd heard only good things, and the good things were true. The food was actually good, not just edible, and there were lots of movies available on the monitor. Of course, even for a guy who loves to travel, twelve hours on a plane just isn't much fun. At least it was more bearable than it could have been, I'll give them that. I highly recommend them, and will definitely be joining their frequent flier club now that I'm in the neighborhood. But the big move blues did set in soon enough.

Maybe you've never experienced the big move blues...they come hand in hand with extremely long airplane rides and jetlag and big life changes. No matter how happy you are about the new adventure you're embarking on, there comes a point when you've been sitting in that seat for hours and there are still hours to go and you haven't seen the sun in forever and oh my God, what have you gotten yourself into? I remember getting a bad case of them on the first trip to Taiwan, and I knew enough to expect it this time around too. Sure enough, they reared their ugly head in the form of a minor panic attack about that last exam (still haven't heard anything, but I do think I passed, really) and borderline terror about trying to find work in Singapore, even though I already have work for the next several months and generally wishing I'd settled down years ago in some small town back in the States like so many of my friends from college did. Even if I wouldn't have been very happy with my life, think of how much more secure it would be!

But then came the sunrise and the landing, this time in an airport I actually knew and a city I knew well enough to head for the subway instead of an overpriced taxi. On the way there, I got a good look out the window at the palm trees and the hazy sunshine that was definitely warning of a torrential rainstorm. A few minutes' walk found me on the subway where I was in the familiar position of being the only white guy, and sure enough, the rain came soon and hard - but not for too long.

And then there were the 7-11s everywhere and the crazy traffic and the smell of sweet popcorn at the movie theater across the street from the hotel and the heat and humidity and the open storefronts crammed with radios or toiletries or clothes on racks spilling out onto the sidewalks...yep, back in Asia at last. Has it really been three years?

Not quite, actually, but close. For now anyway, the blues are back under a rock where they belong!

Step on the gas and wipe that tear away

2008-04-04T02:04:00.009+08:00

Still a lot of lands to see
But I wouldn't want to stay here
It's too old and cold and settled in its ways here

-Joni Mitchell, singing about Paris

Believe it or not, the vast majority of my HEC experiences were very positive. The trouble is that the negative ones were extremely negative, and they were also disproportionately recent. For that reason, I am confident that once some time has gone by and I've gained more perspective on the whole thing, it's going to be a good memory for the most part. In fact, that has already started happening since I got back from Luxembourg in January. I think now about how stressed out and depressed I was during that week when I suddenly found myself headed back for yet another class, and it's hard to believe that was barely two months ago.

Still, for the time being at least, there is nothing I'm going to miss about HEC. (Yes, that includes my friends, because I've already been missing most of them for several months now!) I've been almost done for months, and now that the Class That Wouldn't Die is finally over with, it's time to move on. Past time, actually! This latest big adventure, which began so quietly two and a half years ago in a bar in Denver when I realized I just didn't like political theory well enough to make a career of it, has been a good one. But the curtain has been ready to fall for quite some time now.

It is still not quite official, as I just turned the exam in. I am also painfully aware that I waxed so very poetic about never coming back here back in December. But I knew well enough when I didn't pass, and I think I can also tell when I did pass. So unless somebody in the administration really hates me, this quiet scene in the computer room overlooking the parking lots of HEC is the grand finale. I am feeling characteristically sentimental about the scene, recalling the morning I moved in not so very long ago, dragging my suitcases one at a time across that same parking lot from the hotel to the dorm, smiling awkwardly at the other new students and not sure whether to address them in English or French...and appropriately enough, now they're all my friends and for the most part they're flung to the four winds.

As I will be too, next week. Back in January I was offered a six month gig at a company in my beloved Singapore, but this latest and last academic hassle derailed that...but only temporarily! The company was kind enough to wait for me to get my academic head out of you-know-where, and I'm due to start there on the 24th. It is only a six month job for now, but it's in a good location and anything can happen next. All my belongings except for some clothes and books are soon to be on their way there, and I'll be following suit the next day. Meanwhile, there's some last minute tourist stuff to be done in Paris. Actually, in Paris, that is always an option if not an obligation!

Paris really is all that they say and then some. The people are far nicer than their reputation would have you think (although I do wish they would look where they were going on the sidewalks), the architecture and monuments are even more beautiful in person, and even the dirty streets have a unique charm. Since I've had little to do but study since January, I have caught up on a lot of things I never got around to last year, most notably a trip to the Louvre. It's true, the Mona Lisa really is smaller than you think. The Louvre isn't. It doesn't matter how big you thought that place was, in reality it's bigger. I've also had occasion to spend lots of quality time in various cafés and pubs and restaurants, and had a wild weekend with an old friend I hadn't seen in five years...hard to imagine a better locale for that!

In fact, it's hard to imagine a better locale, period. I'll miss the place. But just as the reason why I had to come back to this wonderful city was a really crummy one, the reason why I have to leave it is a really good one. I have always loved Singapore, and I've been ready to get back to work pretty much from the moment I quit the last internship. But I don't want to dwell on that experience just now.

And what of the immediate future? There's time for one last dinner of escargots and fondue, one last jaunt down the Champs-Elysées, one last aimless wander through the agonizingly beautiful streets...but there's another week yet for all that. Now I'm off to dispose of my finance notes in some creative way or other. And then, to paraphrase Michael J. Fox in The American President, "I'm gonna go get a big steak and have a bite for everybody that tried to F**K me!!!"

Yeah, it has been a tough several months. But if what I've been through since October hasn't driven me to despair, I don't think anything ever will. I lead a charmed life, sort of.

France. Where understanding is less important than your accent.

2008-02-27T23:16:00.003+08:00

The French don't care what they do, actually, as long as they pronounce it properly!
-My Fair Lady

As my time in Paris winds down (no departure date set yet, but there should be one pretty soon), I'm noticing a lot about minor things that have changed. One of these is the tendency of others to switch to English when they hear my accent. It happens less than it used to, which of course is great. But if I stayed for 20 years, it probably wouldn't disappear completely. For one thing, some people are always going to want to practice their English, which is fine with me.

Others just live up to the stereotype about the French looking down their noses at anyone else who tries to speak their language. Which isn't fine with me.

This morning at Starbucks, I had the accidental pleasure of burning one such snob pretty badly. I made my order in French, she understood perfectly, I paid and headed upstairs with my coffee and smoothie and muffin, and that should have been the end of it. After finishing breakfast and studying for a while, I was ready for another cup. Since I had ordered the coffee to stay in the store, they'd given me a china mug. I took the mug back downstairs and asked for another cup, setting the empty mug on the counter.

The girl looked at me like I was from quite a bit farther away from here than I really am. She picked up the mug. "You want another?" she asked a bit skeptically, in heavily accented English.

"Yes, please," I said.

She looked a bit surprised, and went over to say something to another barista, too quietly for me to hear. "One moment please!" she called back to me. I didn't see what the holdup was, since there was a stack of clean mugs there on the counter and the coffee maker did not appear to be empty. But I was in no hurry to return to studying anyhow.

The second barista ran upstairs, while the first pointed at the coffee mug and nodded at her. Then she returned to me. "A minute," she said, and pulled out some wrapping paper and a small shopping bag from under the counter. She laid both on the counter and stood there looking a bit awkward.

It was then that I realized what was going on, or at least suspected that I did. "That's not for me, is it?" I asked, in English since she had addressed me in English thus far. "All I want is another cup of coffee."

"I don't understand," she said, perhaps a bit annoyed at this rude, boorish American who couldn't be bothered to speak her language, except that he had initially done so and she had replied in his.

"I only want another cup of coffee," I told her, in French. "Je ne veux qu'une autre tasse du café."

"Oh!" You could almost see the little light go on in her head. Then the French came fast and thick, about how she'd misunderstood and so on. There was even an apology somewhere in there. It was at just about that point that the other barista appeared with a brand new coffee mug, asking if this was what I wanted.

"Oui mais non," the other gal replied.

A quick update

2008-02-11T00:16:00.000+08:00

Things have calmed down a bit. The move is over and I'm loving Paris as usual. I'd be lying to say I was happy about the reason why I'm back here, but you've got to do what you've got to do. I've tentatively lined something up for after I get done in April, on which more details will be coming once I'm more sure that it's definitely going to happen. Meanwhile, the class I'm taking has been going pretty well so far. In brief, the limbo I've been caught in since last fall isn't quite over yet, but I'm seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. I might even come back to blogging more often, but I don't see myself having a lot to report until April. We'll see.

See you in April

2008-01-21T20:24:00.000+08:00

The good news is, it looks like I'll be moving back to Paris as soon as I can find a room there. And yes, that really is good news. I have missed that town.

The bad news is, the reason why I'm moving back is that I have to take care of yet another wrinkle in my coursework that will require all my attention until halfway through April. While I will probably have some free time between now and then, I don't want this space to turn into a self-pitying fest like I know it can sometimes. Let's face it, there's no nice way of saying "the past six months have handed me one disaster after another and every time I think I see a light at the end of the tunnel things somehow get even worse." But that is pretty much the way it is, and there's no chance of that changing before April. I've always believed things do get better if you never give up, but I have come to question that lately. I'm sure my friends don't want to hear that again and again over the next two months, and I don't want to be the one to say it either.

Thanks, everyone, for your companionship and such. If I make it through this latest challenge (yes, if I make it through), I look forward to sharing happier times.

See you in April.

My take on NH, and do I have one?

2008-01-10T19:21:00.000+08:00

I don't know what to make of the unexpected results any more than anybody else does. My favorite theory so far is that the spike in support for Clinton was a backlash against the predictably sexist clucking from the media about her not-quite-crying jag. I hope that's the case, anyway, I really do. She's still not my first choice (Edwards is, but I don't think he'll be in the running much longer), but the catty media coverage she's been getting is just disgusting. Speaking of which, I don't buy into the argument that the Dems shouldn't nominate her because she'll attract so much venom from the Republicans and some parts of the media. That will be true of whomever gets the nomination. If anything, it makes me more uncomfortable to think any of the other Dems might think they're not in for the same treatment.

On the Republican side, I'm a bit less surprised - but just a bit. I'll give McCain credit where it's due for an impressive comeback, but it's interesting how we're still seeing the most support for those who are least popular within the party. The talking heads on CNN have been saying the religious right will still sink McCain like they did in 2000, and I think that's probably right. I'm not going to go into which Republican I hope gets the nomination, to the extent that I even have any preference. I keep thinking of that old cliche about how the Democrats couldn't wait to run against Reagan and the Republicans were thrilled at the chance to run against Bill Clinton.

On a more personal note...nothing has really changed. Just about everything is still up in the air. A sixteen-month MBA seemed like such a great idea, and it does have its benefits, but at this point I wouldn't mind having a class or two to keep me busy while I wait for the job applications to be sorted out!

But the life and the telling are both real to me...

2008-01-07T01:38:00.000+08:00

I'm selling my memoirs,
I'm writing it down
If no one will pay me
I'll burn down the town!

-Procol Harum, "A Rum Tale"

As you can see on the right, the oldest of the archives are back. I also have all the posts from the first part of 2007 saved, and will be adding those later on. Regrettably, most of the entries from 2005 and 2006 are lost, but I do have a few I saved, which I'll also add in whenever I get around to it. Really, the oldest and the newest are the best anyway.

I must admit, it was rather bittersweet to read some of those old entries, particularly the ones about John Kerry's chances in the election and about Trina's arrival in Taiwan. (I haven't kept in touch with her, but we did part as friends more or less. Still...) But it's all part of the story, and now it's there for my newer readers who might have missed it the first time around.

Also, since I've been known to wax nostalgiac about the big move to Taiwan, and since I haven't really stopped moving since then, and since that's what the blog started out to be all about, I've added a rather lengthy collection of memories from the big trip. I wrote it about two years ago in Denver (i.e. about two years after the events actually happened), but I've filed them under February 2004 for the sake of simplicity. Hope you like it, but be warned, it's long!

Iowa

2008-01-04T18:36:00.000+08:00

So the caucuses have finally come and gone, conveniently while I was asleep thanks to the time difference. Seeing all the clips on CNN really takes me back. I was especially pleased to see the various reps from the Iowa Democratic Party who were interviewed. Not a single familiar face, and that's a good thing. I worked for the IDP a few lifetimes ago and the entire operation was an absolute disgrace. There's a reason why the Republicans won almost everything in the state throughout the '90s. Be that as it may, I do love being on the ground in the thick of a campaign, and I miss that life somewhat. Not much, but a bit. Seeing all the excitement was a nice reminder.

And the results?

First, I'm glad to hear Dodd is dropping out and going back to DC to continue the fight on FISA. Word on the blogosphere has been that the leadership of both parties expected him to stop "grandstanding" on the whole thing once the wheels came off his campaign, but he at least says that's not going to happen. Here's hoping he sticks to that.

Second, I'm very pleased with Edwards' second-place finish, even if it's completely symbolic. Clinton actually won one more pledged delegate than he did, but that's really not what matters. Perhaps it should be, but it isn't. What does matter is that he beat expectations, and in absolute numbers he also beat Clinton. So he gets a ticket to New Hampshire that it was looking an awful lot like he might not get. It'll be interesting to see if the big three all do well enough there to stay in. I'm still thinking it'll be a two person race after next week - but it's not yet.

Third, I have to admire Richardson's spirit, claiming he made the top tier by grabbing fourth place. That's one pleasant way of rephrasing "I got 2% and no delegates," I concede. I wonder if he'll hang in there through the convention with that attitude; somebody usually does in one party or the other.

Fourth, while you know where my sympathies lie, the Republicans had the more fascinating contest this time. I had a feeling all the talk about McCain's big comeback was just cheerleading from his friends in the media, and it looks like that's just what it was. He almost beat Thompson, which would be impressive if not for the fact that Thompson has tossed out every clue imaginable that he doesn't really care about running at all. It's got to hurt to run that hard for that long and then lose - even if it is just by 200 votes - to a guy who doesn't even want the job.

Fifth, I'm also surprised but, to put it bluntly, pleased to see the two most controversial candidates come out on top. Huckabee and Romney have been getting more bad press from fellow Republicans than from Democrats lately...so of course they get almost 60% of the caucus votes together! Unbelievable.

Sixth, while I'm tremendously relieved to see Giuliani go down in flames (oops, I guess it's in bad taste to use that phrase about a guy who's been running on being the Mayor Of 9/11), I'm very surprised too. I really thought that whole stern father figure motif would go over better with the party that lionized Reagan. But then, he's pro-choice and pro-gay rights, which means a lot of wingnuts will chortle about the diversity of the field relative to the Democrats but then vote en masse against him. While Iowa is a fairly purple state, its Republicans are very conservative socially. I thought that might sink Saint Rudy.

Final thoughts...I would really love to see a Romney vs. Clinton race in the fall. Neither is my first choice for their respective nominations, of course. I don't really have a favorite on the Republican side, but if I had to choose one, well, they're not all as slimy as Romney is. As for Clinton, I probably would support her if she really were as left-wing as the right likes to pretend, but that's not even close to the truth. So why would I like to see them go head to head? Because of the past fifteen years of screaming about how Clinton lacks any convictions and cares only about getting power. Of course I don't think too many Republicans really believe that about her. I think it's just something they settled on after Whitewater and the Vince Foster issue proved not to hold any water, and they woke up to the fact that "she's a b***h" would serve only to alienate suburban Republican women without gaining any votes they didn't already have. But that's beside the point. They've been howling about her lack of convictions for all this time, so I'd love to see how they'd react to having a nominee of whom anybody can see that really is the case - not to mention that he's from a state many hardcore Republicans don't even think is really part of the USA*.

Think about it - it would be almost like if they ranted for eight years about Bill Clinton being a draft-dodger, dishonest businessman, playboy, etc...and then nominated a guy who really was all those things. How do you think they'd have reacted if that happened?! The inconsistency would probably make their heads explode, don't you think?

Oh, wait a minute...never mind.

*I've run into that attitude occasionally over here, too. When a group of Europeans asks what state I'm from and I say New Hampshire, typically they don't all know where that is. One of them will then explain that "it's one of those little states up in the corner that aren't really American." But then, since they're French, they probably mean it as a compliment.

2007 in the rearview mirror (thank heavens!)

2007-12-29T18:36:00.001+08:00

Having spent much of the week sitting at my computer sending off job applications (I think I got about 20 of them done in the past week - not a bad haul), I've had plenty of time to watch and listen to CNN in the background. Amidst the sad news about Benzair Bhutto, I did catch something rather more lighthearted earlier this morning. It seems in New York, some group or other has invited people to write down all their frustrations and bad news from 2007 and run the paper through a shredder, to be used as confetti on New Year's Eve.

I, for one, think that's a delightful idea.

The first day of 2007 found me waking to a sunny, warm day in an old but beautiful (and surprisingly cheap) hotel room in Portugal. It's a lovely memory, but had I known what kind of year I was in for, I'd have probably barricaded myself in that room and never come out if I could help it. I've long been at the point where the best thing I could say about 2007 is that I survived it.

But I must concede, it has not been all bad. I did (probably) complete my MBA; now that I've moved on to all job applications all the time and stopped obsessing over that last exam, I believe I probably passed it. I'm not going to declare victory until I know for sure, but the panic has mostly passed. The only other remaining requirement was a paper on my internship, which I submitted on Christmas Day. Finishing my third degree seemed like a good gift to myself. And as a colleague of mine said last spring, an MBA is an investment. You do it in hope that it will pay off later on, not because you expect it to be any fun while it's actually going on. And there were times that were fun, in any case. It's sometimes hard to remember that given the way the past couple of months have gone, but it's true. Looking back on HEC, I can tell it's going to be a positive memory overall. So that's one good point for the year.

What else is to be said of the good and bad of 2007? I'll get the bad news out of the way first:
-The internship was a big disappointment.
-My grades weren't what I'd have liked them to be, although I'm told that really doesn't matter in an MBA.
-I was unlucky in love twice...it's good that I got right back up and gave it another try, but the other try was just as unsuccessful as the first one!
-Job searches are never easy, but one does forget just how miserable they are until it's actually upon us.
-There is still a slight chance I won't be graduating, although I will have a chance to fix that well before June.
-I'm more than ready to leave Luxembourg, but can't for at least another month due to the last few loose ends to be tied up at HEC.
-After borrowing a lot of money and working very hard for the past year, I've increasingly come to suspect I'd have been happier in the long run if I'd stuck with teaching. But if I had done that, I'd never have known for sure.

Now, the good news...
-Regarding that last item in the bad news, I'll never have to wonder about "what if," in any case.
-I did learn a lot at HEC, and I also got to make a lot of great friends from all over the world.
-However underwhelming the internship was, it's one more item I can point to on my CV.
-I also now know one more thing I definitely do not want to do with my life, and yes, that's a good thing.
-I got to spend a lot of quality time in one of the world's most beautiful cities.
-I also got to visit half a dozen or so countries I'd never been to (or had been to only when I was much too young to remember). When I arrived in France last year, there were five or six countries I had technically been to, but couldn't really say I'd been there because I was just a baby. That list of asterisks is now down to one country, Italy. I thought about going there for Christmas but I just couldn't justify spending the money.
-I'm sure my French has improved, even if I can't necessarily tell.
-While this Christmas season was awfully depressing, it's setting the bar pretty low for next year. I've been thinking as long as I'm not in jail next year, I'll be able to look back and say how much has improved!

More to come if I think of them...but I think that's about it. I guess it was a less eventful year than the previous few.

Hey, it really IS Christmas!

2007-12-24T18:29:00.000+08:00

My biggest frustration so far on the job search has been that my colleagues' success in finding jobs has been highly correlated with what they did before the MBA. Of those who have found jobs already, most are just moving up in the same industry. Some are even going back to the exact same company. (Of course, as explained in the last post, there is a chance I'll do the same, but that's not really the same!) Just when I was really starting to despair about having any similar avenues open to me, what do I find online but an international language-education organization that is recruiting finance and marketing staff!

I don't know if they're going to be interested in someone with my particular profile (the actual job listings were along the lines of "five years' marketing experience at a well-known firm" and so forth), but it does sound like a natural fit. After sending off that application last night, I slept better than I have in a while.

Was this all just an extremely expensive vacation?

2007-12-23T17:37:00.000+08:00

For two years now, it's been a fairly common refrain of mine. If you were with me at HEC or DU, you probably heard me say it at some point. If you read this blog regularly, you've probably "seen" me say it. I've thought it many times without saying or writing it. "If this doesn't work out, I could always go back to Taiwan..."

As the MBA finally draws to a close amid numerous frustrations and a monumental amount of stress, and as the job market for newly minted MBAs seems mostly confined to whatever they were doing before their MBAs, and as I try to be patient with somewhat promising leads that haven't led anywhere just yet, and as I came away from the past week in Jouy with something like a sense of closure over the whole thing, I found myself thinking about it all once again over the weekend. Then two things happened.

The first was that I did get a business job offer of sorts. You might think that would end any thoughts of going back to teaching, but, well, the job was selling insurance in Scranton. That's right, Scranton. The city my family has been trying to escape from since 1912 or so, the aptly cast setting of the American version of The Office, the city that escaped the withering pen of Billy Joel only because Allentown is a lot easier to rhyme...and so far, the only place where I can count on a job that would ostensibly be using my degree.

The second was something so obvious I must have chosen not to think of it before. If I did reapply for my old job, that wouldn't mean I would have to take it. (For that matter, there's not even a guarantee they'll take me back, though I'd be very surprised if they didn't.) If I did take it, I wouldn't have to stay forever and I could continue looking for other opportunities while doing work I loved.

Before I could talk myself out of veering from the path of progress, I bit the bullet and applied. And so it is that I find myself here at my laptop in Luxembourg, two years on and thousands of dollars and euros behind, pondering the possibility that I could wind up back where I once belonged and finding that I'm not all that upset about it. Well, I am in the sense that it does feel like a step backward. But my alternative two years ago would have been to always wonder if I should have gone back to school. As it is, at least I'll have the degree for future endeavors, if there ever are any available. Underpaid work that you love is better than well paid work you don't like, and it's much better than no work at all, which just might be better than selling insurance in Scranton.

Right, but will next summer really find me in Taipei using the macarena to teach the months of the year to a bunch of kids in green and yellow pajamas? Odds are something else will come along, and I do plan to keep looking. But given the level of frustration I've had to cope with over the past few months and the fact that it's not likely to end immediately, I had to have some sure thing out there to lean on. I also can't help thinking of all the nine-to-five desk jobs I've failed at in the past, and really wonder why I ever thought going back to that world was a good idea.

And I'm never going back to my old school (?)

2007-12-21T02:42:00.000+08:00

My latest week in Jouy and Paris is wrapping up, as the final internship seminar finishes tomorrow morning. I haven't yet decided when I'll go back to Luxembourg, as I do have a free bed here if I want it, but I'll probably return sooner rather than later. I really should get back to sending out another round of job applications. One thing I've found in my week here is that a lot of my colleagues don't have jobs yet, and some haven't even really started looking yet. (Others do, of course, and I'm happy for them but also rather jealous!) It's nice to know I'm not alone and all that, but it's really getting awfully stressful all the same. It's easy to forget that I don't really graduate until June even though all my coursework is (probably) done. But I don't want to sit around until then, and I couldn't afford to even if I did want to!

In any case, it hit me late this evening when I finally stumbled out of a lengthy seminar on alternative energy: there is a small but significant possibility that this week could mark my very last time at HEC. In a way I hope it is, because my most likely cause for returning at this point would be to re-take the exam I took earlier this week, and I really do not want to have to do that. (Yes, I'm probably being paranoid. Let's hope so anyway!) It has me feeling oddly poignant in light of the fact that I couldn't wait to be done. While the last few months have been pretty miserable, I did have some great times here and I met some wonderful people. It's sad to think that's over. Of course some of my closest friends have already been gone since summer, off on exchange, which already made the campus feel a bit empty in the first place. There is also a chance I'll end up working in Paris, in which case it'll be just a short train ride away but one I'd be unlikely to make - why bother? And several of my friends from here will be there as well.

I guess the thing is, though, assuming I passed that exam and my internship paper is accepted, my coursework is done. Odds are I won't end up in Paris, if only because it's just one of numerous places I'm looking, and the odds of me ending up in any one of them are fairly slim. So this week does mark a greater finality than any of the milestones that have come and gone since July. Since I don't yet have a clue where I'll be going next but I am pretty sure I'll be going somewhere, it's perhaps the biggest finality there's going to be in the whole crazy experience. And it feels like the whole thing just sort of wound down in a rather anticlimactic way. There is graduation, of course, but my presence there depends mostly on where I am living by then and whether I can get the time off from the job I intend to have by then. It's a definite maybe.

But hey, we'll always have the memories, and there are plenty of those. So to all my colleagues, just in case I don't see you again, thanks for the memories. We'll always have Paris. And Jouy, with its three restaurants. And the piano bar. And the Holiday Inn. And the K-fet. I hope we do all meet again, and that we're all gainfully employed by then!

One piece of good news, anyhow

2007-12-19T20:50:00.000+08:00

Just after I hit send on that last post, I stopped by to chat with the guy in charge of the internship-for-credit program here. I explained that I had tried to get in touch with my assigned mentor for the program regarding my problems with the internship and my plans for what to do next, but that he hadn't replied to my repeated e-mails. I fully expected the professor to tell me it was somehow my fault, because that's the way it usually works around here. Instead, he said he'd run into the same problem with that mentor and that I could now deal directly with him instead, which would be much easier for both of us. He also said I could still get credit for my internship if I turned in a final paper by new year's.

I guess it's pretty sad that I've come to the point of being surprised when somebody here cuts a student a bit of slack and deals with the student reasonably, but hey a nice surprise is a nice surprise. And it was something I could certainly use just now!

It's over?

2007-12-19T19:56:00.000+08:00

I just stumbled out of what I sincerely hope will be my last-ever exam. I don't feel it went very well at all, but since I passed the midterm, I'll probably pass the class either way. At least that's what I need to believe just now! If I do pass, all that's left between me and my MBA is a brief presentation of how my internship went. (Well, I may not get full credit until I do another internship or find a job, but that was a necessary next step anyhow.) And yes, it probably went better than I think. But I do miss the days when I could walk out of an exam thinking I had done a good job on it rather than just scraping by or maybe not even that.

As fits the mood lately, I didn't feel much post-exam joy at all on leaving the test room. It was more a lingering sense of not-quite-accomplishment that has been associated with HEC for me since at least May or so. For a program that got off to a great start, I really feel like I'm just hanging on to stumble across the finish line in last place at this point, and even that will be okay as long as I do make it to the finish line. It's still not quite certain that I will do so. I have, however, noticed that a lot of things are falling into place lately just as I have given up any hope that they ever will. So things will probably turn out okay in the end, however barely.

I certainly am looking forward to going back to work, and at last count I had seven fairly strong possibilities for internships or jobs. So there is a light out there somewhere. Whatever happens next, I imagine that next Christmas, I'll be able to look back at this one and be glad things have improved so much. Looking back at last Christmas - passing all my exams, most of them comfortably, followed by the trip to Portugal and back...well, this year doesn't really measure up!

Here's one I hadn't run into before

2007-12-06T19:09:00.000+08:00

I had a job interview yesterday, here in Luxembourg. It turned out that the company in question had a hiring freeze on. Why, then, were they interviewing people? It seemed somebody there saw my CV and thought I might be right for a traineeship for the same company but based in another city. (I'll keep the details off the radar here for the time being, as I have a lot of "maybes" in at least four different cities at the moment.) By the end of the interview, the woman interviewing me said she would pass my details on to the folks in charge of that program and we'd be in touch shortly.

Of course I'm pretty happy about that outcome, but I'm still wondering why they were recruiting here if they're not actually hiring here. Odd. Of course, since the deadline for the traineeship program has come and gone without me ever even hearing of it but I got my resume to them anyhow, I have no complaints. Just trying to figure it all out is all.

Still no word on just what I'll be up to right after Christmas, by the way. Most of the permanent job leads I have - in fact, all of them - will necessarily not be starting until summer, either because of work permit issues or because the program doesn't start until then anyway or both. Once I do nail an offer down (and I'm guardedly optimistic that will happen pretty soon, as I have at least six possibilities of varying degrees), I'm thinking I might look for a short-term teaching gig somewhere to pass the time. But there are still a couple of internship possibilities that could start sooner, so I can't even plan for any interim activities just yet. Since my coursework still isn't quite done, perhaps that's for the best!

I shouldn't be happy about it, but...

2007-12-02T03:59:00.000+08:00

I went to a job fair in Brussels on Friday. For a city I didn't really like very much previously, it went quite well. I had four pretty solid job interviews and I'm feeling a lot more optimistic than I was last week.

But the most memorable episode of the day was not a job interview. It was a conversation with a guy I met in line for lunch. He was a student at HEC's bitter rival, INSEAD. When he introduced himself as such, I said - jokingly of course - "Ah, so we're supposed to hate each other, huh?" He appeared to agree.

It's hard to overstate the sense of rivalry between HEC and INSEAD. The vaunted Yale/Harvard rivalry has nothing on it. In fact, all the previous rivalries I've witnessed, from Yale/Harvard back to Grinnell/Carleton and all the way back to Robinson/Lake Braddock - all of them combined don't pack the barely concealed resentment of HEC vs. INSEAD. They're bigger than we are, and probably better known in most parts of the world, and since they're bigger, they have much larger applicant pools and many more rejected applicants. We, however, have a slightly lower acceptance rate, something many of us are quite proud of.

For my part, I've made good use of my experience with the two universities when people ask me in job interviews why I came to HEC (and they almost always do ask). I explain that I wanted more overseas experience and was especially interested in France because I wanted to brush up on my French, so I applied to both of them. I got to the interview stage with both, and got along famously with all the HEC alums I met. Not so the INSEAD alums, who were more than a little bit snobby and aloof and devoid of reasons to go to their school other than the chance to get rich. (One of them insisted that I rent a car and drive three hours - Denver to Aspen - to meet her at her home for the interview...and then forgot all about it. She happened to come home while I was there waiting for her, but I could very easily have been out the cost of the rental and the seven hours or so the trip involved in all.) In the end I didn't get into INSEAD anyway, but I had already decided on HEC regardless. Of course I tell the story more diplomatically than that in interviews; but when I'm speaking diplomatically about why I chose HEC, the above is what I'm really thinking.

Given all that, why would we HECers waste our time and energy on the rivalry? Because we have a rather naive impression that it's much easier to find a job if you go to INSEAD. It's understandable that one would think as much, for they are far more likely to get recruiting visits on campus from the most prestigious banks, consulting firms, and such. Of course, I've always suspected there was an element of "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" to all this. In Brussels on Friday, I learned that is correct. The guy I met there (with whom I got along just fine in spite of all of the above!) explained that, yes, they do get a lot of campus visits and job offers. The problem is, every single person on campus applies for all those jobs - and remember, there are a lot more students there. I imagine the rivalry among the students is pretty fierce.

Whatever I didn't like about HEC (and as most of you know, I do have my issues with the place), it does not inspire any sort of rivalry among peers, nor did we all ever feel like we were fighting for a piece of the same pie. It's nice to know the smaller fish in the pond have advantages too. Of course, I really shouldn't have needed to have as much spelled out for me. But such is the mentality that goes with job searches.

Another hero leaves the building...

2007-11-26T22:29:00.000+08:00

Indiana Rep. Julia Carson, a six-term Democrat from the Indianapolis-based 7th District, has revealed that she is dying of lung cancer.

I know I have to give it a rest with all the depressing blog-posts here, but I can't let this one go without comment. Julia Carson is one of my favorite members. You know all that lip service Republicans like to give to the American Dream and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps to success? She is one of the very few people I know of who really did it, overcoming racism as well as poverty and working her way off welfare a couple of times in her life. Despite being elected from one of the more conservative big cities, Indianapolis, she has an unapologetically liberal record that has not stopped her from winning re-election five times. (Neither has the fact that she's black in a 63% white district.) We could definitely use a few more of those on the Democratic side of the aisle - but it looks like for now there will be one less.

My own stint working on Capitol Hill began with her first term, and I remember that she was struggling with health problems even back then. A decade later, that has never really changed, so this news doesn't come as too much of a surprise, I concede. Still an awful loss.