Aliens approaching Earth today on a spaceship would have no doubt that our planet was inhabited. In addition to our big blue planet, they would see the satellites, thousands of them, man-made, orbiting the earth. We use them to send information – weather, television, phone calls, bird’s-eye photographs.

Aliens approaching our planet 250 years ago would have seen no such satellites at all — just a lonely, pristine planet. But if they got closer, they’d see hundreds of wooden ships, going back and forth across the big blue expanses of ocean, confined to crawling along a vast sphere, prisoners of non-Euclidean geometry.

I’ve been reading a biography of John Adams lately – not the popular one by David McCullough (I’ve heard that it’s too hagiographical and sentimentalized, that McCullough dumbs down Adams’s personality by making him too likable), but a better one that I discovered, John Adams: Party of One, by James Grant. It’s delightful, and James Grant is incredibly witty – he appears to be a good match for Adams’s cantankerousness. (Adams spent a few years in France as the American minister; he had no patience for diplomacy and sorely tested the graces of the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, who couldn’t wait for Adams to leave the country.)

What strikes me is how slowly information traveled in those days. I’m currently reading my sixth consecutive book about colonial America (I don’t think I’ve ever read so many books in a row on a single topic before), and this keeps coming up. Back then, it took about four to six weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean. As colonial American society matured over the course of the eighteenth century, the colonies became more closely tied to the mother country; the more well-to-do colonials liked to keep up on the latest British fashions, and London newspapers crossed the ocean to be read and discussed in the coffeehouses. And yet, the news in those newspapers was at least a month and a half old. When King George II died, the colonials didn’t know about it for weeks.

The same thing with letters. I don’t understand how the British ever managed to govern their colonies. If a colonial official needed permission from the mother country to do something or some information on a particular matter, he’d have to wait four to six weeks for the letter to cross the Atlantic, and four to six weeks for the response to cross back over the water – in addition to the time spent crafting that response. Information traveled no faster than a human being, no faster than the wind could push a ship across the ocean. When John Adams in France received letters from his wife Abigail back in Massachusetts, who knew how out-of-date the family news he was reading might be?

And yet, as John Steele Gordon writes, this slowness of information travel was “simply a fact of life. Like growing old, or needing to sleep for several hours a day, it was taken as a given, if sometimes regretted.”

It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the first transatlantic cable was laid and the Old World and the New could finally communicate near-instantaneously.

Today, we’ve got our satellites and cellphones and airplanes, email and instant messaging, live television feeds. As soon as I hit “publish” on this entry, someone in far-off Indonesia will be able to read my words on a page visually formatted exactly the way I want it.

How can we take this stuff for granted?

Look around the room you’re in right now and think about what you see. A computer made of plastic and metal. Electric lights. A television, a telephone. Maybe some photographs. You might hear car traffic. I just took the elevator down to the lobby and got a snack, processed someplace far away, covered in a plastic wrapper. All these unnatural things!

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been deeply absorbed in colonial America this summer… but sometimes it really does feel like we’re living in a weird, make-believe future.

Can we please have a moratorium on a particular journalism cliché? I don’t know if it has a name, but I’m calling it the trick opening. It’s used to alert the reader to a supposed historic parallel to a present-day situation. Here’s an example in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, from the beginning of a review of a book about Bill Clinton’s first term:

The president is a failure. His foreign policy is a mess, and he’s hounded by scandals at home. A hostile opposition has seized the Congress, and he’s fought to stay relevant in the face of humiliating approval ratings.

George W. Bush today? No. Bill Clinton in 1995.

The name of the book prominently appears at the top of the review: “Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency.” There’s also a big photo of Bill Clinton at the top. So it’s not like we don’t know the book being reviewed is about Bill Clinton.

Are we supposed to find this opening clever? “Wow! You sure got me! At first I thought you were talking about George Bush — I had no idea you were actually talking about Bill Clinton!”

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I come across this trick in the newspaper every so often, and it always annoys me. It’s just lazy.

After writing yesterday’s entry, I thought about chronicling all the instances of “trick openings” that I find in newspaper articles. I didn’t expect to find another one so soon.

From today’s paper:

In a deal driven at least in part by the hunger to get programming for a cable network, Rupert Murdoch pays an unimaginable price for a family-controlled institution, one steeped in a distinctive set of values, the gold standard in its field.

A familiar story line. But this isn’t another account of Mr. Murdoch’s acquisition last week of The Wall Street Journal and its owner, Dow Jones & Company, from the Bancroft family. Nine years ago, the Fox Entertainment Group, a unit of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, stunned the sports world by buying the Los Angeles Dodgers — The Wall Street Journal of the National League — from the O’Malley family, which had owned the team for decades.

Some peeves:

(1) If you’re riding a bicycle, YOU ARE NOT A PEDESTRIAN. I’m sick and tired of cyclists who ride the wrong way down one-way streets or ride through red lights. It happened to me again this morning. I was waiting to cross a street on my way to the PATH station. When the “walk” sign finally lit up, I began crossing, even though I saw a biker coming from the cross-street who I KNEW was going to keep on biking through his just-turned-red light. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of being deferred to. So he chaotically swerved around me and rode on into the intersection, where he had to brake in the face of oncoming traffic. If not for me, he might have made it all the way through. I heard him say, “My gosh!,” which I think was in response to me. I gave him a lingering glare and continued walking.

I don’t care how great you think you are for biking instead of driving a car. You still have to follow traffic rules.

(2) What’s with the phrases “the exception that proves the rule” and “a rule that is more honored more in the breach”? Neither makes sense. The exception doesn’t prove a rule. It’s evidence that there is no rule. As for “honored in the breach,” Google shows me that the phrase made more sense in its original meaning (it’s from Hamlet). But now it’s nonsensical.

(3) Tim Russert needs to learn how to read. Several times on “Meet the Press” every Sunday, a newspaper or book excerpt appears on the screen and he reads along with it aloud, but he inevitably screws up some words. It’s annoying but funny.

Happy Monday!

Articles about the new narrower New York Times, which debuted this morning: from Gothamist, Gawker, and the New York Observer.

I’m so pissed at the Democrats for caving in on wiretapping last week. A Times editorial today sums it up best:

[M]ostly, the spectacle left us wondering what the Democrats — especially their feckless Senate leaders — plan to do with their majority in Congress if they are too scared of Republican campaign ads to use it to protect the Constitution and restrain an out-of-control president.

Damn Democrats. You can’t count on them for anything.

I’ve been on this whole get-rid-of-stuff-and-maybe-make-money-off-it kick today. I recently discovered The Simple Dollar, and it’s an addictive blog – almost every entry contains links to other entries, and I find myself clicking on a bunch of different things on each visit. There’s also Get Rich Slowly, and Unclutterer.

Anyway, I’ve decided I want to get rid of a bunch of my books and CDs. The books are easy – I’ll try and sell the ones I want to get rid of at the Strand. As for the CD’s, I’m trying to decide whether to just get a bunch of ultra-thin CD sleeves to keep them and save space, or whether to rip them digitally and sell them on Amazon or eBay or something.

There’s also the hassle factor to consider – maybe I should just dump the stuff I want to get rid of and not worry about selling it.

Why now? The fact that we might be moving is a big motivator here. I’d like to get rid of my clutter before packing for a move.

Sometime in the last two months I crossed over into positive net worth. The assets contained in my 401(k), my savings, and my checking account are finally greater than my outstanding debt (student loans).

Of course, the 401(k) is basically untouchable, and that’s where the bulk of my assets are. Still, it feels good to know that my net worth is above zero, even if just on paper.

I’ve been continuing my uncluttering kick. I got rid of around 40 books last night, give or take. They were all books I figured would be difficult to sell and that I knew I’d never look at again.

My first book-purging goal is to get rid of enough books so that all my remaining ones fit on my two six-foot-tall bookcases. Even that goal is hard. I haven’t achieved it yet. I have tons of books. I have such an attachment to them — they’re like my children. Each one has a story behind it and is full of ideas. And collectively, they make me look and feel studious. I admire people who have lots of books.

I did a book purge when I moved out of my old apartment two years ago, but I’ve since acquired more. When we moved in together, Matt jokingly told me that I wasn’t allowed to buy a new book without getting rid of an old one. It never happened.

I have conflicting reasons for doing a book purge: (1) I want to get rid of stuff in order to make a potential move easier and to just have less clutter around, and (2) I want to make a little money. These reasons conflict, because it’s actually a hassle to make money selling your books — it’s easier just to donate them. I’m going to take a bunch of them to the Strand this weekend and try to sell them; those I can’t sell I might just donate in bulk to the Salvation Army down the street. Getting rid of them book-by-book on Amazon seems way too slow and inefficient for the money I’d make off them. Andy made a good amount of money selling books on Amazon, but I’ve sold only one so far out of the several books I’ve put up for sale. And I had to go to the post office. I can’t imagine doing that 50 to 100 times. I’d rather just get them off my hands in one fell swoop.

As for my CDs, last night I ordered a bunch of ultra-thin CD sleeves, which should reduce the physical volume of my CD collection to about 1/3 of its current size after I toss out the bulky jewel cases. Of course, I had to spend money to buy the CD sleeves, so I guess I value the uncluttering itself more than the small amount of money after all.

So South Carolina has moved its primary up to January 19.

South Carolina’s primary was originally scheduled for February 2. But then Florida scheduled its primary for January 29 to get ahead of South Carolina. South Carolina got annoyed at no longer being the first southern state with a primary, so it moved its primary.

This means that New Hampshire and Iowa are legally obligated to move their primary and caucus. Under state laws, the New Hampshire primary has to be held at least seven days before any other state primary, and the Iowa caucus has to be held at least eight days before any other state votes at all. So New Hampshire’s going to have to move its primary up from January 22 to at least January 12. And Iowa’s going to have to move its caucuses from January 14 to January 4.

If the leapfrogging continues, the Iowa caucuses could wind up happening in late 2007.

Isn’t this a bit ridiculous, the first primaries occurring nearly a year before the general election? The major party candidates will be chosen by February 5, and we’ll have a Democrat and a Republican sniping at each other for nine months.

That’s quite a long time, isn’t it? Maybe we should just move up the general election from November to, say, July. And we can move Inauguration Day up to September 2008.

Heck, we may as well start the 2012 primaries now. Candidates can declare their candidacies today and start railing against President X’s administration before President X is even elected or nominated.

Why don’t we hold the 2016 Olympics next year? And can I retire tomorrow?

Does the MTA website suck?

I’m always interested in the passage of time, and I recently realized that this summer is a significant milestone for me.

I was at the University of Virginia for eight years, from August 1991 to August 1999. During that time, I went to college for four years, worked at UVa for a year, and then went to law school there for three years. After taking the bar exam during the summer after law school graduation, I packed up my stuff, left Charlottesville and moved back up to the New York area.

At the time, I marveled at how much time I’d spent in Charlottesville. I began college at age 17 and finished law school at age 25. Eight years – nearly a third of my life up to then. It seemed like ages.

This summer is significant because another eight years have now passed since that summer.

For a long time after moving back up north, I felt like I was living in a post-UVa transition period – my “post-UVa life.” I defined my existence by what had come before it. (Sort of like how we called the ’90s the “post-Cold-War era.”) Life just didn’t seem as interesting or as stable as it had back in Charlottesville. Even several years after moving back up here, I still felt like I’d just recently left UVa.

Well, it’s now eight years since my UVa life ended – it’s been as long as my UVa life itself. It’s hard for me to sense how much time has passed since then; the past eight years seem to have gone by more quickly than the previous eight years. But I’ve experienced a lot since then — some things that happened so long ago that I sometimes take them for granted.

• I came out to my parents.
• I discovered blogs.
• New York City became my stomping ground.
• I had my heart broken several times.
• I had a five-year career in state government.
• I met Matt and we became partnered.
• I met my good friend Mitch in New Jersey, and other friends whom I feel like I’ve known for ages.
• I turned 30.
• I experienced life in a post-9/11 America.
• I lived through most of the Bush administration.

When I graduated law school eight years ago and wondered what my life would be like in 2007 at age 33, I don’t really know what I pictured. I probably hoped that at the very least I’d be in a stable relationship, out to my parents, and financially independent. Check, check, check. Besides that, I didn’t know. I was finally done with school and had no idea what I was going to do with my law degree. I couldn’t see ahead into the mists of time.

Life is like driving down a country road at night. Your headlights are on and you can see only a few yards in front of you, and you have no idea what’s around the next curve. My future is as murky now as it was back then.

But I guess I’m not in my post-UVa life anymore.

I’m just… in my life.

I got rid of a whole lot of books this weekend. I made two trips to the Strand, where I made $50 selling books, and I made one trip to the Salvation Army down the street for books I didn’t think they’d take. (The Strand doesn’t like to buy much fiction because they’ve already got tons of it.) And I took a few books to the post office this morning that I sold on Amazon. All told, I think I got rid of about 40 books this weekend, which is in addition to about 45-50 books that I tossed out during the past week. I’m still left with two six-foot-tall bookshelves filled with books.

I also spent much of the weekend checking out different pieces of personal finance software. First I explored Quicken, but Intuit (which owns Quicken) recently switched to a proprietary file format for downloading data from your banks. This makes more money for Intuit because it charges banks to use the format, but it’s a hassle, and I just don’t feel like supporting a big company that’s going to treat its customers like that.

Next I downloaded and tried out GnuCash, which is free, but I found it ugly. Worse, it requires using double-entry accounting, or debits and credits, which I can’t seem to get my mind around.

Finally I decided to try out Moneydance, which I think I’m going to wind up using. I like the interface, and the application is user-friendly. It’s free for the first 100 transactions you enter, but after that it costs $30. But I discovered that it was created by a UVa alum, Sean Reilly, so if I like it and want to continue using it, I’ll be more than happy to pay him. It’s always nice to support the little guy instead of the Man.

In other money-related issues, I cooked dinner on Friday night for the first time in ages and made enough to last three nights. And I’ve made it a goal to try to make my lunch and bring it to work every day this week.

I don’t know why I get on these weird kicks sometimes. When I get into something, I tend to *really* get into it for a while. Probably has something to do with my overachieving personality.

Although that personality never seemed to apply to things like law school.

We have a mouse in the apartment and it’s freaking me out.

It’s not the first mouse we’ve had – I caught two or three a few months ago with glue traps on the floor. But this one is different, because it’s gotten into our food cabinet. The middle shelf of our food cabinet, actually. We have no idea how it gets up there. Can mice fly?

I first realized we had an uninvited guest several nights ago, when I went to the cabinet to take out a bag of M&Ms. As I picked up the bag, several M&Ms landed on the floor. Puzzled, I looked at the bag and noticed a small hole in the bottom. I felt my stomach begin to turn. I threw the whole M&M bag in the trash.

The last few mornings, I’ve woken up and approached the cabinet with trepidation. We have numerous small bags of candy that I think came from the gift basket for my brother’s wedding last summer, and every morning or night I keep finding little chewed-out holes in them and little pieces of plastic bag strewn about the cabinet. The mystery visitor also got into a bag of bagel chips, a box of cream of wheat, and, sometime last night, a packet of hot chocolate. A few nights ago I set up glue traps right next to the food, but they’re not helping. In the morning I find the traps untouched and more evidence of mousery.

As morning arrived today, I kept dreaming about mice in the cabinet. I dreamed that I went to the cabinet and saw them, little and gray. I woke up anxious, went to the cabinet, and saw the torn hot chocolate packet and some loose chocolate powder on the shelf. I felt ill.

I want to find and trap the damn thing. As I said, it’s really starting to freak me out. I think in part it’s because I don’t actually see the mouse. It’s invisible, which just makes it more mysterious and freaky. AND IT’S GETTING INTO OUR FOOD.

This morning I finally looked at the base of the cabinet (it’s a floor-length cabinet built into the wall) and saw a small hole. That could be where it’s coming from. So I put a glue trap right in front of the hole. It better work. If it doesn’t, I really don’t know what I’m going to do.

Did any of you see last night’s Daily Show? Jon Stewart did an amazing inteview (the link is a video clip) with Stephen Hayes, author of a new hagiography of Dick Cheney. Minutes earlier, Stewart had shown a clip of Dick Cheney saying in 1994 that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would be a mistake, because it would result in chaos. In the subsequent interview, Stewart nailed Hayes to the wall. In a terrific moment, Hayes denied that the Bush administration had ever characterized war dissenters as traitors; the audience responded with a huge groan of disbelief, as if it were collectively yelling, “Come on!”

There were other moments where Stewart voiced the anger so many of us have felt toward neocons in the past six years.

It was great, and it shows once again why I love Jon Stewart.

I have my second letter to the New York Times in Saturday’s paper.

Yesterday was the 25th birthday of the compact disc.

I got my first CD player for my bar mitzvah in March 1987. It was part of an enormous stereo system that included two tape decks and a turntable, and it all fit into a wooden case on wheels with a glass door.

I’m not sure which CD is the first I ever owned. It was either Genesis, Invisible Touch, Bon Jovi, Bon Jovi, or The Bangles, Different Light.

Wow, that last disc was a good one. Lately I’ve been moving my CD collection from jewel cases into slim CD sleeves, and I can’t find it anywhere. Boo.

Can anyone recommend a good gay or gay-friendly doctor in Manhattan? I’ve realized I don’t have a regular doctor anymore since I switched jobs, and it would be good to have one.

I’ve always liked this poem by Phillip Lopate. I find it darkly amusing.

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.

It appears in Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

This looks awesome. You can now explore the heavens with Google Earth – stars, galaxies, constellations. I can’t wait to try it out.

This is going to be disorganized and not very well written.

I hate it when I use this place as my personal therapy session. I’ve already got a therapist. And this place isn’t private. This is a place where I put myself forward to the public.

(Shades of Josh Lyman. “This is a place where solemn work is done. This is a place… this is a place… let me say this… this is not a place where one’s personal things… where things among people… this is not a place… let’s… This is a place where work is done and nothing else.”)

I remember something Mike wrote when I first quit blogging a few years ago. “I’m sad that you never really considered devoting most of your blogging energy to the less emotional aspects of your life, choosing instead to live a very big chunk of your life out in the open. It made for some very compelling reading… and it wore you down in little more than a year.”

I’ve tried hard to avoid doing that since I resumed blogging. But sometimes it slips through. Sometimes I tend to feel things… intensely. I can be oversensitive. Not all the time, but it still happens.

I realized something about myself a while back. I used to think I hated competition. I told myself I wasn’t competitive. But what I realized is, I am competitive. I’m very competitive. I just don’t like having to compete. It’s much easier to feel jealousy or envy instead of actually doing what it takes to compete. In theory I’m against competition, because I think you should focus on yourself instead of on other people, and competition brings up conflict, and I hate conflict. And yet, I focus a lot on other people’s accomplishments in comparison to my own and wind up seething with resentment inside – sometimes subconsciously, so I don’t even realize I’m doing it. So basically, I hate being competitive, yet I can’t help but be competitive.

There are certain blogs I don’t read anymore because they stir up lots of negative feelings in me when I read them, mostly envy. Part of this comes from the fact that I’ve been blogging for such a long time that I resent people who’ve been blogging for much shorter periods of time and are much more popular. Which I know is totally stupid. But they don’t have to be newish upstarts – they can be older bloggers, too. Regardless — I think to myself, what have they got that I haven’t got? And the answer is, drive, or more writing talent, or more focus, or something inherently appealing or attractive about their personality.

I am such a competitive person. I get envious *so* easily.

Sometimes I wish I could get back to that place where I wrote about things in a compelling manner. But too many people know about this site now, which inhibits me.

I’ve been bummed lately in general. Part of it is this dark and gloomy weather that’s hung over New York City and Newark the last few days. Part of it is that Matt’s been really busy and frazzled with getting things set for the new students to move into our building and hasn’t been around that much. Part of it is that I’m worried about us maybe having to move, and about the dent that’s going to put in my finances.

Sunday was one of the worst weekend days I’d had in a long time – complete and utter boredom and loneliness and gloomy weather, resentment over lost or deteriorated friendships, self-flagellation for not being as social as I should be, self-doubt.

I don’t know why I am the way I am. Years of therapy have not gotten rid of it.

David Foster Wallace is the guest editor of the 2007 edition of the Best American Essays. The book won’t be published until October, but here’s Wallace’s introduction to the volume. It’s vintage Wallace. (Here’s the table of contents.)

I was going to quote an excerpt from his intro, but I couldn’t find one that would make any sense out of context. You’ll just have to read the whole thing.

Oh, hell. Here’s an excerpt. But it still doesn’t capture the full tone of his piece, because the essay isn’t really about politics. Although it does encompass it.

Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place — not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the passage of the Military Commissions Act — if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. ‘We’ meaning as a polity and culture. The premise does not entail specific blame — or rather the problems here are too entangled and systemic for good old-fashioned finger-pointing. It is, for one example, simplistic and wrong to blame the for-profit media for somehow failing to make clear to us the moral and practical hazards of trashing the Geneva Conventions. The for-profit media is highly attuned to what we want and the amount of detail we’ll sit still for. And a ninety-second news piece on the question of whether and how the Geneva Conventions ought to apply in an era of asymmetrical warfare is not going to explain anything; the relevant questions are too numerous and complicated, too fraught with contexts in everything from civil law and military history to ethics and game theory. One could spend a hard month just learning the history of the Conventions’ translation into actual codes of conduct for the U.S. military . . . and that’s not counting the dramatic changes in those codes since 2002, or the question of just what new practices violate (or don’t) just which Geneva provisions, and according to whom. Or let’s not even mention the amount of research, background, cross-checking, corroboration, and rhetorical parsing required to understand the cataclysm of Iraq, the collapse of congressional oversight, the ideology of neoconservatism, the legal status of presidential signing statements, the political marriage of evangelical Protestantism and corporatist laissez-faire . . . There’s no way. You’d simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this — about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.’

Followed, in pure Wallaceian fashion, by a footnote.

I’ve been wondering lately whether I should end therapy. I probably won’t do it, but I do think about it.

I’ve been with my therapist for almost seven years now. I had my first appointment with her in November 2000. She’s not even my first therapist – I’ve been in therapy on and off since I was in college. But she’s by far been the most beneficial. I have the best rapport with her and I’ve learned a lot with her help.

I’ve thought about ending therapy from time to time. This most recent musing came about because I was thinking of ways to save money if Matt and I have to move, and getting rid of that weekly expense would be a big way to save.

But also – sometimes I feel like I get diminishing returns from therapy. By this point, I know what my issues are. I know why I am the way I am, why I do what I do, why I think the way I think.

My biggest issue is one that therapy so far hasn’t been able to help me with: an existential malaise. The big picture. I’m not living my purpose. This has dogged me for years. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in college, didn’t know what I wanted to do after college, in law school, after law school, now. Throughout my years of therapy it’s the one thing I’ve never been able to solve. I’ve taken a couple of writing courses (screenwriting and fiction writing), I’ve written a couple of newspaper letters, I’ve written a piece for the Blade, I’ve joined a chorus – but none of this lets me avoid going to a job every day.

The thing I ask myself is: what would I do if I didn’t have to go to a job every day? What would I do if I were set for life? And that’s a question therapy can’t seem to help me with. It’s a question that requires *action.* And therapy has never been good at helping me translate understanding into action.

Therapy has been very good for certain things. My therapist is someone who I always know is going to be on my side, unconditionally. I can talk to her about the most embarrassing, stupidest things and know I won’t be judged. I can vent to her to my heart’s content. I can be totally selfish around her, because it’s the one place where it’s all about me me me and I don’t have to feel guilty about being the center of attention.

Also, I’d be afraid of not having her to talk to anymore. She’s a safety valve that helps me keep my sanity in case I need it. I don’t know if I can trust anyone else to listen to my problems without rolling their eyes at me, visibly or otherwise.

So for now I’ll keep going to therapy. But I do wonder sometimes.

I recently got notalgic for an old videogame and decided to play it for the first time in years: Day of the Tentacle. It’s one of the most brilliant adventure games ever.

And then I found this speed-run of the game on YouTube.

If you’ve never played the game before or it’s been a long time, you might be confused. And, at the very least, spoiled.

The other day I blogged about Best American Essays 2007, which is edited by David Foster Wallace. (Wallace chose them from a larger list that was provided to him.) I’ve done a little web research, and I’ve compiled a list of the pieces in the book that you can already read for free online. Enjoy.

Mark Danner, Iraq: The War of the Imagination

Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw

Louis Menand, Name That Tone

Cynthia Ozick, Out from Xanadu (under a different name)

Richard Rodriguez, Disappointment

Elaine Scarry, Rules of Engagement

Roger Scruton. A Carnivore’s Credo (I think this is the same piece)

Peter Singer, What Should a Billionaire Give — and What Should You?

Edward O. Wilson, Apocalypse Now

I’ve dug up the old volumes of my diary. I’ve got tons of them.

I began keeping a diary a few days after my thirteenth birthday. I’d recently read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, and it inspired me to start one of my own. I told my parents that I wanted a diary for my birthday, and they got me one from a custom crafts store – the cover painted glossy white and stippled with small painted blue stars and a yellow moon, with the words “Jeff’s Midnight Confessions” written on it.

Here’s the first entry I ever wrote. I must point out that (1) one of my recent Hanukkah presents had been a word-a-day calendar and (2) I was a huge fan of “Days of our Lives.”

* * * * * * *

Friday, Jan. 2, 1987

Hello, Diary. This is my first entry. It’s about 4:30 pm and it’s during vacation. I’m in the middle of writing my stupid essay for Mrs. Podesta. I wish I didn’t have any homework over vacation!

Last night for Chanukah (7th night) I didn’t open anything, but on New Year’s Eve I got the Talisman Adventure Set. Now I have the complete Talisman collection!

On DOOL today, they found out that Emma’s death was homicidal. Also, Kayla discovered that Steve used to spy on her for Victor and they broke up. Sometimes I hate Victor! Also, Roman helped a skier with a broken leg. An ambulance took her to a hospital. It doesn’t seem important, but knowing DAYS, I know it’ll lead to something.

I have to get back to my dumb essay. And, just for the record, I like Lara C_________. Hopefully, nobody will look inside of here. Maybe I’ll write later. Bye! Oh, by the way, we didn’t maffick very loudly on New Year’s Eve.

Now it’s 5:00 pm. I’m sleeping at Larry’s house tonight, and we’re going to the museum tomorrow, so I can’t write in you tonight. Bye for today!

P.S. I didn’t set my tocsin this morning since there was no school today.

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Oh, to be thirteen again. Except not really.

Why is it always the Republican senators who get arrested for trying to find sex in men’s rooms?

Not only did Alberto Gonzales suck as Attorney General – the man doesn’t even know how to write.

Oh, this is rich.

As Talking Points Memo says in response, “What are the odds of a piece on airport restroom trysts appearing below a picture of Larry Craig in a conservative group’s newsletter, not to mention the reference to Craigslist?”

Incidentally, the Idaho Values Alliance is calling for Craig to resign.

Hmm… y’know, I’m thinking, maybe Bush could kill two birds with one stone.

Why not just go ahead and nominate Larry Craig for Attorney General?

(Sorry if you were drinking any liquids while reading that.)

Right now I’m reading Consider the Lobster, a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace. (I’ve gotten back onto a Wallace kick recently.) The first essay in the book is “Big Red Son,” an informal disquisition on the (heterosexual) U.S. porn industry that takes as its launching point a description of Wallce’s experience attending the Annual Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. The piece first appeared in Premiere. It’s cynical and hilarious and saddening all at the same time. Though Wallace is a master postmodernish ironist, his meta-ironic point is usually that all this irony is killing our ability to deal with real human emotion. That comes through in this essay.

Two passages stood out for me. One:

Volunteer as a judge for the AVN Awards and spend 1.4 years gazing without rest at the latest in adult video. We guarantee that you will never thereafter want to see, hear, engage in, or even think about human sexuality ever again. Trust us on this. All five marginal (and male) print journalists assigned to cover the 1998 AVN Awards concur: Even just watching the dozen or so “big” or “high-profile” adult releases of the past year… fried everyone’s glandular circuitboard. By the end of the Awards weekend, none of us were even having normal biological first-thing-in-the-morning or jouncy-bus-ride-between-hotels erections; and when approached even innocently by members of the opposite sex, we all now recoiled as from a hot flame (which made our party a kind of strange and challenging breakfast gig, according to our Sunday-AM waitress).

The second passage is too long to quote, but it makes the point that the only moments of real humanity in porn films appear when porn actors’ faces accidentally drop their masks to reveal the person underneath, and that this happens rarely.

The essay didn’t touch on gay porn at all — it seemed largely to be about female porn actresses and their exploitation — and for that reason, I felt disconnected from it. Still, the essay was so long (nearly 50 pages) and so relentless in its focus on the tawdriness and extreme tackiness of everyone involved in porn that a third of the way through the essay I felt a strong desire to wash my brain out. I was happy when it was over.

I went to Jere’s birthday gathering last night at Marie’s Crisis. (It’s one of David’s favorite places in New York, but alas, he lives in Missouri.) I had the pleasure of finally meeting Tim, who moved to New York a year ago with his boyfriend and lives in a far-off land called Bushwick.

We all stood in a small clump near the bar and away from the piano, talking and listening to the piano player tinkle the out-of-tune ivories and the group around the piano sing along. One of Jere’s friends said it was his first time at Marie’s Crisis in 10 years and that as far as he could tell, nothing had changed at all, including the guy behind the piano.

It was good to get out and do something social. I’ve been feeling really bleah lately, but I was cheered up by being around a group of nice guys.

At one point, Tim remarked to me that my blog has been kind of angsty lately. I laughed and admitted that, yeah, that was probably the case, and I explained that I’ve been caught up lately (again) in trying to find my purpose in life. Of course, while I was (mercifully briefly) talking about this, I realized that the piano player was playing, and the people gathered around the piano were singing, “Purpose” from Avenue Q.

Digression: I can barely play the piano at all, so I shouldn’t talk, but can I just say how much I hate it when a piano player plays the wrong backup chords to a song being sung? Well, it’s not that I hate it, because I have sympathy for the accompanist as he tries to keep up, and again, I’m one to talk. It’s that my ears hate it. It drives me nuts.

Earlier this week, I’d decided that I’d hit on the solution to all my problems: I should become a freelance writer in my spare time, and eventually work my way up to things like the New Yorker and Harper’s and things like that. But after looking at various websites and books about how to be a freelance writer, I’ve come away with a nauseating impression of the whole thing. I get the impression that most freelance writing occurs for publications like Woman’s Day or Pet Fancy and so forth and consists of very practical-oriented and consumer-oriented articles. Numbered lists and so forth. And my admittedly unscientific perusal leads me to believe that most freelancers are women and that they love being able to write for Woman’s Day or women’s health magazines or parenting or pregnancy or cooking magazines.

Picture me sticking my finger down my throat and making a gagging sound. (If you could picture a sound.)

My impression of freelance writing might be completely wrong. But if it’s accurate, it’s totally not the kind of writing I want to do – completely disposable stuff. I’m interested in politics and culture and ideas, in which case I should try to write for publications that publish that kind of thing.

Instead of publications that publish Eighteen Practical Ways to Get Along Better With Your Pet!

Senator John Warner of Virginia will announce tomorrow whether he will retire after his current term, and he’ll do so at my beautiful alma mater.

I guess there are only so many variations on a theme, which really hits home after you’ve looked at a few dozen political cartoons about the Larry Craig scandal.

I need help, badly. I’ve had the theme song to Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple In All The World stuck in my head for the past two days. Every time I watch an episode, the music lodges itself in my brain and I can’t get it out. It’s worst when I first wake up in the morning.

And since I can’t get it out of my head I’m going to subject all of you to it as well. It’s about 45 seconds into this clip.

Oh, thank you, Internet. Someone has put together a mashup of Larry Craig’s “I am not gay” speech and “If You Were Gay” from Avenue Q.

[via AfterElton]

Senator Craig will resign tomorrow. My feelings about this scandal have wavered over the past couple of days. As a gay man, I feel a mixture of anger and pity for Craig right now (and pity is not the same as feeling sorry for him). He’s a hypocrite with internal-homophobic issues.

But, as a gay man, I also feel repulsed at how quickly this is happening – four days between the revelations and the decision to resign. Meanwhile, Senator David Vitter cheats on his wife by fucking hookers and nothing happens to him. Craig is ever so quickly being tossed aside or swept under the rug or whatever disposal-related metaphor you’d like to use. The Republican Party is a big Thanksgiving dinner where nobody wants to talk about Gay Cousin Larry. Instead it’s hey how ’bout them Packers, please pass the cranberries, look at all our normal grandchildren!

Craig will resign, Governor Otter (what an Idaho-esque sounding political name) will appoint his replacement, and Craig will sink cleanly below the surface, leaving not a ripple in the Republican consciousness. The Party can remain in denial, ignore its issues and go on pretending that gay people are The Other.

Sickening.