Beautiful panoramic view from the top of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building, the tallest building in Brooklyn. (Via Satan’s Laundromat.)

Late yesterday afternoon I was taking some stuff out of my old apartment and down to the trash. While carrying something, I suddenly felt a numbness in my fingertip. I can still feel a slight numbness – it’s on one side of the fingertip of my left middle finger. I tend to be a hypochondriac, but I wonder if it’s carpal tunnel or what? Of course my first thought is “will I need surgery”? But a bit of online research shows that that’s not necessarily the case. I’m such a big worrier when it comes to anything out of the ordinary involving my body. I guess I’ll make a doctor’s appointment if it doesn’t go away.

[Update: It went away in a few days. Nothing to worry about.]

I made a special trip to my old Jersey City apartment today after work so that this woman and her husband could come by at 6 pm to look at the one piece of furniture I hadn’t yet sold. It was a buffet cabinet that used to be in my parents’ house, the only me-related object left in the apartment. (The renovators have already begun painting the walls, and there are paint cans and drop cloths everywhere.) By 6:45 the woman and her husband still hadn’t shown up, and numerous attempts to call her had given me her voicemail. I left one message at 6:15, and at 6:45 I left a second message to tell her I was leaving.

I’ve been feeling all complainy today. I didn’t sleep well last night, part of my fingertip is slightly numb, and I’ve had an intermittent sore throat for the past three weeks, probably a sign that the air-conditioner filters in the new apartment need to be changed. On top of that, this woman wasted an hour and a half of my time this evening, taking into account transit.

She now goes on my double super-secret shit list.

Jim McGreevey has a tell-all book deal. It was a year ago next week that he came out. Only a year? It seems like it’s been much longer.

I hope it’s graphic. (Yeah, right.)

I’ve been sick as a dog the last few days. My sore throat has turned into a nasty summer cold. I’ve taken about half this week off from work – I went in yesterday morning, came home in the afternoon, and I’m back at work today. I think yesterday was the peak. I had some leftover prescription decongestant from last winter’s flu season (the bottle said the medicine didn’t expire until December 2005), but it knocked me out. It made my eyelids feel like anvils. (Over-the-counter decongestants, which contain pseudoephedrine, don’t work for me, plus they keep me awake.) Today my head feels less congested and the gunk has moved to my chest. So now I’m taking cough medicine.

This may sound icky, but there’s nothing fulfilling like a productive hacking cough.

During my last big cough I suddenly thought to myself, “Everything’s coming up mucus,” sung in a big Mama Rose voice. But that’s kind of gross.

These are so much fun to listen to.

Today (meaning Saturday), Matt and I finally saw “Batman Begins.” Because the movie’s already been open a month and a half, we didn’t think we’d need to get there very far in advance. But the theater turned out to be crowded, although we luckily found the last pair of adjacent stadium-level seats at the end of the last row. I got to stretch out my right leg against a stairway pole. The movie was terrific, punctuated only by my occasional hacking coughs (which I tried to do only during loud moments) and nose-blowing. I was quite struck by Cillian Murphy, who played The Scarecrow, a.k.a. Jonathan Crane. I’d never seen him before (or at least I thought I hadn’t, until Matt pointed out that we’d actually seen him right before the movie started in a preview for “Red Eye”), and while there’s something very strange about his cheekbones, the man is, well, again, striking-looking. And he looks particularly good in the glasses.

Earlier today, I took my first trip to Murray’s Bagels. Matt, as a non-native New Yorker, had never been exposed to real bagels. He’s fond of Lender’s. Lender’s! My poor, sheltered boyfriend. So I went to Murray’s and got half a dozen bagels (two plain, two onion, two everything) plus another one for myself to eat as soon as I got home – a plain bagel with lox, cream cheese, tomato and onion. There’s nothing like a huge, hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside, real New York bagel. It was delicious. Matt was overwhelmed by how big the bagels were.

Last night neither of us were able to go to our usual Friday night gathering. Every week some of us get together to watch the Sci-Fi Channel’s Friday night lineup. But I was sick and Matt was wiped out, so we watched it at home. And I think a few other regulars were out of town. I only wish we’d all been together for last night’s “Stargate: Atlantis,” because there were two or three moments where we would have all had a hoot.

I must point out that I know very little about the “Stargate” franchise. I saw the original movie years ago, but I never saw an episode of “Stargate: SG1” (which has now been on for eight years) until last season, because Matt watches it and I caught a few episodes with him. “Stargate: Atlantis” is only a year old and I’ve caught most of it with Matt. I’ve not traditionally been a big TV sci-fi person; I watched “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with my dormmates back in college, and that’s about it, except for other occasional “Star Trek” spinoff episodes while other people were watching. Watching four shows in a row on a Friday night about bands of heroes travelling through space (and exploring rather Vancouver-like planets) is pretty fun, though. I really am a sci-fi geek at heart.

And now to bed, after which today will be yesterday and tomorrow will be today.

Peter Jennings has died. He was 67. Holy shit. I know he announced his lung cancer four months ago, but I couldn’t fathom that he’d actually die, or at least not nearly this soon. (But I put him on my celebrity death pool list anyway.)

I always found him the most watchable of the Big Three: Jennings, Rather and Brokaw (although Brokaw was a close second). Now Brokaw and Rather have left their posts, and Jennings – though he’d been on hiatus lately – is forever gone.

Rest in peace, Peter Jennings.

I really need a vacation. It’s not that work is particularly bad, but I’m tired of the endless cycle of Monday-to-Friday weeks separated by weekends. And one needs a change of location and routine sometimes. I’m a little bummed that it’s the second week of August and Matt and I haven’t been able to go anywhere. Matt has not been allowed to take a vacation from the New School all summer, which is ridiculous – they shouldn’t have to rely on Matt for everything. Other hall directors get vacations, and so should Matt.

As for me, I have 36 days of vacation saved up and no idea what to use them for, other than as random days off. But a random day off isn’t a vacation. I’ll probably wind up doing what I’ve done the last few years, which is to take a week off in late August and not actually go anywhere.

Part of the problem is that I don’t know where to go. Well, I have some ideas, but I’m either afraid of going to unfamiliar places or afraid of running out of things to do once I’m there. Which is weird, because I’ve travelled to several places around the world over the years with my parents. (And lived in Japan for three years. OK, there’s that.)

Anyway, Matt and I might go to San Francisco in the fall. That could be fun. I haven’t been there since I was 14.

I would love to go to Italy. I think. I do wonder if all the artwork and churches would get repetitive over time.

We went to Washington, D.C. last summer for a four-day weekend. It was a bit of an odd choice, as I spent eight years living and going to school about two hours from D.C. and made several trips over those years. But it turned out to be terrific, because I’d never really visited the city as a tourist, except on a trip with my mom and a friend of hers many years ago. Matt and I chose our own itinerary, steeping ourselves in American history (one of my favorite subjects) and visiting a bunch of traditional D.C. tourist sites that I’d never seen before.

I also have a problem spending money. I’m reluctant to spend money on a trip if I’m not sure I’m going to enjoy it. For instance, I’m curious about visiting Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, because, hey, I’ve never been there! But it’s hard to get myself to spend money on it if I don’t know what I want to do there.

And I worry about things like choosing a bad hotel.

I just need to get better at planning vacations. And take them. Otherwise, life just passes by, and before you know it, you’re old and have gone nowhere.

I have been intently following the death of Peter Jennings these last two days. Yesterday, I TiVo’d/watched ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “World News Tonight,” and “Nightline,” all of which were almost entirely devoted to Jennings and his death. It was surreal to see Charles Gibson last night hosting what is officially called “World News Tonight With Peter Jennings,” reporting about Peter Jennings. At one point I half-expected Jennings himself to appear and report on his own death, because it just seemed like the type of job he should be doing.

GMA and “Nightline” had split-screen interviews with Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather yesterday. It was so odd to see them interviewed on ABC, since each man is so strongly identified with his own network.

Why my interest in all this? I don’t know. But I’ve always been interested in national network TV news. My parents had the “Today” show on every morning when I was a kid, and I used to love it when Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley would spend a week on location somewhere – Rome, Moscow, Africa. When I was 14, my dad, my brother and I took the NBC studio tour at Rockefeller Center, and we got to see the “Today” set. After we got home, I took a shoebox and some old Fisher-Price Little People furniture and recreated the set from memory. I decided that my dream job, when I grew up, would be to anchor the “Today” show or the network evening news and travel all over the world and interview world leaders. I still think it would be fun to anchor a broadcast of a breaking news event. I haven’t enjoyed the network news programs as much since they switched their focus to celebrity news, but I’ve still got that fondness for them.

It’s weird that in less than nine months, all three nightly news anchors with whom my generation grew up – Jennings, Brokaw, and Rather – have left their posts. There a few good pieces about this today from the Chiacgo Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, the Washington Post (Howard Kurtz), and the New Jersey Star-Ledger. I particularly like this quote from the latter: “[Jennings] was Mr. Spock to Brokaw’s folksy Bones McCoy and Rather’s impetuous Captain Kirk — an alien intelligence from the planet Canada, offering not a hug or even a reassuring pat on the shoulder, but a poker face that was accented, on rare occasions, by a faintly raised eyebrow.”

I think the quote exaggerates Jennings’s aloofness, but the comparison of the three is apt. (Can’t you totally see Dan Rather as Captain Kirk?)

As Spock might put it, the death of Peter Jennings is, simply, illogical.

A critique of the alphabet.

Dan Savage has been substituting for Andrew Sullivan this week.

Scottie: What’s this doohickey?

Midge: It’s a brassiere! You know about those things, you’re a big boy now.

Scottie: I’ve never run across one like that.

Midge: It’s brand new. Revolutionary up-lift: No shoulder straps, no back straps, but it does everything a brassiere should do. Works on the principle of the cantilevered bridge.

– Vertigo, 1958

R.I.P., Barbara Bel Geddes.

Because Bob Herbert’s New York Times columns are not generally flashy or witty or written on trendy topics, he’s usually overshadowed by colleagues like Maureen Dowd or Thomas Friedman. What Herbert’s columns do have, though, are empathy and a straightforward earnestness. Today he writes on the growing death toll in Iraq:

The president is on vacation. He’s down at the ranch riding his bicycle and clearing brush. The death toll for Americans has streaked past the 1,800 mark. The Iraqi dead are counted by the tens of thousands. But if Mr. Bush has experienced any regret about the carnage he set in motion when he launched the war, he’s not showing it. …

The administration is not willing to commit to an all-out effort to defeat the insurgents in Iraq, and is equally unwilling to reverse course and bring the troops home. …

Ask a thousand different suits in Washington why we’re in Iraq and you’ll get a thousand different answers. Ask how we plan to win the war, and you’ll get a blank stare. …

When asked on Tuesday about a possible exit strategy for American troops, Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters it depended on many “variables,” including:

“What are the Iranians doing? Are they going to be helpful or unhelpful? And if they’re increasingly unhelpful, then obviously the conditions on the ground are less advantageous. Same thing with the Syrians.”

Got that? …

George W. Bush has no strategy, no real plan, for winning the war in Iraq. So we’re stuck in a murderous quagmire without even the suggestion of an end in sight.

As of today, 1,844 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq; 13,877 U.S. soldiers have been wounded; and somewhere around 25,000 civilians have been killed.

Approximately 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. On the day when the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq meets or exceeds that number – a day that, at current rates, will probably come in late 2006 – the American people will cross a psychological barrier. I doubt anything will substantively change on that day, but it will put the lie to any notion – whatever other valid reasons there might have been – that 9/11 required us to go to Iraq.

Adventures Outside the Classical Canon: Pathfinding Composers. “And so, with rough justice, we present for your consideration and listening pleasure critics’ selections of CD’s by a handful of composers who we think deserve broader recognition, however disparate the starting points.”

I am now distracted for the rest of the afternoon.

I need some help:

I want a new cellphone. Preferably one that has a camera and is relatively cheap.

Any recommendations?

I am Jeff, destroyer of pants.

Lately I can’t seem to own a pair of pants without quickly wearing a wallet-shaped impression into the back right pocket. It happens with my jeans, but more horribly, it happens with the dress pants I wear to work. I’ve ruined two pairs of pants in the last several months due to this. Since I’ve been too lazy to buy new pants (or, more accurately, too lazy to find the rare store than sells pants with a 28″ inseam), I’ve taken to borrowing a pair of Matt’s pants. After two days of wearing them with my wallet in the back pocket, an impression started to show. Since then, I’ve been carrying my wallet in one of my front pockets.

I don’t think my wallet is particuarly thick. Still, maybe I’ll get something like this. (What a great URL.)

Okay, now I feel ill.

Bush on Sheehan: “I’ve got a life to live”

George W. Bush has only one sort of plausible explanation for not meeting with Cindy Sheehan: He’s the president of the United States, and he’s too busy solving the world’s problems to have face-to-face meetings with every American who asks, no matter who she is or how much she has suffered as a result of his war of choice in Iraq.

It’s not much of an explanation, but it’s what he’s got — at least until the president of the United States somehow finds time for a bicycle ride, some fishing, a nap and a Little League baseball game on a single day at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. When that’s what his schedule looks like, the president of the United States needs a new explanation. And as Bush set off on a two-hour bike ride with reporters and aides Saturday, he had one.

The president told Cox News that he’s aware that Sheehan is waiting to talk with him just outside his ranch. “But whether it be here or in Washington or anywhere else,” he said, “there’s somebody who has got something to say to the president, that’s part of the job. And I think it’s important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say.

“But I think it’s also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life … I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy. And part of my being is to be outside exercising. So I’m mindful of what goes on around me. On the other hand, I’m also mindful that I’ve got a life to live and will do so.”

Casey Sheehan might have enjoyed a bicycle ride Saturday, too.

What a fucking schmuck.

What Makes People Gay?

From last Sunday’s Boston Globe magazine.

The latest issue of The New Republic has a good and very long refutation of “intelligent design.” (I discovered this by looking at the Blogad on my sidebar – plug, plug!) There’s also a shorter piece on the subject by Leon Wieseltier, although he loses me when he starts quoting Maimonedes.

My friend Andy occasionally blogs in support of intelligent design, but he gets me all confused when he does this, because I’m not sure his definition of intelligent design is the same as the definition that other people give it. (I mentioned this confusion in a comment on his blog last week.) Andy believes in intelligent design and evolution, but most believers of intelligent design seem to blur the issue. See this from yesterday’s USA Today, in which supporters of intelligent design seem to both reject evolution and support it within the same piece (and see the sidebar). (And jeers to USA Today for presenting intelligent design as a legitimate alternative to evolution. Again, see sidebar.)

Basically, I don’t see how you can believe in evolution without believing in natural selection. Evolution without natural selection isn’t “evolution.” That may be semantic, but it’s important. According to evolutionary theory, human beings will eventually evolve into one or more other species. If God directs evolution, then you believe God will eventually direct us to evolve into another species. In other words, humanity is just one step along an endless evolutionary path. That doesn’t jibe with the idea of humanity being favored by God over all other species.

Much of the confusion stems over the imperfection of language. See the confusion over “homosexuality,” wherein one person might say he “disapproves of homosexuality” and means that he disapproves merely of homosexual conduct, whereas the hearer might think the speaker is referring even to same-sex arousal. Unless both people are defining a term in the same way, they’re not going to get their points across to each other.

Anyway, to quote one of Wielseltier’s less-confusing sentences:

It is impossible, of course, not to marvel at the complexity and the beauty of the natural order; but marveling is not thinking. The mind may recoil from the possibility that all this sublimity came into being by accident, but it cannot, on those grounds alone, rule the possibility out, unless it is concerned only to cure its own pain.

I’m taking a few days off from work this week. Yesterday was my last day until Monday. I’m staying in town, but I decided it was time to take time off.

Today I saw a matinee of Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway. I had hoped to see The Constant Wife, but that wasn’t available at the TKTS booth, and I’m not supposed to see The Pillowman without Matt. I enjoyed it, although my seat was in the last row of the orchestra, and I can’t remember ever having more trouble hearing dialogue than I did today, though it was better during Act II. I’d never seen the movie or any other production of the play, so the story was brand new to me. FAN-fucking-tastic acting from Liev Schreiber and Alan Alda.

Other things I will do this week include getting a library card and a new Social Security card and vegging out. Perhaps I’ll go to a museum tomorrow.

I’ve been reading The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, and I’m starting to get bored. I’ve been reading it for almost three weeks now and I’m only a third of the way through the book. I really don’t want to be reading this for the next month and a half. I don’t seem to be in much of a reading mood anyway, but maybe I’ll go the Strand and pick up something different. I’ll see.

Anyway, over and out.

Today I took a few more steps toward feeling like a real New Yorker. I did a few errands: went to the federal building downtown to apply for a replacement Social Security card (I’d lost my original), and got passport photos taken and mailed them out with a form to renew my passport. Why did these make me feel more like a New Yorker when they’re both related to the federal government? Maybe it’s because I wrote my new address on several official forms, or because I used the local post office for the first time, or because if I still lived in New Jersey I would have gone to a different federal building. At any rate, I feel more official now.

One strange thing was filling in my place of birth on the Social Security form, which is New York, NY. Because I often don’t feel completely “with it” as a New Yorker, it’s always striking to remember that I was actually born here, on the island of Manhattan no less.

In other news, I decided to try out Shake Shack in Madison Square Park for lunch today, but when I got there at 1:50 the line had at least 60 people on it. Screw that. So I went across the street to Wendy’s instead.

Tonight I’m seeing The Constant Wife through HIPTIX. Until yesterday, it had been three months since I’d seen a show, so I have some catching up to do.

I also want to state that I am currently suffering from “reader’s block.” I can’t seem to find a book I want to read. It’s like my short-term brain wants to read a book, but my long-term brain (I just made that term up, but maybe it gets my point across) doesn’t feel like it. So I keep getting intrigued by different books and then deciding that I don’t feel like committing to them. It’s frustrating.

What are you currently reading?

Is Bush the Tin Man?

Hey, I resent that.

I’m slightly bored and depressed today. This should be the worst problem I ever have in my life, right? Nevertheless, it doesn’t feel so good. I thought my Wednesday-through-Friday vacation would be refreshing, but instead it’s been, well, boring. And I’m sure it’s even more boring to read about it.

Matt is way busy lately with RA training, so I haven’t seen him all that much. I have, however, seen three Broadway plays in the last several days – in addition to the previously-mentioned Glengarry Glen Ross and The Constant Wife, I finally saw The Pillowman yesterday. Very well done and highly entertaining, even though it doesn’t amount to much in the end. Doubt deservedly won the Tony.

Matt and I did get to see Silence! The Musical last night at the Fringe Festival. It’s a musical spoof of “The Silence of the Lambs.” We rented the movie last Monday in order to refresh our memories before seeing the show, and I’m glad we did, because it made some of the jokes funnier.

Some recent attempts at keeping busy:

I thought about going to the movies this afternoon, but I didn’t feel like going by myself.

I’ve been thinking about reading The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, which is supposed to be the best book on the Clinton presidency to date. But I don’t know if I want to read a whole book about that frustrating presidency.

Unable to commit to a book to read, I bought a book of sudoku puzzles a couple of days ago and have been steadily doing them. Sudoku is rather addictive, although it doesn’t give you the same feeling of engagement with the world and culture around you that comes from doing crossword puzzles.

Sigh. I really need to travel somewhere.

Actually, Matt and I are planning to go to Chicago the weekend of November 19 for a wedding of a friend of my family. Hopefully we’ll be able to meet up with some of you Chicago bloggers! But more on that as the date approaches.

For now… over and out.

I agree with Verlyn Klinkenborg that many skeptics of evolution have an inaccurate concept of time. Life on earth is about 3.5 billion years old. That’s 3,500,000,000 years. How many years is that, really? The square root of 3.5 billion is approximately 59,160. Therefore, imagine 59,160 discrete units of time. Now imagine each of those discrete units of time, each itself containing 59,160 years. So if 59,160 years pass (or, all of humanity’s recorded history times 12), you’re only 1/59159th of the way there. That’s a fucking huge amount of time. And as Klinkenborg says, “All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by one.” We puny human beings can’t grasp such immensities, of course, but a few billion years seems like a reasonable amount of time for us to have evolved to our current state of existence. (Just imagine what our descendants in 3.5 billion years will look like!)

Humanity is just a small, insignificant part of what is Out There. Time, like most grand concepts, is beyond full human comprehension. Religion is a desire to bring the incomprehensible within the realm of human comprehension – to create meaning where there is none. (Or at least none that we human beings will ever be able to understand.) That may sound like a criticism of religion, but I mean it merely as an explanation.

I’m not religious. But that doesn’t mean I think everything can ultimately be known. On the contrary, I think it’s the adherents of the world’s major religions who claim to know more than they do. I think that we, as a species, are tremendously well-suited to figuring out how things happen. But the whys? We’re not terribly well-suited to those.

I’m not religious. But I will always look at the universe with awe and wonder.

I broke down yesterday and became decadent.

I finally got HBO.

I couldn’t get HBO in my old apartment, because my cable TV was part of my apartment and not changeable. Last month we signed up for cable service in the new place, but I didn’t want to get any premium channels because of my preconceived notions of how expensive it would be. That, and I felt guilty spending money on something that would just encourage more laziness.

But the other day I decided, screw it. I’m tired of feeling out of the loop when my family talks about “The Sopranos” or my brother talks about “Entourage” or the blogs talk about the final episode of “Six Feet Under.” When the next good show comes along, I can take part in the conversation. Since my rent-free status is really a function of living with Matt, we decided that I would pay for cable, so it was my decision to make.

So I ordered HBO yesterday after work and it was even cheaper than I’d thought – $7.95/month for six digital HBO channels. (Well, seven, but I don’t speak Spanish.) Not three minutes after I ordered it, the channels were on my TV. I left a note for Matt before leaving for my fiction-writing class, and when I got back and checked the TiVo, I saw that Matt – who had been indifferent to HBO – had already added a movie and three programs to the “To Do” list. Then I added a few of my own.

What this means is that I’m going to have to buy an extra hard drive for my TiVo. I have a 40-hour machine, but I don’t like recording things at the lowest quality, so I really only have about 25 hours of recording space. You non-DVR-owners might think that’s a ton of space, but it’s really not.

Now, if only HBO showed movies in letterbox format.

Anyway, if I start to look like a potato, you’ll let me know, right?

I was thinking last night about how strange our money system is. Or any money system, for that matter.

This month I accidentally made two student loan payments instead of two. Unfortunately, I only had enough money in my checking account for one payment, so on Monday (when the second payment went through) I wound up having a negative balance. I tranferred money from my savings account to cover the shortfall. There’s more I won’t explain, but the upshot is that next month I will be transferring money among my savings account, my checking account, and my student loans to straighten things out.

It’s strange that so many of our economic transactions today are electronic. Electrical pulses zipping around the world over wires. Debit cards, credit cards, online payments. My salary is paid by direct deposit, so I don’t even see a check. You have money, but how much of it do you actually see anymore? Only your cash.

And cash – at least paper money – is only that, paper. The only reason it’s worth something is because we all agree that it does.

The only real money, some say, is gold. There was a great New York Times Magazine article a few months ago about “gold bugs,” people who are fetishistic about the value and reliability of gold. But what is gold, after all, but a rare, shiny metal? It has no magical properties. You can’t eat it. Wood and steel are good enough for shelter, and fabric is good enough for clothes.

Gold, like paper and the electronic impulse, has no value for what it is but for what it does. From the above article: “As the greatest theorist of money, the German sociologist Georg Simmel, recognized, money is only money when it is in motion: ‘When money stands still, it is no longer money according to its specific value and significance.'” One of the themes of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon is money and how it has evolved from gold to information and electronic data.

It’s so odd that you can have “millions of dollars in the bank” and feel safe, when what “millions of dollars in the bank” really means is that you can see a big number on a computer screen, made of pixels. “Millions of dollars in the bank” is nothing but a promise. And yet it’s the biggest thing in the world.

(Not that I have millions of dollars, mind you. But one can dream.)

The Big Cup is closing on Sunday due to high rents, as Chelsea continues its de-gayification. I used to spend many a weekend afternoon at the Big Cup, sitting in a comfy chair (if I could find one) with a book and a hot chocolate and shyly not talking to cute guys.

One weekday evening a few years ago I had an out-of-town guest whom I wanted to show gay Manhattan. I really should have taken him to Christopher Street and Sheridan Square, but instead I took him to Chelsea. He was duly unimpressed. There’s always been something sterile about Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. Unlike the Village, there’s no neighborhood center like Sheridan Square, nothing historical like the Stonewall, no gay bookstore like the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, and no interesting architecture. Eighth Avenue is just another wide, impersonal Manhattan avenue.

The Chelsea boys have all moved to Hell’s Kitchen, anyway.

Goodbye, Big Cup.

A particular blog-related company, which I’d never heard of before, comment-spammed my blog this morning, as well as the blogs of Joe and a few other people. After deleting the spam comment, I sent an e-mail to the address contained in the spam:

If you were on the up-and-up, you would have sent me an email instead of leaving comment spam on my blog. If you really understood the blog community, you’d know that bloggers hate comment spam. I really don’t appreciate it, and therefore I won’t visit or publicize your site at all.

I received the following reply:

Dear Sir.

High Class Blogs is a not for profit directory. If you’ll notice, we have no advertising on our site. Our directory is run by volunteers who dedicate time from their busy schedules. As it is, you were not contacted by me. But, if you were contacted by one of our reviewers, I can assure you the message was authentic and personal.

Regards.

Maggie Livingston
Approval Department
[Company X]

I responded:

Ms. Livingston, whether the message was “authentic and personal” is not the point. The point is that someone at the company decided to use the comment section of my blog (and the comment section of other people’s blogs) to advertise your website – not to make a comment on a particular post I wrote, but to advertise your company. That is not what the comments section of a blog is for. If the people at your company knew anything about blogs, they would know that bloggers don’t write blogs as avenues for other people to advertise their products, services or business ventures.

Please forward this message to the appropriate department or person.

Thank you.

This evening I received a reply:

You should write a book about the blogging community and then we could all read it and be enlightened.

No need to reply. Good luck with your blog.

Maggie

I responded:

Your reply was sarcastic, and it provided no argument against the fact that comment spam is totally antithetical to the spirit of blogging. I’m not sure how you can work for a blog-related site and not realize this.

I trust you will pass on my previous e-mail regarding your organization’s spam tactics to the appropriate people.

Damn comment spammers.

Show Me the Science: “Is ‘intelligent design’ a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn’t such a hoax be impossible? No. Here’s how it has been done.”

Excellent, excellent, excellent.

From Salon.com: Reading “In Search of Lost Time,” by Jane Smiley. This makes me want to take the plunge and read all seven volumes. Not now, but someday.

I just received the following e-mail from someone at the aforementioned company:

Dear Sir,

Hi. Just sort of caught wind of your complaint, so please forgive me for taking so long to contact you about it. First off, let me apologize about the situation. That is definitely not what we’re trying to do.

Yes, we are a non profit and, no, we really aren’t looking to spam anyone. The thing is, because we are non profit, we have several volunteers working at home to review many of the blog submissions we have. It seems that some of them have apparently gotten a little over zealous in their efforts (it’s really not their responsibility to try to get blogs to submit).

I’ve sent each of them messages explaining to no longer post any sort of messages in blog comment boxes. I think some of them didn’t realize how anoying that can be.

Anyway, once again, I apologize. It won’t happen again. Please shoot me an e-mail if you have any other concerns or questions.

I appreciated his courteous reply, which was very different from that of the other person.

[random person]: hey
tinmanic73: hi
[random person]: who is this? hmm I am trying to find out why you are on my buddy list
[random person]: XD
tinmanic73: i should be asking you the same question
[random person]: I am Rachel
[random person]: and who are you?
tinmanic73: i don’t know a Rachel i don’t think
[random person]: ok
[random person]: well your name?
tinmanic73: I’m Jeff
[random person]: ok
[random person]: sry for bothering you
tinmanic73: no problem.

My reader’s block has ended and I’ve gotten into another book. I’ve been reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Last week, someone in my writing class said that he was reading Lolita, which I’d already read, but I was inspired to pick up some more Nabokov. Pale Fire is a novel in the form of a 999-line poem plus accompanying commentary. The “commentator” is hilariously wacko. Yay metafiction.

After this, I think I’m finally going to read Borges. I’ve had a collection of his fiction on my bookshelf for quite a while now, and since I seem to be getting onto a 20th-century postmodern kick, I think he’s next.

In light of Hurricane Katrina, my thoughts are with Richard and Jonno (who both escaped New Orleans to stay with him). I hope everything turns out okay for you two and your house.