I hate to pick on a candidate’s supporters when that candidate is down. But this really irks me.

[…], a Clinton volunteer who works at a Center City law firm, says many gay men support her “because she’s definitely a diva, which is like a goddess to us… Every time you knock her down, she gets back up and fights harder. She’s strong, powerful, smart and poised, with a sophisticated attitude.”

I knew this was one reason so many gay men supported Clinton. We’re a sucker for put-upon middle-aged women. This is not by any means true for all of her gay supporters; the gay bloggers I know who support her have intelligent reasons for doing so. But it’s true for quite a few. And supporting her for that reason is as stupid as supporting her just because she’s a woman.

For some reason what comes to mind when I read the above comment is some airhead Chelsea queen sitting at the now-defunct Big Cup, leafing through the latest issue of HX and looking at the pictures because it would take too much brain power to actually read it.

I like this essay about taking peeks at other people’s books on the subway:

On the subway, sometimes the person with the book is sitting close enough, and the typeface is large enough, that you can peer onto the very page. At home, reading over someone’s shoulder merely constitutes annoying behavior; doing it to a stranger on the subway feels close to illegal, or at least illicit. To read a page, a paragraph, a line from someone else’s book is to bypass the common curiosity about what might be on a stranger’s mind; it’s to know with great certainty; it’s to appropriate the language floating around in his or her thoughts. Regardless of how banal the book, those stolen words practically shimmer with intrigue.

Sometimes I try to surreptitiously glance over and see what the person next to me is reading. I try to read the author and title at the top of the page. I love getting little windows into random people.

Playing around on Google Maps, I found the apartment building in Tokyo where my family lived when I was in high school: the Homat Sun, in the neighborhood of Roppongi. (My dad worked for his company’s Tokyo branch for three years.)

You can see the great roof garden where my parents used to take the dog when she needed a bath.

And here’s my high school, the American School in Japan, in Chofu, a Tokyo suburb.

It was a long trip to and from school every day — 75 minutes each way. I had to take four different subway/train lines. Here’s the route I would take. (Home is east, school is west.)