These could just be thoughts of an insomniac, and we’re of course at the height of the Republican Convention, which puts the Republicans in the best light possible. Perhaps I’ll regret writing this in the morning. But anyway, here’s what’s going through my brain.

Eight years ago, when Clinton was running for re-election, I couldn’t understand how anyone in their right mind could think that Bob Dole would make a good president. I silently made fun of all the Dole supporters. Bob Dole as president? Are you kidding me?

This time, though, the shoe’s on the other foot, and I’m finding myself making fun of… myself. I’ll never bring myself to vote for Bush, but I don’t see how Kerry, an unappealing guy who can’t even get his own campaign together, could possibly make a good president, even if he wins. In at least the last five presidential elections, the guy with the better campaign was the guy who won the election. (This applies even to the screwy 2000 election; the Republicans were damn effective in disenfranchising at least a few hundred voters in Florida, if not more, and they certainly won the post-election public relations battle there.)

On the other hand, maybe it’s not about Kerry being a good president, as much as it’s about me wanting to kick out of office an incumbent president for whom I have a visceral, nearly-overpowering dislike.

Now I think I know how the Dole supporters felt.

Well, wonderful: Mel Martinez, anti-gay bigot, whose endorsement by a Florida newspaper for the Senate Republican primary was rescinded last week in favor of his primary opponent, won the primary anyway.

From the above-mentioned editorial:

No matter what else Martinez may accomplish in public life, his reputation will be forever tainted by his campaign’s nasty and ludicrous slurs of McCollum in the final days of this race. The slurs culminated with Martinez campaign advertisements that label McCollum – one of the most conservative moralists in Washington during his 20 years as a U.S. representative – “the new darling of the homosexual extremists” because he once favored a hate crime law that had bipartisan support. A few days earlier, the Martinez campaign arranged a conference call with reporters in which a group of right-wing Martinez supporters labeled McCollum “antifamily.” Why? Because McCollum supports expanded stem cell research to find cures for deadly diseases – a position that is identical to those of Nancy Reagan, Connie Mack and many other prominent Republicans.

At Friday night’s Republican Senate debate, McCollum confronted Martinez and called on him to repudiate his campaign’s sleazy, homophobic advertisements. Martinez refused. Later, he said he “wouldn’t be in favor of that kind of rhetoric.” But the rhetoric calling McCollum “the new darling of the homosexual extremists” and accusing him of making “statements in order to appease … the radical homosexual lobby” was included in advertising paid for by the Martinez campaign. If Martinez failed to review the ads before they were sent out under his name, he was irresponsible. If he knew what was in the ads and is now trying to distance himself, he is being dishonest. Either way, Floridians deserve better in a U.S. senator.

Martinez finally pulled the most offensive of the anti-McCollum ads from the air Saturday after a call from Gov. Jeb Bush, but he still hasn’t disowned the slimy content of the ads.

When is this kind of crap going to end?

“Handled Badly: How this gay reporter was kept from the Hamm brothers.”

There’s a terrific article in Salon.com today about how the Republicans know how to win elections — just use dirty tricks and manipulate the media — and how the Kerry campaign needs to start fighting back, hard. Here’s a great quote:

The Bush campaign is more adept than the Kerry campaign at playing the game. The game is, the press only covers four things in a campaign: polls, scandal, mistakes and attacks. And the only one of those you can control are attacks.

That’s a terrific insight, and so true.

The New Yorker is helping restore my sanity with its description of the Bush Administration:

its mania for shovelling cash to the very rich at the expense of families of middling means, its servility to polluters and fossil-fuel extractors, its reckless embrace of fiscal insolvency, its hostility to science, its political alliances with fanatic religious fundamentalisms of every stripe except Islamic (and of that stripe, too, when the subject is family planning or capital punishment), its partisan exploitation of our city’s suffering after the attacks of September 11, 2001, its transubstantiation of the worldwide solidarity that followed those attacks into worldwide anti-Americanism, and its diversion of American blood, treasure, and expertise away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda to a bloody occupation of Iraq that appears to have done nothing to weaken Islamist terrorism and may have done more than a little to strengthen it.

I haven’t heard about any of that at the convention this week. It’s nice to escape from the fear propaganda and be reminded of the truth. Now, is there a way to boil it all down into a Kerry campaign slogan?

I stayed over at Matt’s place last night. When I got home this morning to change for work, there was a voicemail from my mom. My parents fled to California this week to escape the Republican Convention; my dad works in Penn Plaza (right above Penn Station and right next to Madison Square Garden), and my mom works near Union Square (which turned out to be the site of many protests). My mom’s message said, “I’m just calling to say hi… We’re sitting here watching TV, and I’m watching George Pataki speak at the Republican convention, and it’s probably the worst speech I’ve ever seen someone give at a political convention. Just wanted to know what you thought of it.”

I love my mom.

Anyway, yes, Pataki’s a horrible speaker, and although he’s been elected three times as New York’s governor, he’s the quintessential mediocre machine politician. As for last night’s speech, the only states whose citizens he praised as helping New York in the aftermath of 9/11 just happened to be swing states: Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania. That was artless. And watching him ask each of those state’s delegations to stand up made me feel like I was watching a high school graduation ceremony.

After Pataki’s speech, there was a long pause of several minutes while the convention waited for the TV network coverage to kick in, and then they showed the traditional introductory video of the candidate. Except they must have lost the footage, because it was replaced with an oatmeal commercial. Was that former Senator Fred Thompson narrating, or was it Wilford Brimley? I wasn’t sure.

As for the main event, my main impression of Bush’s speech is that it went on about 20 minutes too long. He led off with a recitation of domestic plans, which I actually found interesting, because I’d never heard it before. It was transparently Clintonesque, though, and there’s no way to fund all these new programs he proposed. While he spoke, I watched the backdrop behind him: all these little boxes, each filled with an image of an American flag, bringing to mind the divided America that he’s helped foster over the last few years.

Then he turned to foreign policy, during which I largely tuned out, especially once the clock in Matt’s apartment ticked past 11 p.m. and I was hearing nothing but more empty rhetoric.

I was surprised that two protesters managed to get past security. And they even made Bush stumble over one of his lines. How did they get in? I wonder if there are Republican Convention credentials available on eBay? Oh look, there are. (Okay, that pass was good only for Monday. I don’t know how the protesters got in. But if you don’t want that, there’s the RNC Macaroni and Cheese, so you can, redundantly, “have a part of history which is currently being created right now!”)

About an hour later, Kerry gave a speech in Ohio that was, as usual, painfully inarticulate.

So it’s over; the delegates and protesters go home, we New Yorkers get our city back, and the fall campaign season officially begins. It’s still summer right now, but soon, lawns across America will crunch with leaves, high school football teams will practice outside in the chilly air, kids will plan their Halloween costumes, the pundits will parse what happened during the presidential debates, and we’ll obsess over daily tracking polls.

It’s going to be nerve-wracking and depressing. I love it.

Today is the last day at work for a co-worker of mine. Around lunchtime this afternoon, I realized that about seven of my colleagues weren’t in their offices, including all five of my colleagues who are in my age range. I soon figured out that they had all gone out to lunch together.

Nobody ever tells me when these things happen. Nobody stops in my office to invite me along. I always have to make the effort myself.

When I first started this job three years ago, I realized that lunchtime was the main time when people got together. For a few months I joined everyone in the small lunch room, eating my lunch with them, males and females alike. But although they were very nice people, I was never very into the conversations, most of which revolved around work, or pop culture, or sports, or whatnot. I also tend to be an introvert, which doesn’t help. After a few months I finally gave up and started having my lunch by myself, usually in my office, while either surfing the web or reading a book. That was fine with me.

Unfortunately, when you do that, you miss out on the group dynamic. Whenever you do try to hang out with the other folks, you’re behind on what’s been happening, and it’s hard to catch up without spending time with them regularly.

I don’t really want to hang out with them outside of work or anything — not because of any faults in them, but just because it’s the way I am. But I don’t like being left out, either.

This is so reminiscent of past social situations in my life. Law school, college, high school, middle school, summer camp: I’ve never been good at hanging out with the cool kids. It makes me nervous, and I’m not all that interested in it anyway. But on the other hand, I don’t like the consequences of being antisocial (e.g. feeling left out). Socialization with certain groups of people often feels like a duty — something I do to avoid negative consequences — rather than something that flows naturally out of my personality.

I want to be liked without having to put in the time required, and it doesn’t really work that way.

Here’s a wonderful essay about writing.

Once again, Paul Rudnick cracks me up in the New Yorker.

Here’s one of the best assessments I’ve read so far of John Kerry and his campaign. An excerpt:

For all the talk of Bush’s malaprops, the man can sometimes make a simple point clearly. Untroubled by nuance, detail or fact, Bush travels the country saying things like, “Because we acted, our economy is growing.” That’s not how Kerry speaks on the stump. Here’s the candidate in Akron Saturday, trying to go after Bush on what should be easy targets, Friday’s announcements of disappointing job numbers and the biggest increase ever in Medicare premiums:

“What makes me angry — and I say this nicely — what makes me angry is the complete breach of faith with the American people. They promised four years ago to strengthen Medicare. He promised again a couple of nights ago to strengthen Medicare. And you wake up Friday morning on a day when a lot of the news is being hidden by what’s happening in the hurricane down in Florida, what’s happening in Russia with 200 people tragically killed by terror, and the news is hidden, but it isn’t going to be hidden for long from Americans. Because what they did yesterday was, this president of the United States, made history twice.”

Four hundred words later, Kerry was still going at it.

Ugh. I cringe when I think about the upcoming debates.

I’m in a bit of a funk today, for a few reasons.

First, I’m sad that the summer is unofficially over. It all went by too fast. Back in college, I looked forward to the end of the summer, because it meant I’d be seeing all my friends again. Now, though, the summer ends and nothing changes. Time just marches on.

The next point is related, which is that on September 24, I’ll reach the end of my minimum three-year commitment to my state job. In the past, I might have seen this as a good thing. All employees in my state agency have to sign a three-year contract. For a long time, I couldn’t stand working here, and I looked forward to the end of the three years. But now I’m relatively content in my job, although not particularly fulfilled, and I have no idea what else I might want to do. Now that I’m allowed to leave, I don’t know where I’d go.

Also, I haven’t been able to commit to a book lately. I keep going to bookstores and seeing books I might want to read, but I don’t actually want to spend the money or invest the time in reading them. Matt says this is why libraries are good. That’s true. But I’ve been more of a fickle reader lately, more content to read magazine articles in the New Yorker than a full-length book. I’m just not in the mood to commit to a book.

Finally — and Matt was going to blog about this but I beat him to it — I’m in the midst of making a decision. Matt has invited me to move in with him once my lease ends on November 1. We’ve been talking about it for a few months. I already spend every weekend there, and lately, one or two nights a week as well.

There would be several benefits to moving in with Matt. One: I’d be living with Matt! Two: I’d finally be living in Manhattan. Three: because of Matt’s university job, he lives in his apartment rent-free, which means that I, too, would be living RENT-FREE. I could take the $1125 a month I’m currently paying in rent and put it toward my student loans.

There are some things that give me pause, though. One, I’d have to move, and moving is such a hassle. Because Matt’s place is much smaller than my apartment, I’d have to sell some things and get rid of others. I have no idea if all my stuff would fit in Matt’s closets. Two, I *love* my apartment, in which I’ve lived for three years, and I’d miss it. Three, I have the normal moving-in-together fears. What if we get in each other’s way? What if the apartment is too small for both of us or one of us feels suffocated? What if something goes wrong between us? There are other fears: What if I regret giving up my big Jersey City brownstone apartment for a 17th-floor apartment in an elevator building? And my housing would depend on Matt’s job. What if Matt gets a new job and we have to move again?

But, I’d be living there RENT-FREE.

We’ve been together almost a year now, and I’ve never felt more compatible with someone. I love Matt. We’re planning to move in together eventually, and in a lot of ways it makes sense to do it now. I just have a natural fear of change, and I hate moving. HATE it. Driving a U-Haul makes me nervous, let alone driving one through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan. Plus it’ll be right before Election Day, which means there’ll probably be an Orange Alert and I won’t be able to drive a U-Haul through the Holland Tunnel. Well, maybe I can do it a week or two early. And then there’ll be a terror attack and I’ll be living in Manhattan.

Anyway, it’s a decision, and one that I have to make soon.

This is highly addictive.

Holy fucking shit, that was a lot of rain.

It was so much rain that Matt’s kitchen ceiling was leaking this morning. After doing what I could to help Matt, he made me leave for work. Three other people were riding down in the elevator with me, and when we got to the vestibule just past the lobby, we all saw the deluge pouring down, the second coming of the Flood.

For a few moments we all just stood there, stunned.

Then I shrugged my shoulders, opened my umbrella and stepped outside. The umbrella did nothing; within a few seconds, my pants were drenched. It was so bad that instead of walking along Maiden Lane to the PATH station, I went to the closest subway station and used a Metrocard swipe so I could walk along the underground route.

The ride back to my apartment (I needed to go home, shower and change my clothes) is supposed to take seven minutes, but instead it took about 30 minutes, because one of the routes was flooded and the train needed to take a detour. I thought about going directly to my office, but I hadn’t showered or brushed my teeth and I had a meeting today and I’d gotten less than four hours of sleep last night — Matt’s phone had rung at 4 a.m., and I hadn’t been able to fall asleep after that until around 6:30.

After I got home, pulled off my sopping wet clothes, had breakfast and took a shower, I nearly had a temper tantrum because I couldn’t find a wearable pair of pants. I managed to find a pair of off-white slacks that I probably shouldn’t be wearing after Labor Day, but it’s better than nothing.

All in all it was a crappy morning, but I’m sure I’ll feel better once I have a nap.

I love a good New Yorker profile, and I enjoy David Remnick’s writing, and I find Al Gore strangely fascinating, so I’m really loving this long, terrific profile of Gore in this week’s magazine. I’ve long had this odd affinity/empathy for Gore. Some of my favorite excerpts from the profile:

“Basically, the answer is, I do not expect to ever be a candidate again,” Gore said. “I really don’t. The second part of the answer is, I haven’t ruled it out completely. And the third qualifier is, I don’t add the second part as a way of signalling coyness. It’s merely to complete an honest answer to the question and it in no way changes the principal part of the answer. Which is, I really do not expect that I will be a candidate.”

I love it.

And then there’s a discussion about the public sphere, in which Remnick says that Gore referred to

the brain-imaging center at New York University; “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,” by Leonard Shlain; “Broca’s Brain,” by Carl Sagan; an Op-Ed piece in the Times about the decline of reading in America, by Andrew Solomon; the lack of research on the relation between the brain and television — “There is just nothing on the dendrite level about watching television”; Gutenberg and the rise of print; the sovereign rule of reason in the Enlightenment; individualism — “a term first used by de Tocqueville to describe America in the eighteen-thirties”; Thomas Paine; Benjamin Franklin. “O.K., now fast-forward through the telegraph, the phonograph.” O.K., but we didn’t fast-forward: first, there was Samuel Morse, who failed to hear the news of his wife’s dying while he was painting a portrait — “You know, he has a painting in the White House, if I remember correctly” — and therefore went out and invented a faster means of communication. “Now fast-forward again to Marconi… now that’s an interesting story”; the sinking of the Titanic; David Sarnoff; the agricultural origin of the term “broadcast”; moving right along to “the nineteen visual centers of the brain”; an article on “flow” in Scientific American; the “orienting reflex” in vertebrates; the poignancy and “ultimate failure” of political demonstrations as a means of engaging the aforementioned public sphere…

Finally:

“One thing about Gore personally is that he is an introvert,” another former aide said. “Politics was a horrible career choice for him. He should have been a college professor or a scientist or an engineer. He would have been happier.”

At heart, Gore’s just a big ol’ nerd. I guess that’s why I empathize with him so much.

(For more Gore, here’s another New Yorker profile of him from four years ago by Nicholas Lemann.)

Happy 30th Birthday, sweetie.

Now everyone go over and send him some birthday greetings!

Paul and Morgan Hamm talk about gays. Turns out they’re totally cool with us. (A follow-up to this.)

Matt and I watched the first episode of “Joey” last night. It was not as good as it could have been, but I enjoyed it more than I’d expected.

Here’s a weird coincidence from a couple of reviews:

When Gina brags that she looks incredible for the mother of a 20-year-old son, Joey replies, “You rarely hear the argument for teen pregnancy” — a joke that would sound much more natural coming from Chandler or even Ross.

— Alan Sepinwall, New Jersey Star-Ledger (Wednesday)

Joey’s dry retort – “You rarely hear the argument for teen pregnancy” – is funny, but it’s the kind of sardonic aside that Chandler would make, not Joey.

— Alessandra Stanley, New York Times (Thursday)

And here’s another one from the same two articles:

Gina, who has long nails, tacky hair and tight outfits, isn’t exactly a stretch for de Matteo — optimistic “Sopranos” fans who refuse to believe Adriana died because it happened off-camera can convince themselves that she’s in Witness Protection posing as Joey’s sister.

— Alan Sepinwall

Ms. de Matteo plays Gina with the same décolletage and Italian-American panache she had in “The Sopranos.” (At times it is almost as if Adriana had survived the hit and was relocated to Los Angeles under the Federal Witness Protection Program.)

— Alessandra Stanley

I’m just saying.

The night before last, I dreamed that I was in my childhood bedroom. Through the window I could see a couple of bullies outside on the front lawn, about middle-school age. I knew that they were part of some larger amorphous group that was out to get me.

One of them put up a ladder and climbed up to my window, on the second floor, while another of them taunted me. The ladder guy reached my window and was at eye level with me. I was terrified, but also angry. So I pushed him. The ladder tipped backward and fell onto the lawn, and so did the bully. I saw his head clunk against the grass. He was clearly unconscious, and maybe dead. The other guy, who’d been taunting me, looked on in awe.

I felt awful and scared. The guy might be dead, and his parents were sure to find out and have me put away for life. What had I done?

***********

When I was a kid, we had these next-door neighbors who had moved to the New Jersey suburbs from Texas. The father was a local minister. It was a strange family. The older son would chop wood in the backyard, and I was scared of the younger son, Chris, who was a mean bully and a year older than me.

One spring or summer evening, I was in my backyard with my best friend. We were playing on the swingset. Chris was in his backyard, and for some reason — with no immediate provocation — I started taunting him. I’d never done that before. I supposed I felt protected by my friend’s presence.

I recited a long impromptu speech. The only part I remember saying is, “This is my be-bullied-no-more speech.” It went on for a while.

Later that night, my family was eating dinner in the kitchen. My brother, four years younger than me, said, “Chris said he’s gonna kick your ass.” My dad asked why, so I told him the story. My dad responded, snidely, “If I were him I’d want to kick your ass, too.”

There are these long, narrow strips of granite embedded in the sidewalks of Broadway in Lower Manhattan. I’ve seen them as far south as Battery Park and as far north as the Woolworth Building. They’re spaced a few yards apart. Each of them is inscribed with some famous 20th-century person/event and a date. For months now, I’ve been dying to know why they’re there and what they’re for.

I finally posted an Ask MetaFilter thread about it this afternoon, but before someone posted the answer I wound up figuring it out by myself. It suddenly hit me that that part of Broadway is known as the Canyon of Heroes, used for ticker-tape parades. (My brother and I went to the parade for the New York Rangers after they won the Stanley Cup in 1994.) So I typed “canyon of heroes” into Google and came up with this and this. It turns out there’s a granite slab for each ticker-tape parade that has been held in Lower Manhattan since 1886.

And here (linked from one of those pages) is a list of Manhattan ticker-tape parades through 2000.

I never really wanted to grow up. Once I started middle school, though, I knew I had no choice. During my first week in sixth grade, I saw a familiar guy, a seventh grader whom I’d last seen in elementary school. Back then, I’d been in fourth grade and he’d been in fifth. Since then, he’d changed: his voice was deeper now, and he exuded testosterone. It overpowered me. I’d entered a new world, and I couldn’t go back, no matter how much I wanted to.

Last night Matt and I saw Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, a parody of the Peanuts gang as teenagers, which recently ran at the New York International Fringe Festival. I was expecting a musical comedy, but it wasn’t a musical, and despite some truly hysterical moments, the show turned out to be quite serious. It’s rare that a show moves me as much as this one did.

The beginning is unexpectedly depressing. Charlie Brown (or “C.B.” as he’s known in this show; most of the characters have been renamed) comes out on stage to tell us that his dog has just died. He contracted rabies and tore his friend, a little yellow bird, to shreds, so he had to be put to sleep.

It continues from there. Linus has grown into a pot-smoking Buddhist; Sally is a black-clad Wiccan; Peppermint Patty and Marcie are the school sluts; Lucy’s in jail for committing arson; Pigpen has become a germophobic, homophobic jock; and, most poignantly of all, Schroeder has grown into a sexually confused loner who still seeks solace in his piano. (He’s played heartbreakingly by Benjamin Schrader.)

It all made me sad. I grew up with the Peanuts gang. I read the comics and watched the TV specials. I both saw and performed in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” When Charles Schulz died a few years ago, I was unexpectedly moved to tears. So watching this show is like when you get to high school and you realize that all the kids you knew back in elementary school have changed. I always tried hard to be a good kid, and one day I realized that I was the only one still doing so while all my peers had moved on and begun breaking all the rules — smoking, drinking, having sex. They’d comfortably made the transition, while I hadn’t. When I realized this, my paradigm was shattered. I had no idea what I was supposed to do anymore, or whom I was supposed to listen to.

What I didn’t realize is that my peers were as insecure as I was. I’d coped by clinging to my old self, while some of them had coped by doing the opposite, rejecting who they’d once been — just like Pigpen, who now carries around a bottle of antibacterial hand-cleanser and becomes enraged when anyone tries to call him by his childhood nickname. (Now he’s known as Matt.)

In this show we learn that even Charlie Brown — poor unlucky Charlie Brown, with whom I’d always greatly identified — has changed. It turns out that he dated one of the female characters at one point, and they even had sex. My childhood self is troubled by that.

But it turns out that C.B. remains the moral center of the Peanuts universe. Even though his choices wind up leading to tragedy, those choices arise from the goodness and bigness of his heart.

Dog Sees God runs only until next Sunday, September 19, and if you’re in town, I highly recommend that you see it. The names may have been changed, but you can’t protect the innocent indefinitely.

I watched the premiere of “Jack & Bobby” last night, a new show about a boy who grows up to be president, and I liked it. I’m going to add it to my list of shows to watch this season.

Like “Smallville,” it’s on the WB, and it would be great if they could do a crossover. Both shows use the same conceit — each portrays the formative years of someone who will grow up to be an American hero — but what makes the possibilities intriguing is that on “Smallville,” we know that Lex Luthor eventually becomes president. So it’s conceivable that Bobby McCallister could run against the incumbent President Luthor and defeat him. There’d be an age gap — Bobby is currently 12 or 13, and Lex is probably around 30 — so it could be a generational passing of the torch. And the “passing of the torch” theme is so Kennedyesque, which is what the title “Jack & Bobby” seems to be going for.

“Smallville” takes place in Kansas and “Jack & Bobby” takes place next door in Missouri, so it’s conceivable, right?

“What if Bush Wins: Predictions on the likely consequences of a second term for President Bush. By a panel of 16 writers.” Lots of intriguing ideas.

(via MeFi)

Was I really planning to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason a few weeks ago? Who was I kidding? Fortunately, I didn’t even buy it (either the book or the notion, take your pick). After giving up on that idea, I tried to find another book to read. I spent lots of time at the Strand and elsewhere, picking up books that looked fascinating and then putting them back down. I just didn’t feel like investing the time in reading a whole book. I wound up frustrated.

And yet at the same time, I found myself catching up on past issues of the New Yorker (probably my favorite magazine). I realized, hey, the pieces are shorter — but I’m still reading! Since then, I’ve picked up The Best American Magazine Writing 2004, chock-full of magazine-length pieces. I’m currently reading the first piece, about how interrogations work, that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly last fall.

I’m also thinking that if I want to get paid to write, the best place to start is with magazine articles. So I’m looking into taking a course this fall, either through the Gotham Writers’ Workshop (I took a screenwriting class through them a couple of years ago) or through Media Bistro. (Ahhh, the advantages to living in/near Manhattan.)

I think a class would not only teach me some stuff, but would also give me a kick-start into the professional writing process.

Michael Tomasky writes about Republicans vs. Democrats on political strategy:

It seems that once the Democratic nominee is decided — in the current case, that would have been early March — the top Republican and conservative strategists start having conversations. They probably get together and say something like: “OK, John Kerry’s the nominee. In one sentence or maybe two, what do we want the American voting public to be thinking about John Kerry by November 2? The neighbors discussing their votes on election eve — what do we want them to be saying about Kerry?”

The answer they settled on was clearly something to the effect that “he can’t be trusted to fight the war on terror.” Then, once they’ve agreed on that, they say: “Okay. How do we get there from here? What are the stages of the argument?” And then they lay it out, and the stages are exactly as we’ve seen…

Republicans understand the world, and Democrats do not. Republicans know that voters will respond emotionally to character questions, and they know that the media will lap them up like a thirsty dog…

George W. Bush has a record the Democrats should have made mincemeat of. Right about now, the media should be writing, and American voters should be thinking: Golly, a million jobs lost, millions more in poverty, manufacturing down; no WMD’s, 1,000-plus dead, Iraq on the brink of civil war, al-Qaeda larger than ever and still recruiting, acts of worldwide terrorism on the rise, North Korea and Iran responding to the cowboy routine by going nuclear. This should have been easy.

Now, it’s too late for the Democrats to create these narratives. The counter-narrative is too well established.

I generally agree with this. I’m amazed that a party so incredibly hell-bent on retaking the White House could be so inept at doing so. The Democrats have stumbled along these last few months without any apparent strategy at all.

In the Democrats’ defense, they’ve had two disadvantages (well, three, if you include running a lousy candidate): one, they didn’t know who their nominee was going to be until six or seven months ago, so they didn’t have a solid campaign staff in place; two, once they’d chosen that nominee, he was a blank slate, open to being defined by one side or the other.

On the other hand, they’ve known who their opponent was going to be for the LAST FOUR YEARS. They’ve had four years to prepare for this, and they’re blowing it.

Meanwhile, look at the Republicans. Until January or February, they thought their opponent was going to be Howard Dean; parts of Bush’s January State of the Union Address could have been written with him in mind:

We have faced serious challenges together, and now we face a choice: We can go forward with confidence and resolve, or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us… It is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting — and false…

Some in this chamber, and in our country, did not support the liberation of Iraq.

In fact, after the address, word was that the Republicans had been caught off-guard by Kerry’s surge in the primaries. (And didn’t most Democrats vote for Kerry because he was more “electable” than Dean?) Soon after, they switched their focus to Kerry. One reason they could do this so quickly is that they’d previously assembled opposition research on all the Democratic candidates.

For whatever reason, the Republicans are just better at this stuff than Democrats. I think it’s simplistic for Tomasky to say that “liberals tend to want to believe the best about the world” and that this “makes liberals less likely to play on voters’ fears — makes them want to believe that they actually can win a campaign on the issues.” Anyone is capable of believing the best or the worst about the world. But Tomasky is partly right. For whatever reason, Republicans don’t mind playing dirty politics and Democrats do.

Of course, it would help if the Democrats ran a decent candidate. There are 22 Democratic governors out there — maybe next time some of them will run.

I didn’t learn this until I was catching up on the Little Minx, but Herbert Muschamp has left his position as New York Times architecture critic. Put aside all the concerns about Muschamp’s apparent biases toward his architect friends; I wasn’t aware of any of that. All I know is that I could never understand what the hell the guy was writing about. His words were fascinating, but they left me feeling alternately uncultured and exasperated. As Judith Shulevitz wrote:

Muschamp’s most idiosyncratic and notorious bit of metaphor-making came at the end of his rave write-up of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. After leaving the building, he spotted a woman alone on the corner, and asked himself, “Why can’t a building catch a moment like that?” Then, he realized, “the reason I’d had that thought was that I’d just come from such a building. And that the building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” Startled by this leap in logic? Let Muschamp explain: What they share is that their style “is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child. It can’t resist doing a dance with all the voices that say ‘No.’ It wants to take up a lot of space. And when the impulse strikes, it likes to let its dress fly up in the air.”

I love looking at architecture, but — in part because of Muschamp’s columns — I’ve always wondered if perhaps I was too stupid to appreciate it. Maybe now I’ll start to realize that’s not true.

Matt and I both think the guy in the new Gap ad is hot, and I was wondering who it was.

Turns out it’s him.

Mmmmmm… Josh Duhamel.

There’s a beautiful little story in today’s New York Times by Jonathan Safran Foer called The Sixth Borough:

Once upon a time, New York City had a Sixth Borough. You won’t read about it in any of the history books, because there’s nothing – save for the circumstantial evidence in Central Park – to prove that it was there at all…

The Sixth Borough was an island, separated from Manhattan by a thin body of water, whose narrowest crossing happened to equal the world’s long jump record, such that exactly one person on earth could go from Manhattan to the Sixth Borough without getting wet. A huge party was made of the yearly leap. Bagels were strung from island to island on special spaghetti, samosas were bowled at baguettes, Greek salads were thrown like confetti. The children of New York captured fireflies in glass jars, which they floated between the boroughs…

Read “The Sixth Borough.”

“Angels in America”: The Sparknotes Study Guide.

(I bought the DVD yesterday, so the play is on my mind.)

Note to self: Stay away from 53rd Street tonight.

Dogpoet writes about his ongoing adjustment to life in New York. His writing is always such an inspiration to me.

I’d post an excerpt of the above, but you may as well read the whole entry.

Last night I had my first Kiki and Herb experience — and, if this really was their farewell concert, then probably my last. Approximately 2,800 people were in the audience, a vast majority of whom were gay men. I’m not quite the scenester that Sparky and Andy and Charlie and Jonno are; by no means did I see my own gay history of New York City pass before my eyes, as they did. I did see several familiar bloggers and a former Gay Gotham Chorus member. Half the people I knew were the people I was with: Matt and Mike and the other Matt and his boyfriend Marc and our friends Dan and Jaye.

I really enjoyed the show, and that must be the most inane comment ever written about Kiki and Herb. But I did really enjoy it. It’s just that whenever I encounter camp — or maybe it’s not camp, but never mind; whenever I encounter something camp-ish, I feel like I’m getting only about half of it. I’m simulating a genuine response rather than feeling something visceral. My life has been neither tragic nor fabulous enough (aren’t those really the same thing?) to respond viscerally; I’m not worldly enough to be tragic, and I’m not stylish enough to be fabulous. The rest of the audience seems to be tapping into some collective well of personal experience that I just can’t reach, even if I’ve had my own dramatic moments.

Now, I’ve been in therapy on and off for 13 years — do I get a therapy Bar Mitzvah? — and most of my neuroses have been julienned into tiny pieces by now. So I know that I should be content to just be me. And I am, really. But still.

It’s not that I want to be more like them, necessarily. I want to be more like me. I want to be the me-est me that I can be. That’s why I need to get things going for myself, start my writing class next week, learn how to write magazine articles, try to get my name into real print instead of just cyber-print.

I have to learn how to be fabulous in my own way.

So the presidential debates are set: the first one is next Thursday night. The second one is on the night of Friday, October 8, when Matt and I will be in Tennessee for Matt’s brother’s wedding. We’ll be staying at Matt’s parents’ house, and Matt has warned me against bringing up politics in front of his parents, so it’s probably not a good idea for all of us to sit down and watch the debate together.

Anyway, the Kerry people got something they wanted: three debates, not just two. Who knows whether the Bush people really wanted only two debates or whether they were just using that as a negotiating point? At any rate, the Republicans also got something they wanted. In the original debate proposal put forth by the Commission on Presidential Debates, the first debate was to focus on domestic policy and the third on foreign policy. The Bush people were able to get that switched around, so the first debate — which, historically, is the most-watched of the debates — will focus on foreign policy.

I think this is actually great for Kerry. Karl Rove’s preferred campaign tactic is to attack a candidate on his perceived strengths, since the public presumably already knows about that candidate’s weaknesses, and that’s what Rove and Bush have been doing to Kerry. Bush’s “strength” (in the public mind, at least) is foreign policy, so the first debate will give Kerry his biggest venue in which to attack Bush on that topic. He’s already started — he pummelled Bush on Iraq yesterday at NYU.

An interesting historical sidenote: apparently, four years ago, most people who watched the first Bush-Gore debate felt that Gore won, while “those who merely read about it reflected the view of many journalists that Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Mr. Gore look hypocritical.” I’m one of those people who thought Gore kicked Bush’s ass in that first debate; I didn’t even realize Gore had excessively sighed — or sighed at all, really — until the media coverage told me so. That’s another reminder that (1) the media loves to tell the public what to think, and (2) the public is incredibly susceptible to being told what to think.

Anyway, the debates are my favorite ritual of the presidential campaign season, so I can’t wait to watch.

I wish I could easily type a proper em dash in my blog entries.

I use em dashes all the time — they’re great for breaking up sentences (like this one) — but they don’t come out properly when I type them in WordPress (see?).

Whenever I want to use an em dash, I habitually type [space][hyphen][hyphen][space]. For example: “I like spaghetti[space][hyphen][hyphen][space]well, usually…” The spaces are improper. I don’t know where I got that bad habit.

But WordPress autocorrects two hyphens to something that looks closer to an en dash instead of an em dash. So if I type [space][hyphen][hyphen][space] in WordPress — like here — it doesn’t look right. Imagine how bad it looks without the spaces–such as here–you see? The only way to create an em dash in WordPress is to type three consecutive hyphens—like so. I still habitually type two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence; now I’m supposed to train myself to type three hyphens when writing an em dash in a blog entry, while remembering to use only two hyphens for everything else I write? And if I ever switched to another blog service, I’d have to change all the triple dashes after importing all my old entries.

So I apologize to any typography mavens. Sparky, for instance. Sparky, I’ve always remembered that you wrote this more than three years ago.

I don’t know what to do except continue my old habits. Sorry, everyone.

It just became autumn.

For the next six months, night will be longer than day.

That’s kind of depressing, although not as depressing as it will be when Daylight Savings Time ends. At least it ends later than usual this year.

(Oh, and Happy Mabon to all the pagans out there.)

When I was a student at the University of Virginia, I’d occasionally travel to and from my hometown in New Jersey. It would have been slightly shorter and faster to take I-95, but I preferred an alternate route, taking I-78 into Pennsylvania, then I-81 down into Virginia, then I-64 west to Charlottesville. It was perhaps 30 minutes and 60 miles longer, but it had a few benefits. One, there were no toll roads. Two, the scenery — miles and miles of farmland — was beautiful. And three, there was this little — ahem — store that I discovered one day just off the highway. Actually, it wasn’t that hard to discover, because you could see the sign from the interstate. It was in Bethel, Pennsylvania, right by Exit 4 or 5 of I-78.

I’d see the sign every time I drove that route, but I’d never pull off the highway to check the place out. Then one day I finally did.

There was nothing around but that store and an Exxon station. A sign on the door told me that people under 21 were not allowed in, and that IDs would be checked. Since I was under 21, I didn’t go in. I guess I was worried I’d get arrested or something.

After I turned 21, I finally went inside for the first time on one of my trips back to school. There were lots of items and magazines, and in the back, there was a row of booths: single-person booths with curtains over the entrances, each containing a video screen with access to various channels for people of different tastes. There was also a coin slot (which was later upgraded to a bill slot). I think those booths were my first exposure to video entertainment of a certain nature. Before then, I’d seen only magazines.

From then on, that little store in Bethel, PA was one of the highlights of my 400-mile trip.

I bought a videotape there once, and it turned out to be rather monotonous, certainly much less entertaining than what I’d seen in the booths. But on one trip I bought another one, called “Tradewinds,” and it wound up being really great.

Unfortunately, during my final year of law school, a friend and I traded tapes, and he moved to France before I could get my tape back. I never heard from him again.

For years, I mourned the loss of my beloved tape.

It wasn’t until last week that it occurred to me to find and buy it online. I’d never bought that kind of thing online before. I’m not exactly a connoisseur of the topic; I can count my collection on less than one hand. (As for the other hand — oh, never mind.)

So anyway (and this is the first my boyfriend is hearing of this — how embarrassing for me), last week I tracked it down online and ordered it (on DVD!) and it should arrive any day.

That’s entertainment.

The history of Chinese restaurants in America.

There’s an exhibit on this topic at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MoCA), a place I’d never heard of until just now.

It’s “New York, NY,” not “New York City, NY.”

It arrived yesterday.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh. It’s so nice to have those old friends around again. I’d missed them.

I’ve got a question, though: why is this stuff so damn expensive? The DVD is an hour and 10 minutes long and it costs more than, say, an entire season of “Buffy.” It’s not like there are any special effects, either. (Although one guy has such amazing control of his gag reflex that it makes me wonder.)

Seriously, anyone know why this stuff costs so much?

Cynthia Nixon is dating a woman.

I don’t see why this is a front-page story (wait, what am I talking about? it’s the Daily News), but, good on her. I’ve long had a non-sexual crush on her, and I’ve long wondered if she was on our team. In fact, I wonder if she was with her girlfriend when Matt and I saw her a few months ago.

Despite accusations, Kerry’s position on Iraq has been consistent

“[B]eneath the torrent of campaign verbiage, Kerry’s position on Iraq for the past two years has been consistent and defensible – just difficult to sell in a sound-bite world.”

I hate the sound-bite world.

I’ve been thinking about Kerry and the perils of running on one’s voting record. It’s so easy for the Bush campaign to use various past votes by Kerry to try to illustrate things about Kerry’s beliefs and about what he would or wouldn’t do.

But there are different reasons why a U.S. senator might vote a certain way. True, a senator’s vote might reflect his own beliefs. But it might reflect the beliefs of his constituents — the residents of his state. Or a senator might vote tactically, knowing that the outcome is going to be so lopsided in one direction or another that his individual vote won’t matter.

For instance, suppose the Senate is voting on whether to levy trade sanctions against Frabonia. You’re a senator, and a majority of your state’s constituents are either ethnically Frabonic-American or benefit from U.S.-Frabonic trade and would oppose such sanctions. You yourself believe that sanctions against Frabonia are extremely necessary, but you know you’d get in trouble with your home state if you voted that way. So you’re torn between your constituents’ views and your own views.

You’d have a difficult choice if the potential vote in the Senate was really close; your vote could decide the issue. Fortunately, though, something like 70 out of 100 senators are known to support the sanctions. Since you know the sanctions are going to happen now matter how you vote, you can safely vote against the sanctions, mirroring your constituents’ desires and thereby preserving your chances for re-election.

Unfortunately, a few years later you run for President, and U.S.-Frabonian relations are a major issue because of the Frabonians’ hostile treatment of its Christian minority. Your opponents make hay out of your earlier vote against the trade sanctions. You can’t say that you personally supported the sanctions but had to vote for what your constituents wanted, because you can’t guarantee you’ll win this race and you might wind up back in the Senate having to run for re-election to your seat at some point.

I think this has a lot to do with why so few senators become party nominees.

Here are some relationship rules from Hot Toddy.

On Friday I reached the end of my three-year job commitment. When I started this job, I had to sign a document stating that I’d stay at the job for at least three years. Everyone else has ti sign the same document. I think it’s because they don’t want us leaving too soon for higher-paying jobs in the private sector.

Three years ago, three years seemed like a long time, but they’ve gone by pretty quickly and uneventfully. While my personal life has had its ups and downs and dramatic moments, my job situation has been pretty constant. And while I spent parts of the past three years wishing they’d go by faster or thinking it might be worth a resignation in bad standing in order to leave before my time was up, I’ve come to feel relatively content in my job. It’s not my life’s work, but for now it’ll do.

My fear is that one day I’ll turn around and realize I’ve been here for 30 years. I don’t want that to happen. I’ve got goals, murky though they may be. Starting tonight, I’m taking a 10-week class in feature writing. I want to have a writing career. Choire is still a role model for me in some ways; while I don’t write about the same things he does, I admire how he’s managed to convey a natural writing talent into several ongoing gigs, including Gawker (previously) and occasional pieces for the New York Times. One of my dreams would be to write regularly for the New Yorker, like Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik and Louis Menand and Rebecca Mead do. Mostly, though, I just want to feel free to write whatever the hell I want and to express whatever the hell opinion I want without worrying about getting fired for it.

One of the themes of “Angels in America” is that human beings naturally want to keep moving. We can’t help but have dreams to fulfill. I want to fulfill mine, or I want to at least hope that I can.

Newsweek has a piece about college hookups.

Since the late 1990s the media has been filled with accounts of adolescent hookups. The phrase describes one-time sexual encounters — anything from kissing to intercourse — between acquaintances who’ve no plans to even talk afterward, let alone repeat the experience. As alarming as this sounds to parents, journalistic accounts of this behavior seem sketchy and anecdotal, filled with boasts by kids who won’t give their last names.

Aww. Old media is so cute.

I had my first feature-writing class last night, and afterwards, I was ready to quit. Matt had never seen me so depressed.

For one thing, I’m the only male in the class. The other 13 students and the teacher are all female.

Some gay men thrive around women; others feel alien around them. I’m the latter. Around most men, particularly most gay men, I can take comfort in a range of strong but familiar emotions: lust, envy, competition, empathy, identification, distaste, admiration, curiosity. Around most women, I don’t know how to act or what to feel. Women are not as psychologically resonant for me, or at least the resonance is too buried.

And I’m not comfortable enough in my manhood to be “one of the girls”; I don’t like playing the token gay guy. One of the exercises last night was to take 10 minutes and privately brainstorm on a sheet of paper about what topics we might want to use for feature articles. Everything I wrote down revolved around homosexuality. Gay marriage; closeted gay spouses (since the McGreevey thing has been in the news); gay dating; gay legal issues. The teacher, Beth, asked for volunteers to read theirs, and I didn’t volunteer, because I knew that if I did, I’d immediately be the token gay guy. (When I mentioned this to Matt, he asked me if any of the women were lesbians. I don’t know. If there were, they weren’t obvious.)

So there’s that.

Besides that, feature writing just doesn’t seem fun. I’m probably totally overreacting or focusing on the negative and unfamiliar, but anyway: Beth referred to a few types of feature articles, and among these are things called “charticles,” which appear to be articles in the form of charts, or snippets of text accompanied by graphics. There’s also service journalism, which doesn’t move me.

Near the beginning of class, Beth passed out a bunch of magazines to illustrate different types of articles. Except for two or three, they were all women’s magazines. (Fortunately, I got the New Yorker.) I don’t want to write dumb little personality-less pieces. I want to be like Michelangelo Signorile or Dan Savage or Andrew Sullivan or someone like that. I want to write gay stuff.

Perhaps blogging has spoiled me, but I really want to write about things that I’m interested in and that show my personality.

And I’m being so stupid here, because of course I can write stuff like that. It’s just a matter of appropriating the things from the class that I need, of putting my own stamp on my experience of it.

I was depressed last night because I’ve wrapped up my three-year commitment to my job, so I’m free to leave without penalty, but what am I going to do now? Work at this job until I retire? Go through life without making anything of myself? And if I do want to make something of myself, go for some sort of goal, is it going to be unpleasant? I want life to be fun and as stress-free as possible.

I saw an opening for myself, some hope, a possible way out of the boredom, only to realize it was a mirage. That’s not a good feeling. Brick wall. Is this all that there is in life?

I don’t feel quite as negative as I’m making this all out to be. I’m just trying to describe all of it so I can work through it, which I’ve already begun to do.

So I’m not quitting the class, and I’ll see what I can do with it.

Michael Tomasky says that Kerry should focus on the Bush administration’s failure to capture Osama bin Laden. And in doing so, he addresses one counter-argument I’d had in my head:

I can already hear the nervous Democratic operatives: Ooh, that’s too risky. What if we capture bin Laden between now and November 2? The argument is cut out from underneath Kerry. Well, that’s inarguable. But guess what? If we capture bin Laden between now and election day, Bush wins anyway, no matter how you slice it and no matter what Kerry did or did not say…. From the Kerry campaign’s point of view, the possible bad political outcome (Bush captures bin Laden, wins election) would have happened anyway, while the possible good political outcome (nation finally focuses on why this man is still at large, Bush put on defensive) will come only if Kerry starts asking the question.

Yeah, good point.

The American presidential campaign process has become a parody of itself. There’s nothing new left: the conventions aren’t real conventions, the debates aren’t real debates; “October surprise” and “post-convention bounce” are practically scientific terms. The process is so ossified it practically sits in the American Museum of Natural History where commentators can pick over and anaylze the dried-up bones.

I read a few political news roundups every weekday — first and foremost, Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes and ABC News’s The Note, the latter of which is all media-insider-ish and fun. Sometimes, my extensive tour of the daily political media universe leaves me with an overriding theme or impression. Today’s is a big meta-thing about the first presidential debate: the debate itself is not as important as how the post-debate spin is picked up by the media. It’s the meta-debate that matters.

Howard Kurtz:

When John Kerry and George W. Bush step off a University of Miami stage at 10:30 tomorrow night, the battle will just be getting under way.

Just ask Chris Lehane, who was Al Gore’s spokesman when quickie polls showed his man winning the first debate against Bush by as much as 14 points. But Bush operatives began highlighting small errors Gore had made — such as saying he had visited Texas with the federal disaster director, not the assistant director — and calling the network morning shows with examples. By the time the New York Post ran the headline “Liar! Liar!,” the media consensus was that a heavy-sighing Gore had blown it. …

The post-debate debate “can influence things in a major way,” says Scott Reed, who was Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign manager. “Most people watching aren’t sitting with pad and paper keeping score, except for the media. The 72 hours after the debate are when all the decisions are made, both at the water cooler and on the front pages of papers.”…

Slate political writer William Saletan calls the post-debate analysis “huge,” noting that the average person probably doesn’t watch the whole hour and a half, or raids the fridge in the middle, and goes to bed without a fixed view of the outcome.

“What are you going to remember? You remember what’s repeated to you on TV or in the papers. It decides everything.”

And from the Los Angeles Times (courtesy of today’s The Note):

Four years ago, instant polls conducted by the media after the first debate between then-Texas Gov. Bush and Vice President Al Gore showed a narrow Gore advantage. Furthermore, respondents indicated in these initial measurements (taken among 500 people over the telephone in the 30 minutes after the debate ended) that the debates had almost no effect on their choice for president. Those who were for Bush before the debates remained in support of him immediately after. The same was true for Gore’s supporters.

Yet, within a week (a week during which not much else of substance happened in the campaign), Bush had gained 8 percentage points. In addition, polls showed that the American people had changed their minds and were now convinced that Bush, not Gore, had won the encounter.

How did this happen?

The Bush campaign had persuaded the media, and hence the American people, that the vice president was overbearing and presumptuous in his manner during the debate. And so even though some people had initially said Gore offered more elaborate answers during the debate, by a week after the encounter, the tide of public perception had shifted and Bush was believed to have won. With that belief came a significant narrowing of Gore’s margin in national polls. …

So each campaign’s real work will begin immediately after the debate, as both sides work to provide reporters with documentary evidence that the other side made mistakes, flipped-flopped and offered answers that were lacking in depth and specificity.

The candidates’ surrogates and operatives will try to draw the media’s attention to scripted sound bites each candidate has delivered in the hope that reporters and commentators will treat these comments as representative of what really happened and was most important in the debate.

The other theme I’ve picked up today: the debate format sucks. These are not going to be debates but “parallel press conferences” or a “joint press conference” or what have you. From NPR:

“A debate is a head-to-head, spontaneous, structured argument over the merits of an issue,” Rice says. “Under the ridiculous 32-page contract that reads like the rules for the Miss America Pageant, there will be no candidate-to-candidate questions, no rebuttal to your opponent’s points, no cross questions or cross answers, no rebuttals, no follow-up questions — that’s not a debate, that’s a news conference.”

Anyway, that’s my political-digest digest for the day. As if things weren’t meta enough already.

To save you all the trouble, here’s a nice summary from The Note of all the conventional wisdom that’s been floating around about tonight’s debate. I could have just read this instead of the reams of political commentary I’ve been ingesting in the last few days, but it wouldn’t have been quite as fun.

Kerry has to “win” the debate to win blah blah blah.

Kerry has a tough challenge — to go on the attack but still be someone Americans want in their living rooms for four years blah blah blah.

Both these men are champion debaters blah blah blah.

What the news coverage says immediately after the debate is just as important — maybe more important — than what happens in the debate itself blah blah blah.

Kerry will acknowledge that he’s changed his mind occasionally and can be unclear at times, but will needle Bush by saying it’s better to be flexible when things go wrong than to be stubborn blah blah blah.

This is the first time both candidates will appear together before the American people free from the influences of handlers and aides blah blah blah.

The president — after acting confident for days — will “surprise” everyone (and de-fang Senator Kerry) by being suddenly contrite and yielding — less “times are tough,” or, even “mistakes were made,” than “I have made mistakes” blah blah blah.

In a nation of several hundred million people, why does Jim Lehrer get to keep moderating these things blah blah blah.

It will be interesting to see if the candidates choose blue or red ties blah blah blah.

How they look and act will matter as much as what they say, blah, blah, blah.

John Kerry sure better have a good and tight answer to that Iraq question, blah, blah, blah.

Boy, Republicans are more organized and on message than Democrats are blah blah blah.

Al Gore lost the first 2000 debate by losing the post-debate spin wars blah blah blah.

How about those wacky, restrictive, detailed campaign-negotiated rules that make this less a debate and more a joint appearance blah blah blah.

The first debate historically has the largest audience blah blah blah.

John Kerry must sound more bar room than Brahmin blah blah blah.

Ralph Reed really HAS been to the fountain of youth (or perhaps DID make that deal with the devil) blah blah blah.

And most important, as Democratic pollster Paul Maslin — with characteristic understatement — told the Los Angeles Times about John Kerry:

“If he can make this election about Bush, Bush in all likelihood will lose. If this election is about Kerry, then we’ve got a rougher row to hoe.”

And there isn’t any blah blah blah about that.

I’ve flip-flopped. I dropped the writing class.

Today was the last day I could do it without forfeiting my entire tuition. I get credit toward another class (minus the $25 registration fee and a prorated tuition for the one session I attended), which I have to use within a year. Hmm… nonfiction writing? Fiction writing? Sketch comedy? Who knows.

I just didn’t like it, on a gut level. I rarely trust my gut, but this time I decided to do so. I’m so bad at quitting things; I usually feel like a) I’m wimping out and b) the thing from which I quit will turn out to be wonderful. (The Party After You Left, perhaps.)

One summer at camp, I was on the age cusp between two different living arrangements. I got placed in the tent units, for the older kids. These were platform tents, with room for four beds each; except for canvas roofs and rolldown flaps, they were exposed to the elements, and it was recommended that you sleep with a mosquito net over your bed. The bathrooms were in a separate structure outdoors. I hated the idea of this, so I complained and made them switch me to the cabins, for the younger kids. These were your traditional multi-bunk cabins, each with a bathroom, et cetera.

After I switched, a couple of people in the tent units made fun of me. They called me “cabin boy.” And you know what? That July, all the boys and girls in the tent units wound up majorly bonding. At the end of the July session, when everyone gathered for a goodbye ceremony, the camp director said that she’d never seen the campers in the tent units become so much like a family.

There was a big changeover between July and August, and I decided I wanted to be cool again. So I switched back to the tent units. But most of the cool kids had left, and it wasn’t the same.

To this day, I have always feared quitting.

But today I did it anyway.

On the up side, now that I won’t have class on Monday nights after all, I can continue going to trivia, and the Jews For G-Strings won’t have to change their name.

If Howard Dean Were the Candidate…

Hmm… I’d like to believe this, but who knows. I would absolutely prefer to be watching Bush-Dean tonight instead of Bush-Kerry; I could see Dean clobbering Bush. I just think that no matter who the Democrats ran, the Republicans were prepared to ruin the candidate with a specifically-tailored attack plan. And the fact is, Kerry isn’t that far behind in the aggregate polls right now. Perhaps Dean would be doing even worse. We love to speculate as to what might have been; such speculation is a cousin of nostalgia and hope.

In an alternate universe, Dean is the Democratic nominee, and he’s currently kicking Bush’s ass. That’s not the universe we live in, but it’s nice to believe it’s happening somewhere. Human beings are nothing if not optimists.