vacation week at the new yorker zoology fact-checking desk

may 12, 2008, p. 59:

In his living room, Myhrvold has a life-size T. rex skeleton, surrounded by all manner of other dinosaur artifacts. One of those is a cast of a nest of oviraptor eggs, each the size of an eggplant. You'd think a bird that big would have one egg, or maybe two. That's the general rule: the larger the animal, the lower the fecundity. But it didn't. For Myhrvold, it was one of the many ways in which dinosaurs could teach us about ourselves. "You know how many eggs were in that nest?" Myhrvold asked. "Thirty-two."

and you know how many birds are in a room with thirty-two ovulating oviraptors? none, because oviraptors are reptiles, like just about all the other freaking dinosaurs, and they were relatively small dinosaurs in their time and environment, and larger animals have lower fecundity because they have longer gestation periods, but reptiles and other animals that lay eggs don't really have to worry about that (on average, an ostrich—an actual bird that is actually large—lays just over one egg a week, and each egg takes about forty days to hatch, so at any given moment during breeding season there might be five or six eggs from one bird in any nest [but ostriches share nests, so there would probably be more like twenty or thirty eggs total in any one nest, and there might be as many as sixty]), and reptiles tend to lay eggs in large clutches rather than one or two at a time, although most paleontologists are pretty sure that oviraptors, being bird-like, but not birds, formed and laid two eggs at a time and laid multiple pairs sequentially in a single nest, and yes, i am furrowing my nerdy brow at malcolm gladwell, and it pains me greatly, but, damn it, you can't start an article talking about a quantum physicist who goes on dinosaur hunts and get my heart all in an uproar and then do something like this and expect to just get away with it, especially not when i've waited five bloody months for you to do it, gladwell, you weenie. you could have left out this entire paragraph and made your point just as well, if not better, and i wouldn't want to swat you with a rolled-up magazine. sometimes you get so greedy for a higher-resonance close that i think i'll have to start calling you mcfuzz.

she was a bird, by the way. ask your myhrvold about that.


postscript, may 8, 1:59 PM: i had to distance myself from this article for an hour or so, to regain my objectivity, but i have come back and finished it, and it, you know, it's fine. it's a very good point, really, that people have a hard time distinguishing scientific innovation from artistic creation, and they should be distinguished: scientific advancement builds on preexisting knowledge, and in that sense every invention is a collaboration. but while artists typically have myriad influences, imagination can function in a near-vacuum. so while it might be art for someone who's never seen a telephone to think, "wouldn't it be neat if there were some kind of machine that allowed me to talk to someone far away," that visionary won't get anywhere without the aid of some other person, or several people, who knows how sounds and machines work, and there is decidedly less "art" in the construction. i think the degree of genius in either case is about equal, though (i know that i, regardless of my era or company, would never, over the course of an entire lifetime, either think up a telephone or manage to build one from its unassembled parts), and if someone has a brilliant idea independently, it shouldn't be considered any less brilliant if it turns out someone else had it, too. this is the problem with equating all invention with art: the originality factor, which doesn't apply equally in both realms, can get in the way of people's recognition of truly impressive accomplishments. it's also the problem with patents; if you come up with an idea and patent it just for the sake of planting a flag, of saying "i made this" even when you haven't actually made anything, and someone else later comes up with the same idea and has the support and means to take it further than you have, or has already gone further, do you really deserve more credit? surely you don't deserve sole credit, if you aren't capable of turning your idea into a practical reality without the knowledge and assistance of others. if you and some other person independently come up with the same idea before anyone has built anything, does either of you deserve more credit than the other? there's often so much emphasis on timing, but that really isn't relevant at all when it comes to gauging the merit of the notion or relative input into an invention. and yet we are taught that every new thing has one source, that it was one person sitting under a tree or on a hill or in a bathtub who all alone saw the answer that no one else could see. i wish we could be more communal. i know i always come back to the ants, but the truth is they're tops when it comes to societal paradigms. which ant decided to build a hill? who the hell cares? now all the ants have hills,* and it's awesome. people, you know, they're sort of silly animals. some of them even think that anything with feathers that lays eggs must be a bird. but they can't all be natural scientists; some of them have to be writers, and that's good, too. it would be better if they devoted more than one column out of twenty-four to their very good point, but i have a feeling that there are a lot more pages where these came from.



* i know that not all ants live in hills, but i had to wrap this thing up. it isn't like i don't know how writers fall into these traps.

joon can read!

paperback; © 2007 by melville house publishing

i'm poor, and libraries have strange, inconvenient hours, so sometimes i read books in sporadic one-hour installments during trips to the union square barnes & noble. the barnes & noble has four floors. on the second or third floor, there's a café with a big sign at its entrance prohibiting patrons from bringing in food from outside vendors, but on the fourth floor, where the fiction is, i can sit on the floor or in a folding chair in the section where readings are held and eat anything i want. that’s not true; technically, i'm not allowed to eat in these places, but no one has ever stopped me. once i brought in a sandwich and a beer and sat on the small stage in the front of the room, because i liked the way the light was coming in through the window over it. it’s as if by acting with enough confidence and nonchalance, i can persuade the people around me that i know more about the rules than they do. but all i know is that sometimes, even though there are people everywhere who might object to it, i want to be the way i would be if no one else were around.

is that more? or is the rule that i should be trying to act as if other people are around even when i'm alone? when i act like no one can see me, does it become self-fulfilling?

anyway, i have decided that this is the only way to read this book—in erratic and unannounced bursts, alone in a place that is not my home, in flagrant and yet utterly unchecked violation of the rules of social conduct, surrounded by strangers who are having hushed and incredibly serious conversations about things that strike me as wholly meaningless. really, i think it’s the only way to understand this book.

in eeeee eee eeee’s two hundred or so pages, characters drift in and out, with little or no fuss made over their entrances or exits. some of them have extensive back stories; some of them seem to have no history whatsoever. some of them play main roles for a chapter or two, dominating the entire plot, and then vanish and are never mentioned again. some of them are children. some of them are bears. some of them are so unspeakably isolated and untethered that they can’t visualize their own thoughts or desires clearly enough in their own minds to devote an action to them and instead wander numbly from one stationary object to another, looking, turning away, seeing nothing, responding to nothing. this is a lot like the reading room of a popular manhattan book store, and every public space is a microcosm representative of the broader, surrounding population. so eeeee eee eeee is about twenty-something-year-old pizza-deliverymen who have ironic and seemingly purposeless conversations with their friends, and it is about dolphins who live in an underground city and sometimes bludgeon celebrities, and it is about hamsters trying to explain the underground city to strangers in a park. but through these things, through their randomness and disconnectedness and the flatness with which the characters in the novel receive them, it becomes a spot-on telling of the state of society. it may be my generation's catcher in the rye.

we think we’re bored, but maybe we aren’t, and either way we aren’t sure how to fix it. we try things that don’t work, but we think they should have worked, so we don’t admit that they didn’t; then we are bored and depressed, and we can’t admit that either. we don’t know what to say instead, and we aren’t sure who to talk to, but we’re afraid to stop talking. sometimes we do terrible things and don’t know why; we regret them, we cry about them, and we do them again. sometimes the only way you can think of to tell your sister that you love her and you’re lonely and you want to be her friend is to sit on her head. sometimes people die and no one talks about it at all, and it feels incredibly strange, to know that someone has died and no one is talking about it, and you want to ask everyone why they aren’t talking about it, but you know that you will never ask and that no one will ever explain it, and it makes you desperate. it makes you so desperate that you cover a moose’s head with a blanket and punch it in the face, and when it says, “thank you,” you want to give it a cookie and kill it and drown, you love it and envy it so much.

eeeee eee eeee is about an invisible person in the center of a crowd of millions of people listening to one person nearby saying, “i’m so tired today. every time i try to think about something, i forget and think about something else,” and wondering, “am i tired? is that what’s wrong?” and writing, “i’m so tired today,” and knowing it isn’t the answer, and thinking about someone who isn't there, and moving to a different seat. that person disappears for two weeks and then comes back, and no one mentions it. someone stands on a chair and throws a bottle, and someone starts to cry, and other people look up and think, “i wonder if that would make me happy,” and then go back to their books.

you, all alone in the corner, with the untied sneaker and the hat hair—this book made me want to offer you my sandwich. i wanted to give you a hug. but you never looked up.

a note to my admirers

i have had enough of this responsible-adult-with-a-full-time-job nonsense. it is not benefiting me either financially or psychologically, and so i can see no point in carrying on with it. i should like very much to instead become a lady of leisure and/or letters, and i will happily accept donations enabling such a transition. if you have an opening for a kept woman and/or a well-positioned apartment* in which to keep a woman, please consider me as an applicant. i am an excellent cook and tend to smell nice, and when i laugh at your attempted witticisms it will be with thoroughly convincing sincerity. i'm not prone to clinginess; in fact, if you never stop by at all, i won't complain. i don't even care for jewelry, really, so you'll save a bit there. you will have to be kind to my cat. that is not a euphemism.

invitation not extended to: men who have slept with or plan to sleep with my sister, anyone who has followed me onto or off of a subway train, people who think nancy franklin is funny, dennis miller.


* minimum requirements: roof access or terrace, oven, dependable hot water, at least one window.

as long as it stays crunchy in milk

the current democratic contest is officially ridiculous. i can't find any logic or consistency in voting patterns, except that college students *heart* charismatic rhetoric, especially from renegades and underdogs, and that steel magnolias really nailed that whole older-chicks-sticking-together thing. oh, my darling, errant nation; how you never surprise me.

anyway. i cheered and danced when i heard last night that hillary had won ohio (sorry, downstairs neighbors), even though i have been rather disappointed in her recent attackyness, because here's what i've been even more disappointed in: the annoyed swatting at her by obama supporters (including john kerry! holy knife in my heart, batman), and said supporters' inexplicable and desperate insistence that she withdraw from the race if her victories from tuesday on out were not landslide ones. last night's victories were not landslide ones, yet the difference in delegates between her and obama is now, what, 85? if obama wins every remaining delegate from now through june, it still won't be enough to get him to the number needed to guarantee the nomination. it seems to me as though everyone is viable. of course, the claims that hillary's presence is keeping the party from uniting under one candidate are not technically false, but claims that obama is doing democrats a similar disservice would be equally technically true. it's nonsense, though, to say that the current volley is splitting the party; the party was split at the outset--demographically--and its members are voting accordingly. this is the usefulness of demographic categories: people tend to make selections according to them. they also like to make assessments based on emotional judgments and post-snap-decision rationalizing. i think those are usually the worst things to base one's choice for president--or anything--on, but given the vague differences in many of hillary's and barack's political proposals and the immense differences in their presentations and demeanors, really, what chance was there of things turning out any other way? ordinarily, all of those demographic subsets are choosing between candidates who are thirty-second-spot equals--equally white, equally male, equally old and swaggering. we do not know what to do with all of this variety. it's like buying your corn flakes at a three-aisle bodega for an entire lifetime and then having that bodega be torn down and replaced with a super stop & shop. look at all that cereal! look at all of the ways that corn flakes can be so much like and yet so completely different from corn flakes! these ones have frosting! these ones have nuts! you could lose days of your life to it. i understand it, i do. but it's still ridiculous.

i am trying to objectively support what i believe is know-how and substance, but what the hell do i know. i could be rationalizing just as much as everyone else. i mean, i shop at a store that only has a quarter of an aisle's worth of cereal, three measly shelves, and i still can't get in and out in under fifteen minutes. i spent a full five the other day trying to decide between two versions of grape-nuts. i know that there is no difference between grape-nuts. but there is this brand and that brand, and they are very nearly the same price, and i'm not buying them both, so do i like this font or that font? do i want the box that says "i'm delicious!" or the box that says "i am cereal"? this is a poor example, because in the end i chose the box that said "cracklin' oat bran," but i think you all understand what i'm saying. just, you know, stop picking on each other. all that matters is that everyone has a wholesome breakfast.

i'm, um, i'm hungry.

broken-doll blogging

one day a girl began to feel that something was not right

"something is not right," she said, and for a moment things felt more right, because she had said that, and she wondered if she was mistaken. but she was not.

this girl had a brazen and improper heart which would dance and whoop at inopportune moments. the girl tried hard to muffle it, had tried even harder to retrain it, to break it of its egregiously bad habits, but it did as it pleased and shamed her in public whenever it wanted. the girl checked it now to make sure it wasn't dancing on a table or wearing a ridiculous hat, but it was in its cavity where it belonged, talking quietly to itself, and didn't look up. "that seems right," she thought, but she was still uncomfortable. she looked away and then back, quickly, to catch it. but it only drummed its fingers on a rib, innocent and bored. "that must be right," the girl thought, and looked for something else.

she checked her coat pocket to see if she had her keys. she checked her bag to make sure she had not dropped her wallet. she touched her fingertips to her earlobes and felt for an earring on each. she made sure she had remembered to put on clean socks and underwear, quickly and discreetly sniffed her left armpit. she checked her watch against the local time. all of these things were right.

she looked out the window and saw people moving about on the streets and sidewalks below her. it was daylight and it was supposed to be. the sky was not cloudy and nothing was falling from it. the girl could not see smoke or hear sirens, there was no shouting or crying. while she stood near the window she felt better, she felt that things were more right than they had been, and she sat back down. but as soon as she was in her chair she knew that something was not right after all.

she checked her accounts for overdue bills. she reviewed her calendar for missed appointments. she searched her desk and drawers for not-quite-empty food containers or coffee cups. all of these things were right. "i am forgetting something," she thought, and grew optimistic, but could not think of what she was forgetting, and so could not make it right. this cancelled out the optimism, which she immediately missed.

"i will retrace my steps," she said--she had heard of people having great success with such a method on various occasions--and set about it.

she walked down into the lobby of her office and out the door that she had gone in through, across the street and around the corner to the subway station she had come aboveground at, onto her train which took her back to her neighborhood. she walked from the train to her apartment, looking at the ground for things she might have dropped, listening for someone who might be calling for her to stop. she went through her building's front door, up the staircase, into her apartment, and still she felt that something was amiss, and still she could not say what it was.

"i will retrace my steps farther," she said, because she didn't know what else to do. she liked saying this, but she knew that not saying it was not what had not been right.

she went back outside and got into her car and drove to the last place she had lived in, but everything seemed right there. so she drove to the place she had lived in before that, and before that, and even before that, all the way back and back to a place she barely remembered, to the first place she'd ever been a person in. "there are only a few steps left," she thought, and was suddenly very nervous. but something was not right, and so she went on.

this first place had a porch in front, and on the porch was a small pruny woman rocking in a small creaky chair. "oh," the woman said as the girl stepped onto the porch, "it's you!"

"is it?" the girl asked.

the woman leaned forward, squinting, judging, and then sat back. "no," she said. "not really. something is not right."

the girl's heart rattled and flopped and banged a drum and waved a flag and made a general spectacle of itself, and the girl rushed both of her hands up to her chest and covered it, to keep the woman from noticing. "what?" she asked in what she hoped was a very calm voice. "what is not right?"

"well, that," the woman said, and pointed at the girl's hands. they both stared down at the place where the girl's small palms were spread and pressed over the rippling, thrumming, flashing patch below her collar bone. yes, the girl thought, yes, this is not right. but why is this not right?

"why is this not right?" she asked. her heart lit three red flares and launched them toward the porch, but the girl crossed both her arms in front of her, and the torches rebounded and sputtered under her sleeves.

"a girl lived here once, a long time ago. she lived upstairs, and i lived down," the woman said. she rose from her creaky chair, and her creaky legs tottered her slowly across the creaky porch. she stood very close to the girl and extended one creaky arm up to the girl's wrists, crossed tight and hard over her noisy, embarrassing heart. the old woman closed her crinkled fingers about the wrists and tugged, but the girl pulled her arms tighter to her and took a step back. "that is the wrong direction," she thought, but didn't undo her move. the woman lowered her hand to her side, frowned gently, shook her head. she made her creaky way back to her creaky chair and lowered herself into it.

"the girl i thought you were," she murmured, "would never have done that."

the girl let her eyes fall to the wall she had built to keep her heart in its place, her two mortified hands leaning hard against the clanging and whistling and jigging, the colored lights and firecrackers, her crazy clown of a heart covered in bells and spangles, its unicycle careering into the barricade over and over and over again. "of course," she said, and smiled, and was relieved, and had great hope, and lifted her hands up into the air over her head.

her heart, with all its momentum, accustomed to having to use a great deal of force, hit the wall once more and shot right through and out, and disappeared, leaving a trail of rainbow glitter in the sky like a pixie-powered jet, a wild, flying mardi gras party favor. the girl and the old woman watched it until it wasn't so much as a speck among the clouds.

the woman sat back in her chair, satisfied. "that's you, then, after all."

"it is," the girl answered, dropping her arms. "it is, and it's right."

and then she died.

psychiatry through the looking glass

from today's new york times:

Depressed teenagers who are not helped by antidepressants like Celexa or Prozac may improve if they switch drugs and receive a certain type of behavioral therapy, a review of studies found. . . . The study of adolescents, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, gives mental health professionals guidance about how to treat teenagers who do not improve using antidepressants, said David Brent, a psychiatrist at the Western Psychiatric Institute at the University of Pittsburgh.

of course they could use some behavioral therapy. this is breaking news for psychiatrists? it's news to the general public? in what up-is-down world do mental health professionals need more guidance in supporting mental health than they do in prescribing mood-altering drugs? i had assumed that the recent trend toward medicating distressed individuals instead of listening to and counseling them was simply one of the more unfortunate results of society's move toward convenience uber alles, a way to "treat" more patients with fewer resources in a shorter amount of time, a way for people with problems to solve them without putting in more than a minimum of effort. the laundry list of antidepressants and antianxiety medications seemed comparable to, and in step with, the explosion of diet aids on the market. but articles such as this one suggest that the profession as a whole has decided that modern pharmacology is preferable to traditional mental health care, and that's deeply disheartening.

when an adult chooses to take a pill rather than implement a lifestyle change, that's on the adult, and i have little sympathy for adults who are less than thrilled with the outcome of such a decision. but all adolescents are a little troubled, and they are troubled in ways that are likely unique in their lives up to that point. an angsty teenager is trying to cope with pressures and upheavals that are entirely new to him or her. what a seasoned adult might see as a small problem can be completely overwhelming to a thirteen-year-old, and when you, as a parent or a medical professional, tell that confused and depressed child that the best solution is medication, they will believe you. but it is not the best solution. the best solution is to help that child clarify the problems in question and come up with reasonable, repeatable ways of facing them. your role as a parent or counselor is to help prepare the child in your care for a lifetime of potentially rough sailing. the world is a tough place, and you are not doing your kids any favors by plying them with pills that will make them feel their sadness less. you have to help them resolve the sadness. you have to foster mental health.

this is not to say that there are no circumstances in which a pharmacological approach is appropriate; sometimes medication makes a significant difference, and sometimes it's truly necessary. but it should not be the go-to therapy, and it's a tragic commentary on the state of the profession that psychiatric professionals need to be reminded by the journal of the american medical association that there are other ways to work with depressed patients, particularly teenagers. so many adolescents just want to be seen and heard; when you stuff a prescription into their hands and tell them to call you in a month, you could be drastically compounding the problem. of course, it may not be all the fault of the professionals--now that prescription medications are not only common and acceptable but marketed directly to consumers in sunny, smiley commercials and magazine spreads, many parents march into doctors' offices and demand medication for their children. but those doctors need to take more control of the situation, because the parents' demands are not the priority. the focus needs to be on the patient, and a doctor's first step should always be to listen--carefully--to the patient's complaint. sometimes that complaint will call for medical intervention. sometimes listening might be enough.

teenagers don't need to be chemically pacified. the period is difficult for everyone, but by attempting to sedate our children through it, we're nearly guaranteeing that every day of their lives beyond their teens will be equally difficult, because we won't be helping them develop the inner resources required to overcome difficult circumstances. this used to be, by definition, the role of counselors and mentors. psychiatric medications should be adjunct therapies, not mainstays. turning to drugs, licit or otherwise, in an attempt to assuage emotional problems used to be viewed as a textbook negative; now people act as if it's the only dependable solution. and by setting the stage for that mindset early in a person's life, you make it all the more likely that that teenager taking antidepressants to get through a bumpy patch will grow up into an adult who takes antidepressants to get through the work week. great news for eli lilly, maybe, but it seems a mimsy sort of progress to me.

lit-dork girly crush of the week

i was sure it would be susan jacoby, who spoke tonight at the 82nd street barnes & noble about her new book, the age of american unreason, but it turns out that susan thinks i'm an exceptional outlier for being simultaneously reasonably intelligent, not addicted to an electronic messaging gadget, and under thirty, and that vexes me. so instead i'm giving in to my long-burgeoning infatuation with new yorker writer lizzie widdicombe, who wrote a nearly seven-hundred-word "talk of the town" piece on six-word memoirs for this week's issue. in support of the movement, or simply to challenge herself, she wrote the entire segment in six-word sentences. i know, i know, it's so precious . . . but it's so precious! i like her generally, actually. you can just tell she'd be so much fun to listen to wait wait . . . don't tell me! and make "day of the dead" dioramas with. not like susan, who would only snort at me for thinking that maybe my cousin really is promoting intellectual thought when he plays episodes of numb3rs for his high school math students. *sigh*

you regulars will know (and quite possibly lament) that i am not a great crafter of brief sentences. i take my words the way i take my colors: all of them, all at once. but the six-word memoir intrigues me. it reminds me of the habit an ex-roommate and i had of pointing out how unintentionally perfect some of the things our friends said would be as titles of their biographies. sample titles include the door is locked, but the window is open, if i knew where it was, i'd have it, you're breathing on my muffin, and in heaven, the buses play galaxie 500. none of these has six words.

but that one did. and i think that in a world where the goal was to summarize your experience in six words, those would be my six.

tuesday is super

my apologies for the blog coma, kids; think of it as my token contribution to the writers' strike. but i'm alive and reasonably well (not injured or afflicted by flu or other ailments, warm and sleeping through the night, yadda yadda), and i'm rooting for hillary. if you haven't done so, go out and vote, already. it actually matters this year, a lot, and who knows when that'll happen again. in fact, this year the primary election may have more influence over the fate of the country over the next several years than the presidential election. you count! so be counted.

yes, i watched bush's final (FINAL!) state of the union address. yes, i was underwhelmed, but no more so than usual. yes, i found the speaker to be self-righteous and out of touch and in endless search of applause and approval, but no more so than usual. and i was not surprised at the turn in public commentary following the speech. bush, lame as lame can be and out of favor with everyone except maybe his mom, is no longer someone to pay attention to, and all around this great nation pundits and average citizens alike have shaken their heads and blinked awake from the dream, like jennifer connelly rising up and giving david bowie the linguistic finger in the final scenes of labyrinth. "earmarks? terror? what about the human-animal hybrids and the switchgrass? no, you know what, forget it--you have no power over me."

and yet, i am still disappointed, that it took so long and that there is no sign that the masses will withstand similarly hypnotic antispeeches in the future. here is today's guest speaker, h. l. mencken, with a few words on the strange thrall in which politicians seem to hold their prey--er, public:

It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicality. . . . When [the president] got upon his legs in those days he seems to have gone into a sort of trance, with all the peculiar illusions and delusions that belong to a pedagogue gone mashugga. He heard words giving three cheers; he saw them race across a blackboard like Marxians pursued by the Polizei; he felt them rush up and kiss him. The result was the grand series of moral, political, sociological and theological maxims which now lodges imperishably in the cultural heritage of the American people . . . . The important thing is not that a public orator should have uttered such vaporous and preposterous phrases, but that they should have been gravely received, for weary years, by a whole race of men, some of them intelligent. Here is a matter that deserves the sober inquiry of competent psychologists.

he's talking about woodrow wilson, but the message can certainly be applied universally. people are all politicians, but some more and some less, and they will all tell you the thing they think you ought to hear instead of the thing that is true, but some more and some less. we'll get the liars and fools until we decide that what we really want to hear are straight and sensible facts. i don't want to be cheered up by my president, i don't want to be coddled or played. and change, yes, yes, we all want change, we want it by the busload, but "change" could be anything. "change" could mean that all interstate highways will now be paved with yellow brick. "change" could mean that everyone making less than $100,000 a year will be paid in pennies and nickels. i've no use for the vague and the starry-eyed. the people like big, baseless promises, they like charisma and grandiosity, they like being told that they can have all the social and civil services they need and enjoy with no money down, but the people . . . well, we've seen where their fickle, passionate wisdom can get us. silly rabbits.

here are a few of the things i've heard people say while discussing their preference in presidential nominees:

"i'm voting for obama, because the gospels say that women shouldn't be in positions, you know, that women shouldn't have a lot of power, so if hillary clinton were president, that wouldn't be right."

"all i want in a president is someone who's righteous, and it seems like obama will bring that."

"obama's really inspiring, and right now the country needs to be inspired." (doesn't it need to be inspired to do something more than be inspired, though? telling me to have hope is not a reassurance that my hopes will be fulfilled, and telling me that partisanship is bad will not change the day-to-day functioning of congress, the media, or american towns and cities. it really won't. i've been listening and listening and listening, and i know who obama is, and i know what he likes, and i know why people think he can win, but i can't figure out what he intends to do, or how any of his intentions might make him unique. but, you know, i'm a little cynical, generally.)

"we're not voting because one is a woman, we're not voting because one is black. when i go to vote, i'm just trusting that the lord will guide me to the right choice, that he'll lead my hand."

"he speaks with such authority."

interesting to see people citing righteousness and gospels as reasons for electing a liberal democrat--at least in my neck of the woods. also interesting that i have not heard anyone discuss voting for a republican nominee, for any reason. but that's not the point. the point is that you go out into the world and voice an opinion that you have formed with your head, not one that commercials or photographs or your friends and family (and i'm very sorry, but as far as i'm concerned that includes matthew, mark, luke, and john) have formed for you. don't be scared. today* is a super special day; own it.



* unless your state's primary falls on some other day between february 9 and july 12, in which case you should wait a bit and then own that.

post from the wild southwest [corner of my office building]

busy at work STOP many nights and weekends STOP roommate will not pay internet bill and so can not talk often STOP but have hope STOP moving out soon and many books in final stages STOP in meantime happy about this and this STOP sleeping better since adjusted to white noise and shrieking whistle of heating pipe STOP could live without experimental opera on roommates radio all night but a few more weeks STOP miss you hope all is well STOP joon

the password is "jerkwater"

so much to say, so little assistance or support from my home internet connection, which runs hot and cold like a neurologic abyssinian cat in heat. it works, it doesn't work, it starts to work and then changes its mind, it loves me, it loves me not, it spits on fidelity, pitou . . .

i am keeping notes and drawing up blueprints, cross my heart. i will tell you something useful and informative, because i do not fancy myself a belletrist, and i still intend to post my summary of ben greenman's appearance in brookline way, way, way back in some other lifetime of mine (or april; i sometimes get the two confused). but i have things to tend to in the office, and at home, well, you see how it is.

but i would like to take a moment to answer a very important question that somehow directed one knowledge-hungry reader to my den of pretentious hackery:

"what does it mean when a hamster pushes your hand away with their nose?"

excellent question. hamsters are very complex and mysterious creatures, and their tendency to express themselves via subtle, dancelike gesture makes them a favorite pet of rodentophiles, and not just those who are specifically cricetinae enthusiasts. i have had some hamsters, and none of them has ever done this to me. one of them often bit my hand, but nobody ever nudged it. a motion of this sort could mean many things, from "you are blocking my light" to "we have a bond that can only be described through the subtle, dancelike gestures of a hamster, which is dandy, as i am a hamster and can offer you just such an expression. in this movement, as i press my tiny nostril, through which oxygen and thus life enter my body, against your hand, which you use to stroke me and provide me with food and water and therefore sustain my life with, i am telling you that i recognize my debt to you, and i am grateful for your care, and the warmth and tenderness that i feel for you exceeds the bounds of my tiny, furry body and is spilling out into the pine shavings around me with every exhaled breath. as i press against you now, i am acknowledging, with no regrets about the fact, that my life is quite literally in your hands." not knowing your hamster, dear reader, and not having seen the pushing of the hand myself in its authentic context, it is difficult for me to offer a definitive interpretation of the action. if, though, the hamster was, as you say, pushing your hand away, then i would err on the side of caution and assume that the hamster kind of wanted you to get your hand out of its face. or their face, as the case may be. if you submit a video of the pushing next time, along with a brief write-up of the events leading up to the contact, i may be able to give you a more concrete explanation.