At some point, Matt and I will probably move in together. Until then, I need to somehow solve the little hassles inherent in renting my own apartment while spending most of my time in a different one.

My morning routine lately is that I wake up at Matt’s place in Manhattan, throw on whatever clothes I was wearing the night before, walk to the PATH train, take the PATH to my stop in Jersey City, walk home, bring in yesterday’s mail, shower and change for work, leave my apartment with my morning paper, walk back to the PATH, and then take the PATH to Newark for work. It takes at least an hour and a half, door to door. It’s too inefficient.

A couple of factors cause difficulty. One is that I need to stop at home at least once a day, or else my mail and my newspapers will pile up. The other is that if I stay over at Matt’s place, in order to go directly to work the next morning I need to have some work clothes to change into; it won’t do to wear the same clothes to work, day after day. But I don’t have enough work clothes that I can leave some at Matt’s place and some at my place. Plus I need something to put on when I get to Matt’s place in the evening.

Also, I use an electric toothbrush. If I used a regular toothbrush, there’d be no problem — I could own a couple, and keep one in my apartment (where I do occasionally spend the night) and one at Matt’s place. But it would be expensive to own two electric toothbrushes and a hassle to carry one around with me all day.

Maybe it’s not easily solvable — maybe two apartments just requires twice as much stuff. I guess I need to buy more clothes. But there’s still the issue of the mail and the daily newspaper.

How do other people deal with this?

For more evidence that the red-state/blue-state divide is not as stark as we think, here’s a national map of the 2004 election results that takes into account the winner of each county in the nation, the percentage of victory in each of those counties, and the population of each county. Looking at this map, it’s easier to see the 51%-48% popular-vote divide.

[more here]

There’s just one little request I have. If it’s not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?

I mean, look at it this way. (If you don’t mind, that is.) It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I’m sure they are — don’t involve any direct imposition on you. We don’t want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

We on my side of the great divide don’t, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don’t claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree? …

Conservatives shouldn’t assert the prerogatives of victory and then claim the compensations of defeat as well. You can’t oppress us and simultaneously complain that we are oppressing you.

— Michael Kinsley in the L.A. Times