My AWESOME little elf name is Leafwind Hairtoe.

What's yours?
(From Naked Drinking Coffee, which by the way, may be the best named blog ever.)

Apparently the service that generated this name, Rum and Monkey, can see what my feet look like, which is strange, because unlike most days, I’m not wearing sandals, but expensive Italian leather shoes.

Well, they weren’t that expensive. Dad bought them, and aside from his forthcoming purchase of a laptop for my future law school adventure, he generally shies away from any purchases one might consider “expensive.” But these shoes are awesome. They’re Johnston & Murphy, and listed at about $100 on-line, which is an awful lot more than I’d be willing to spend myself. I think he got them at Marshall’s, so they were cheap.

But I digress.

I’m wearing expensive leather shoes because tonight I’m having drinks, with girls. Both were in high school student government with me.

One is working for a Senator’s field office in town, and the other just got back from an internship with Bill Clinton. I really want to hear how that was.

When I heard that the woman in question was hired as an intern for Mr. C., I immediately quipped, “Did she send a picture along with her resume?” She was pretty attractive in high school, and Friendster suggests that she remains so. I guess that’s part of the rationale for the fine Italian shoes.

To be sure, attractive women with some sort of connections to past presidents are pretty much how I’d describe “the woman I’m looking for,” but I have way too many issues with high school to even think about dating someone who I knew back then. Really, the main point of this exercise is to have people from my high school to think of me as someone who now wears expensive Italian leather shoes, and not as the mouthy kid who used to have inexplicably long hair.

I wonder if there’ll be a point in time when I don’t have “issues” about high school. Probably not. For our ten year reunion, I intend to buy a fancy new suit and much fancier Italian leather shoes. And I’ll repel in through the ceiling.

Editorial Policies: Neo Tokyo Times

The Editorial Board of the Neo Tokyo Times hereby establishes guidelines by which postings must conform. These policies are meant to protect both the writer(s) of this blog, it subjects, and most of all, its reader(s). While these policies will no doubt be violated time and time again, any alleged violations will be referred to and investigated thoroughly by the Neo Tokyo Times Ethics Committee on Publication Content.

1. No postings will include anyone’s full name on this blog unless they are a public figure.

2. No postings will be such that the writer would not be comfortable knowing that either their mother or current significant other had read it.

3. The Neo Tokyo Times will sometimes reference its fictional namesake as though it actually existed.

4. The Neo Tokyo Times will be funnier than it has been in the past.

5. The Neo Tokyo Times will publish on a wide array of topics, including law, politics, policy, and the personal doldrums of its author(s).

6. No postings will contain profanity unless it substantively enhances the post’s purpose or effect.

7. Under no circumstances will the Neo Tokyo Times ever advocate for the drowning of puppies.

8. The Neo Tokyo Times will endeavor to keep its association with its author(s) outside the view of the first page of a Google search for their name(s).

9. The Neo Tokyo Times will post interesting day-to-day occurrences from the lives of its author(s), with the intent of keeping in touch with acquaintances, friends, and family.

10. The Neo Tokyo Times will try to keep any whining to an absolute minimum.

11. The Neo Tokyo Times reserves the right to delete, edit, modify, or transmogrify any post it sees as unfit for public consumption. Any copies of changed posts retained on a private, public, or quantum priv-public computer must be edited by the user to reflect the Editor’s change. Failure to do so will result in a demerit issued by the Editor of the Neo Tokyo Times, and possible issuance of a yellow card.

12. Deleted posts from The Neo Tokyo Times will be available upon request, in triplicate, to the Editor’s family attorney who neither exists nor in any way ever agreed to serving in this capacity.

13. Attractive female readers of The Neo Tokyo Times are required to ask its Editor out on dates.

14. The Editor of The Neo Tokyo Times will write no more than 30% of his posts while sitting in an imagined giant robot.

Re Appealing to Wherever

I’ve been thinking about what, if anything, I should do about my continued waitlist status at Columbia, NYU and Penn.

I’ve pretty much put Penn out of my mind. It’s a great school, to be sure, but D.C. is just too romantic of a place for me. So that leaves NYU and Columbia, two schools, on whose waitlists I remain.

I think I’d like to do a semester or year or something at Columbia regardless. They have this great class that’s half business students and half law students, and it’s about “The Deal.” It sounds awesome. And I think if I got in on the waitlist from Columbia or NYU, I’d definitely want to stay for a while in DC, either just for a summer internship, or more likely, for a year in class.

But anyway, Columbia solicited another letter from me when they re-waitlisted me. I think they said something like, “if you feel there is any aspect of your application upon which you would like to elaborate upon, you may do so by providing additional information,” or something. So that’s a challenge. Or something. I think I'm going to write another letter.

Jeez.

I guess I just don’t want to give up. I don’t want to settle for what’s sitting in front of me. I want to write them back and tell them exactly why they should let me in, AGAIN, just to say to myself that I did it. I want to say that I wanted something, and I didn’t let a bunch of repeated drawn out exchanges to deter that desire. I guess that’s why I’m writing them another letter.

The school’s not that much better, and I’m told by Mr. Rickey that the dorms are like ass.

But so what. I wanted it, and I’m the kind of person who seeks out what I want to the best of my abilities. Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to be. I believe in self construction. That’s a topic for a later date, perhaps.

An Email Fundraising Letter From That Guy Who Pees on the Campaign Office

Dear Friends,

I’m writing you as a fellow supporter of Leroy McCubbins. It is now vitally important that we do everything within our power to see him elected to the State House this November.

Many of you have donated to Leroy McCubbins in the past, and some of you have volunteered your time at his campaign office. For those of you who haven’t yet volunteered, let me introduce myself. I’m that homeless guy who pees on the campaign office.

My job in the campaign is simple, I pee on the office, usually in the middle of the night when no one will see me doing it. For so many supporters, their role is different. We will only succeed in electing Leroy McCubbins if we each do our parts.

We need Leroy McCubbin’s leadership in our state. We need him to represent us in the capital. Any size donation will help. The expenses in running a campaign really can add up. From mailings, television advertising, to the industrial cleanser needed to scrub the front door every morning, a political campaign is always an expensive affair.

Contribute Today

Every campaign attracts a variety of participants. The campaign for Leroy McCubbins is no different. Your financial contributions are being carefully spent on mailings to likely voters, not on an office space in a nicerpart of town. While the Leroy McCubbins campaign staff seemed not to mind my loitering in their poorly lit parking lot, they eventually became less welcoming when I was caught peeing on their doorstep while they stayed late preparing an important press release.

A donation as small as $50, $100 and up to $3,200 will make a real difference in this campaign. The quarterly filing deadline with the Secretary of State’s office is fast approaching, and your donations will show that Leroy McCubbins is a candidate with real grassroots support, not just a candidate with a homeless guy who pees on the office door after pan handling volunteers for beer money.

Contribute Today

Thank you for taking the time to support Leroy McCubbins.

Sincerely,

That Homeless Guy Who Pees on the Campaign Office

Contribute Today

Hilarity

Okay, this is sort of complicated.

First, I read this post on Underneath Their Robes in which a judge asks to be placed on their “hottest judges” thingy.

Its hilarious, so you should read it.

And then I looked at the Judge’s fan site, which is itself pretty remarkable. And therin, was a law article co-written with our own Eugene Volokh. It was awfully hilarious, although, to be fair, I’ve never read any law articles before, so maybe this isn’t way out of left field.

Anyhow, here goes:

Yale Law Journal, November 1993, 103 Yale L.J. 463
[*463] Searching the MEGA file in LEXIS reveals that "chutzpah" (sometimes also spelled "chutzpa," "hutzpah," or "hutzpa" n1 ) has appeared in 112 reported cases. Curiously, all but eleven of them have been filed since 1980. There are two possible explanations for this. One is that during the last thirteen years there has been a dramatic increase in the actual amount of chutzpah in the United States -- or at least in the U.S. legal system. This explanation seems possible, but unlikely.

Wall Street Journal

This is on the Washington Post?

Fast and Loose
It's the 'Player' Who Gets The Girl (Or Girls), and a Rep That's Good and Bad

Hrmmmm. I used to think this paper was only a political hack magazine whose existence was fueled by the attentions of Hill-Junkies and ambitious politicos.

But now I see it’s a newspaper for *human beings* with real interests, foibles, and curiosities.

There may be no place for me.

My Friend Megan's Live Journal

How I Got Invited to Wine Tasting

On Saturday I went wine tasting in Temecula, which is a small almost rural community North East of San Diego. A lot of people live in Temecula and commute into San Diego for work. And as my Saturday activity might have suggested, Temecula plays host to some excellent wineries.

I used to joke that it as a colony of San Diego, which existed only so that we could extract its resources of inexpensive labor and delicious locally-grown wines.

The outing was occasioned by my roommate’s girlfriend’s birthday. The roommate planned a big day with a limo full of her friends.

One Saturday evening that I spent at home, I told my roommate and his girlfriend that I was her best friend, of amongst his male friends. I didn’t ask if it was true, or anything like that. I just stated it as a plain fact, and despite my roommates surprise at either my presumption or audacity, his girlfriend agreed. This roommate’s male friends have all been with him since high school, and while I might predate them from our time together in elementary school, they’re a clique apart from me, and we do not share all of the same traits and behaviors.

I explained that I make it a point to befriend the significant others of those around me. Its true. I suppose it might have sounded crass and deliberate, like it was fake. But it isn’t. And they knew that. You can decide to become friends with someone. I suppose there are in fact people in the world with whom I cannot, or am not able to become friends with, but they are relatively few. Decent friendly people are always befriendable.

MS Office says I made up “befriendable.” Whatever. I’m a writer. We invent words. We create them.

A few of my friends make the same efforts. And I don’t mind telling you that I’ve hardly been more grateful for those who have done so. The first girlfriend I had in college got a warm welcome from my friends, and it made everything much smoother, especially since I was woefully unprepared to accommodate a real life adult relationship.

My roommate’s other friends are pretty cliquey. They tolerate me, and invite me places, and that’s great, but they are only marginally inclusive of eachother’s girlfriends. They have high standards on befriendability.

So I got invited to the birthday wine tasting, which is great, ‘casue it was on my list of things to do before leaving San Diego. It was also great ‘casue I got to drink a lot of wine which I couldn’t have afforded were I to purchase it by the bottle. I mean, there were bottles there for sale at over $25. That’s outrageous. I mean, I’ve rarely even seen $25, much less drank such a sum.

The wine was delicious most places, and at the specific aforementioned winery with unregulated serving guidelines was lots of fun, way too much fun. I highly recommend wine tasting adventures for everyone.

Wine Tasting # 1

So we went wine tasting today. It was lots of fun. There was a place where we were supposed to get 6 tastes for eight dollars. But there was absolutely NO enforcement mechanism to either measure or restrict our consumption to the proscribed maximum. You can probably imagine how we dealt with the situation. (They had at least 8 good wines, and several excellent combinations.)

There were also these little fried pitta chips at the bar.

Oh, and then we followed a gaggle of 30-something women at a bachelorette party. They were flirty and pointless, but they had a delicious baked garlic bread brie. I enjoyed their attentions, and consumables.

Jokes

Jokes:

My boss at work is pretty funny. Moreover, she thinks I’m funny, which makes me funnier. Here’re some funny things:

I’ve been looking for a new office. And I made a comment to the boss with something like…

Me: Yeah, so I’ve been trying to avoid driving around looking for offices in [the swanky local beach community filled with bars, pretty girls and food targeted and priced at my age and demographic].

Boss: That’s probably wise. It would be nice to have a beach office though, wouldn’t it?

Me: It sure would.

Boss: We probably wouldn’t get a whole lot of work done though, would we?

Me: Not a bit. Most days’d be spent sipping margaritas under a thatch umbrella. But we’d have a whole lot of volunteers… You know what, [Boss]? I think we should just talk as though we do have one. It’ll be our hilarious fictional device.

Boss: *Knowing appreciative laugh.* That’s good. It’ll be like a carrot.

Me: Yeah, totally. We can tell the volunteers: “Just put in a few more weeks with the campaign, and maybe we’ll transfer you to the Beach Office. You own sandals right? There’s a dress code after all.”

Yeah. I live in San Diego. It’s a wonder how we get anything done.

That’s the first of many revelations you can expect on here. Although if you were paying close attention to earlier posts, you’d have figured that out. I think I posted driving to work in La Jolla or something, which is another beach community here in town, but I’m specifically referring to Pacific Beach, a town where John Kerry used to live while he trained for the Navy. It’s in every speech he gives in San Diego. Google around, you’ll see what I mean.

Seriously though. I wear sandals to work. This is not the only job I’ve had where that was allowed.

So I’m having a migraine

But the rosemary garlic bread and $7 bottle of wine are doing a good job dealing with it. Oh, I’m not drinking an entire bottle of wine. I mean, I can hardly afford spending a $7 on an evening’s entertainment, at least not when the only thing I can look forward to at its end is a cold bed with only a sick me in it. But there was a large glass left in the bottle, and I’m working my way through it now.

Last time I had a migraine, I took a quick nap and listened to an episode of the West Wing on my computer. I listened. I sat on the little love seat in my room, closed my eyes, and listened to the episode. The West Wing is pretty dialogue driven. You probably knew that, but it’s the sort of show that hardly requires a visual accompaniment to its audio.

This time, upon waking from my brief nap, I wasn’t feeling well enough to get myself to the gym. I cancelled with gym-buddy via voicemail, and tried to listen to another West Wing episode. But I was getting stir crazy. I thought about blogging with my eyes closed. I wasn’t going to post what I wrote with my eyes closed, but I was pretty sure I could basically type without seeing exactly what I was typing. I’ve done it before. And Spell-check, especially auto-spell-check make my poor typing really effective.

I tried it, but it was harder than I thought. I’ve typed before when I couldn’t’ see what I was typing, but I’m a little spacey right now, so it didn’t’ work out tonight. For shame.

Anyhow, I started typing with my eyes open, and here I am. I’m still stir crazy. I can’t get back to sleep. I’m thinking of getting drunk. I’ve done that before to accommodate a migraine, but I don’t think I’ll need to do that. I think I just need to feel a little useful before sleeping.

That’s something that’s been a reoccurring theme of this summer. It’s part of why I’ve been blogging. I’ve enjoyed this time away from ambition and specific long-term goal achievement, but it’s also felt out of place. I’ve felt unproductive. I’ve been regrouping. I’ve been relaxing. My capacities for relaxation are limited. I’ve been getting a lot of migraines this year, this year and a half, really, and I think it’s due to my persistent inability to realize exactly what I want and what I have to do to achieve that.

Campaign work is also pretty tough on this. Its never as structured as I’d like it to be. There’s a lot of “inventing your own work to do,” which is fine, but also highly dependant on others’ go-aheads.

Oh, so blogging helps me feel productive. Writing is an exercise. It’s a function. It makes me smarter. It refines a skill. It focuses my thoughts. It defines them. It completes them. They are definite now. They are written.

I have a migraine.

I

Party, Whoooo!

On Friday I’m hosting a party. I’m expecting about 20 to 30 people. It’ll be smaller than most parties I’ve thrown this year.

I’m really not sure how many people will be in town this summer, so I’ve changed the calculus. I’m not even trying to throw a “rager.” I’m instead trying to have a relatively intimate social occasion with a bit of adult class. We’ll be serving wine, cheese, brandy and cigars. The brandy and cigars are really about enticing my pre-law, political friends with some of the social mediums by which power is expressed. The wine and cheese is about getting my arty classy friends to drink with me.

I’m also filtering out any of the people I usually invite who might not be as charming or self-sufficient. I don’t want to babysit anyone. I don’t want background “filler.” I’m only inviting people I’d like to talk to for the entire evening. I’m sure this is all folly and fraught with danger and disaster, but whatever. I bought some excellent $5 wines from Costco, and a Courvoisier. I’ll have much cheaper versions of both the wine and brandy for those who don’t know any better. That oughta work.

The politics of sushi

I picked up a friend from the airport tonight. She took me to a sushi bar as reward.

She chose the place. In it, the sushi bar had these little boats floating on a moving moat which carried plates of sushi covered in plastic. It was a cute gimmick, but the side affect of this setup was that the sushi was pretty stale. The fried tempura roll was particularly soggy, although the spicy mayonnaise accompanying it was pretty fun.

My favorite sushi place in town has about 15 chairs, and it’s only a bar. There are one or two chefs behind it, and when you make an order, they begin to chop the fresh cuts of fish right in front of you, and then immediately hand them to you. It’s as fresh as fresh can be.

Also, the chefs, and the woman who serves drinks all get excessively drunk as the Friday or Saturday night progresses. I’ve been once on a Sunday night, but that was timid and boring. I recall enjoying the sushi a lot less too.

There are few people in my life that I completely trust to judge sushi for me. In fact, I think there are three of them. I dated one, another’s my roommate, and a third is the person I hired as my replacement at the humor newspaper. These are important roles within my life.

Oh man. I wonder if I’ve just stumbled on a major character quality that plays a significant role in determining how much I value others.

This could be bad news. None of my family like sushi whatsoever.

Working at working

So far at my job, almost all of my work is assigned to me by my direct superior, who is also working fulltime as the candidate’s district director. The candidate is already a state assemblywoman, who is running for State Senate.

So my boss is often too busy to make sure I’m kept busy.

This means I have time to read a fair number of weblogs, news websites and all that. Now, I don’t have as much free time as I had temping at the bank, which is fine. I enjoy having something to do, which is wholly unlike temping at the bank, which paid me $15 per hour to read weblogs, news websites and all that for eight hours straight.

I’ve only been paid to manage people twice. But each time I tried to maximize other people’s time. When I was the Editor of the humor paper at my undergraduate Alma Matter, I was pretty good about making sure that our limited computer resources were constantly being utilized. If a computer opened up, I’d drop whatever creative task I had assigned myself and find someone to sit and do layout, or make a graphic, or whatever. Doing so made sure that the paper got finished on time, or even better, meant that we had extra time left over to either refine the art, or eventually find our way to bed.

Earlier this year when I was managing a State Assembly campaign, I had two types of folks to manage: volunteers and paid employees. The volunteers were mostly interns who needed the experience, or a letter of recommendation, so they generally were treated the same as the employees. But the volunteers who were friends of the candidate’s, or activist, or otherwise not expecting anything in return for their service were much like the volunteer staff of the humor paper. They came to have fun. They came to feel like they were a part of something. They’d easily spend the entire time there “hanging out,” if no one asked them to perform a specific task. It was rare that they balked at any such request, but if they found themselves not enjoying the performance of what was asked of them, they usually were quick to ask for a reassignment.

If I couldn’t give a volunteer anything else to do, I’d usually ask them very nicely to do what I had originally asked, and explain to them its importance. They’d almost always comply. Usually I’d throw in a casual joke, which I don’t mind telling you, I can do without any effort whatsoever. I won’t tell you that I can tell hilarious genious jokes with great ease, but I have this special power that allows me to say something mildly funny in such a way that people just have to laugh. Part of it’s an infections and self-indulgent smile I use, but mostly it’s the fact that I look very expectantly for a laugh, and people just like going along with it.

The employees, however little they were paid, generally did whatever it was that I asked them, and seemed to appreciate the structure and direction I gave them. It’s good to know what’s expected of you, and what you have to do to satisfy your boss. That’s something I’m sort of missing from my current job. I mean, my boss is super sweet, and she’s way too nice to be in politics, but I sometimes wish I had a better idea of what she wanted. She’s never mad that I’m not always toiling away in the office, but part of that might be due to my desk being a half mile away from hers.

Anyhow, I’ve never really worked for someone who kept me as busy as I like to keep others, so perhaps I’d only enjoy one side of the equation. Hmmm.

Italian Carb-Fest Recap

My roommate’s Italian-born mother is clearly my favorite person currently living here.

She spent the evening, and I imagine a good portion of the afternoon, cooking food, feeding 10 20-somethings, and getting us quite drunk on wine. The wine was pretty poor, sadly, but that’s as much complaint as I can gather.

There was delicious breaded thinly sliced chicken. Black crusted barbequed sausage, and exquisitely rustic lemon skewered chicken were some of my favorite. Fresh pizza dough from Trader Joe’s made the base for excellent rosemary garlic bread. And if you haven’t had fresh mozzarella with fresh sliced basil and organic tomatoes, you haven’t lived. I once tried to replicate this woman’s feats with poorly conceived pizza-grade mozerella in tightly wrapped plastic seals, with great regrets.

Rommate’s mother got pretty tossed herself, but she only became more charming and embarrassing to her timid engineer grad student son. After interrupting regularly the dinner conversation from the kitchen with a raised glass and a “Cheers!” which immediately received enthusiastic response, she told a bawdy joke.

It went like this (I’ll try to preserve her somewhat unpolished English):

So there was this nun named Sister Christia. She was new to the congregation, which was in Italy, of course.

She had these [motions suggestion a large bosom] and this [motions suggestion a (large/ small/ excellent?) posterior]. And whenever she was at mass, all the boys would come. The church would be filled with boys.

And one Sunday after mass, Mother Superior could not find Sister Christia. It was 11, and then 12, and then 1, and still she could not find her. She said “Where is Sister Christia? Where is Sister Chirstia?” And she could not find her.

And then the next morning, Sister Christia came back, and her blouse was all broken, and her, what do you call it on her head? was all like this, and her rosary was like [makes motions to suggest a crucifix slung over ones shoulder].

Mother Superior said “Oh, Sister Christia, it’s a miracle! Where have you been all night!?”

And Sister Christia said, “Oh, there were these boys, one, two, three, four, I lost count.

"And they kidnapped you!?" asked Mother Superior?

"Yes, but it’s okay. And they did, well the did this, and that, [Aside: I’ll leave it to your imagination.] And this for three days!" said Sister Christia. "But it’s okay."

And then Mother Superior was shocked and said “But Sister Christia, you’ve only been gone for one night, and you said three days!”

To which Sister Christia replied, “Yes, last night, tonight, and tomorrow!”

Next week I’m going wife-shopping in Italy.

Work and Home

There needs to be a more central process by which campaign offices are secured. It’s taking me an awful long while to call up every little roadside sign advertising available space.

I did just find a local commercial broker that has online listings. So far they look promising. I’ve already told my boss I’m looking at space close to my home. I lust after the concept of walking to work.

One of the best parts about life at my Alma Matter was being able to get out of bed, groom, and then walk to work. I was also a huge fan of living with the same people I worked with. Maybe I shouldn’t have considered amateur legislating and amateur humor writing as “work,” but I did. Heck, it paid the bills.

w

AIM Away Message Graveyard

I shouldn't have even written this, much less let it stand as my away message for a full hour. Sheesh.

What's that sound? Is it the persistent whispering of greatness? Is the Universe coaxing you to challenge its dominance over your direction? In the back of your mind, do you wonder if you can be so much more than what is expected of you, that family and history will always question from where you drew inspiration and courage?

Ah, but thoughts like this, thoughts like this lead mean and women into dangerous waters, from which many promising idealists never return. What price are you willing to pay to achieve what is unusual? What of you is a fair price to be more than person from which you began?

But there's no such thing as the invention of the self. So don't fret it, cowboy.

Who do I think I am?

So Columbia sent me another letter today.

It was enclosed in a standard-sized envelope, which immediately suggested a rejection letter. But when I picked it up from the table, it felt heavier than I expected. It felt like three pages. Thus far, I hadn’t received a rejection letter longer than three pages.

But I wasn’t accepted. Nor was I rejected.

I’m still waitlisted. Re-waitlisted. Waitlisted twice. Twice. That’s okay, I mean, I shouldn’t even be in the running whatsoever, but since I am, I’d like to have some closure to this thing. I’d like to know.

I am usually pretty good about becoming not only satisfied with what is available to me, but a champion of it. My undergraduate Alma Matter was not my first choice, but my first choice was MIT, and it turned out that aerospace engineering was not in fact my cup of tea. But regardless, I made sure that I was my school’s greatest champion. I volunteered yearly for Admit Day, and did my part to woo prospective students to our fine campus, and away from comparable, or even better institutions. I made constant and hilarious disparaging remarks about all other schools in the humor paper I edited. I launched myself into student government and did everything my developing prowess allowed me to do to improve the school I was coming to love.

I’m sure it’ll be the same with Georgetown, once I can get my mind around going there for sure. There’s just this part of me that wants to refrain from manufacturing a love for this school I’ve not yet attended, for fear of never attending it.

The sad thing is, that despite my lingering desire to attend there, I have no great reasons for wanting admittance to Columbia. There are some excellent academic programs at Columbia. The negotiation curriculum looks fantastic. And I love negotiating. I love it. But so what? Since when have I preferenced academia to my other desires? Never, that’s when. I’ve always spent more energy, time, and love on my extracurricular and social pursuits. I fear that my primary desire for attending Columbia is that it’ll have a name my peers from high school will more readily recognize five years down the road at our reunion. That’s problematic, to say the least.

A post on Italian mothers

My roommate’s Italian-born mother is staying with us for a couple of days. Tomorrow night she’s cooking a seven course meal for all the roommates. We’ll have to stomach her son’s very annoying friends, but there will be good food and wine, which make such company quite tolerabe.

This kind of feminine mystique makes me wonder how women were ever able to even attempt an escape from male domination. I mean, home cooked meals every night are a huge prize to be won, and societies are usually quite jealous of their ill-gotten conquests. Anyhow, I am embarrassed to say that would really enjoy finding a woman who was much less of a feminist than I contend to be.

Separation Anxiety

r

Dear Vietnamese Spicy Pork Sandwich that I Just Ate,

Dear Vietnamese Spicy Pork Sandwich that I Just Ate,

You were delicious. I may have only had two other Vietnamese sandwiches in my life, and they were indeed from only one other store on the other side of town, but you by far surpassed them.

I suppose the Laotian beer I had with you was an unfair compliment to your spicy porky goodness. But I don’t think you should be punished for being so cleverly sold next to a Vietnamese supermarket. My only regret is that there were no Vietnamese beers for sale, forcing me to settle for beer from a people who I only suspect shares some similar heritage.

I wanted to take a moment to compliment you not only on the quality of your marinaded vegetable relish, which was quite flavorful, but also on the moistness of your spicy pork. The last pork Vietnamese sandwich I had was very good, but its pork was unfortunately drier than I would have liked. Most of all, your quality French roll deserves special mention. That it was toasted to a perfect light gold was especially appreciated. You were a perfect compromise between toasted flavor and softness of texture.

I know that I don’t enough express how I feel about people, and things, so I wanted to make absolutely sure you knew how much I appreciated your deliciousness.

Also, thank you for being more than a foot in length, and less than three dollars.

Sincerely,

Editor, Neo Tokyo Times


PS: That fried fruity thing that I purchased on a whim after lusting after it while waiting for my sandwich to be prepared was quite excellent too. I would ask you what it was, but I suspect your inanimateness and location within my stomach might well preclude you from answering.

poker face

I played poker this weekend. It was fun. I cleaned out my friends. I was the only person at the table to leave with more money than they brought.

I haven’t had that kind of completely one-sided victory since student government. I sat down, took everything I could in a forum where it was both tolerated and expected for someone to compete in such a way, and I won like crazy. Granted, it was totally beginner’s luck, and I won a grand total of eight dollars, but that eight dollars was two and a half times what I bought in with. Winning is a high. It’s making me rethink my “games are dumb” platform, to which I have stuck fast for a long while.

I should not be so fickle.

Fish Burritos and Beer

Apparently, 24 oz Coronas are marketed to people who regularly carry around bottle cap openers. I’m not such a person. But tonight, I suppose I ought to have been.

I got fish tacos from my favorite fish taco vendor for dinner, and if you know anything about delicious beer-battered fish tacos, then they ought to be accompanied by a cold cerveza. They were.

Oh don’t worry, I have a bottle opener at home. And for the record, your honor, the full 24 oz’s were wholly necessary.

I’ve been having nightmares all this week.

I don’t know the cause of it. But its been either contributing to, or causing my lack of focus during the day.

I don’t remember what it was last night, but I had some sort of anxiety dream. There was this unfixable problem I was confronted with, and it was probably due to my mistake, or inaction, or some other failure. I woke up worried and half believing that I had to get up and address the problem. I lingered in bed for a moment, hoping against hope that I had just dreamed it all, and after a few terrible seconds, I realized that I must have, and put my head back down.

The nights before were something similar, I think. Monday I kept waking up mid-sleep, and in the morning I found that my covers had been all pulled out of the bed.

Also, I’ve been breaking out. Acne. It’s unusual. I wonder if it has something to do with my campaign. Last time I was working for a campaign, I had pretty terrible acne. I wasn’t able to explain it then, but the office was dingy, hot, and poorly ventilated. That’s not the case this time, so I wonder if its stress or something.

I think maybe it has something to do with a feeling of being out of my league. During my last campaign, I had far too much responsibility. I was responsible for making sure that my 60+ candidate sat down and made fundraising calls, despite her complete unwillingness to do it. That was impossible and a half. Now I’m responsible for finding a campaign office, negotiating for its lease, and then leasing it. This is way out of my league. I’ve been spending most of the week driving around collecting numbers of leasing agents.

I suppose Jessica’s death is still lingering with me. I could hardly accept its reality for the first week. I hadn’t really seen her much this last year, and her absence was not relatively significant. But on Friday I went to her memorial on campus, and that evening, I went to a wake with her friends and family. It made it more real.

The experience has also heightened my fear of leaving my home town. I am about to leave not only 23 years of friends and family, but the entirety of my experience.

I actively and strategically created a very large network of friends and colleagues that in the last few years has finally given me a sense of belonging that I think has been missing from all earlier periods in my life. I constructed something at my Alma Matter that I have not at all abandoned. I still go to the gym on campus and each time I go there, almost without fail, I see someone I know. I like that. I don’t want to live in a small town, and be forced to accommodate a lack of good restaurants, but at the same time, I want to feel like I’m a part of a community. I want to recognize people, and I want to be recognized.

That sense of home is not limited to campus either. I went to a John Kerry Meetup not a few months ago at a Dave and Busters. I went with a couple of fellow Young Democrats, and they were pretty surprised when a middle-aged man displayed an eagerness to explain to them that he knew my name from “all over the place” at my Alma Matter. He was a staff member of the university. I think I gave him my first name, and he guessed my last name when I said that I had recently graduated from where he worked.

Just this happened to me this morning as well. I was attending a bulk mail class at the post office, one of the many odd things you learn about when working at a campaign, and a man introduced himself to me when he found out who I was working for. I introduced myself back, and he recognized my name. He said “Oh, you’re the guy working with Charlie ‘So and So’” [name adjusted to protect the innocent.] I said that I was, despite never having worked with the man in question. The truth of the matter is, that the guy who we both knew was a person I met at the San Jose State Party Convention, and he invited me to a dinner a few months ago.

Anyhow, that’s what I’m used to. I’ve spent a good long while here in s Southern California meeting people and finding my place. I’m afraid of leaving that. I’m afraid of leaving my friends. I’m afraid of not knowing where I am, and what I’m in for. But most of all, I’m afraid of loosing forever the sense of community that I feel like I have now. I’m afraid not only that I won’t build [or, *gasp* join] another comparable community in law school. I’m afraid that the Southern California I return to won’t have the people I know now in it. I’m afraid that this sense of comfort and belonging is a fleeting joy which I squandered on amateur political ambition and too-frequent indulgence in solitude.

Of course I am overreacting. I know this. I’m a child of divorce who never lived in a sufficiently comfortable environment throughout childhood, and only in my burgeoning adult life was I able to fashion some modicum of control and comfortable community. But since when have adult fears demanded rationality. I love it here. I love my life here. I love my friends, more than I have ever expressed to them, and I am worried about life without their presence.

I spent half of my morning bulk mailing class thinking about sending a Christmas Card mailing to my friends. Tonight I signed up with Plaxo, so that I can get their addresses and contact info. Oh yeah, and it’s not a Christmas Card list. It’s a “Holiday Seasonal Mailer”. That’s sufficiently PC, right? Right.

I’m having lunches with friends who are leaving soon. Everyone’s leaving. We’re dispersing. We’ll be back, but it’ll never be quite the same again.

Scheduling

Despite my complete dependence on my PDA and its syngage with MS Outlook, I’m routinely surprised by how poorly they work together.

I just synced my PDA with my computer at work, a task I have not done in almost a week. And without fail, whenever I sync to a secondary desktop, I get some crazy message saying that I’m missing files, or my datebook is all askew.

Today’s example was high-larious.

Breakfast – 13 Days Overdue

Luckily for me, writing appointments into my PDA gives me at least a 50% chance to remember them on my own. I have not starved to death, yet.

Blogging in Beta

I’ve started telling people I know in real life that I have a blog, but I’ve also been telling them that I’m not releasing its address till shortly before I leave to school.

They seem to take this news with little comment. No teasing, no pressing me for an address. I suppose I’m disappointed. I think blogging should be more controversial. I’m especially concerned that they don’t immediately demand to read it. Concerned, not surprised.

Hastings

I just turned down Hastings. I hate limiting my options. I really thought about stringing them, and me, along for a while, but I decided against it.

I'm going to get a celebratory burrito.

memos

This Torture Memo Deal is insane.

"Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the commander-in-chief authority in the president," the report claimed.

Ummmmmm…

I’m no lawyer, but treaties are not just an enactment of Congress. The Executive gets to negotiate and sign off on them too. So there’s no unconstitutional curtailment of the president’s war-fighting powers.

The presidency gets to decide how to command wars, but it also gets to decide which treaties the nation joins in, some of which can limit or structure how nations commands wars.

And what the heck were these people doing writing this memo anyway? The only explanation is that someone with the authority of having memos written, was considering using torture, and wanted something to justify its usage. This is troubling.

There is no good reason to allow for the president to order torture, because doing so would violate the international standard against torture, which like so much else in international law, only survives because everyone agrees to it. If we start, they’ll start. And we don’t want them torturing our troops. End of story. So there’s no good reason to allow torture. That’s it.

The only rationale to allow for torture is one which is fueled by ego and irrational “we can do anything we want ‘cause we’re America” insanity. That’s my beef with these Republicans. They’re insane. They’re drunk with a sense of power and invulnerability, which is simply not how reality exists.

There are consequences to our actions in the world, and their failure to recognize them is leading us to ruin. Okay, not ruin. Neo Tokyo isn’t upon is, but man, this is really asking for it.

rambly

boy i'm rambly today. Hungover. Couldn't you tell.

c

Working through waitlists

I got a voice mail from Hastings last night at 6 PM. They want me to call them back.

I just left a voice mail with the woman who called me.

My assumption is that they want to offer me a spot in their class off their waitlist. Suckers.

Well, I guess I’ll see what they’re offering. I mean, I ought to. But I really can’t imagine that they’re going to give me a free ride plus housing, if they thought I was waitlist material. But Hastings over Georgetown? I don’t think that’d be wise. Even the insanely different prices wouldn’t swing me. There are a lot of uber-political people in California with Hastings in their educational background though. But I think that’s more of a product of the middleclass public school “chip on your shoulder” mentality of California politicos.

It would be nice to say that I got into at least one California school though. Damn. I didn’t get into a single one, of four that I applied to.

More Legal Science Fiction

The Sacramento Bee, reports that:

Although their father died 10 months before they were conceived, two Arizona 8-year-olds are entitled to Social Security insurance benefits as his dependent children, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday

This sort of stuff makes me wonder why there isn’t more legal science fiction. There was a short-lived legal drama on CBS set in the LA of the future which I thought to be an interesting concept, but that’s not the same kind of hard legal science fiction I’m talking about.

Hard Science Fiction is a subgenre which deals with the actual possibilities of the future. Although it generally deals with advances in technology, it could just as easily discuss the outcomes of human existence as affected by changes in the law. And the law itself is a very important factor to be considered in any development of technology.

The great thing about hard science fiction is that it is not only a predictor, but it is an identifier of problems. It can be a mechanism for people to explore solutions to problems as well. Asimov famously created a system of “laws” by which robots could be governed, which would enable their safe incorporation into human society, if and when they were invented. That was a solution to a problem he envisioned.

There should be some science fiction to talk about the legal solutions to some of the upcoming problems we’re going to have with further advances in biotech. Cloning will certainly need to be dealt with through the law. There might be laws against human cloning now (I have no idea really), but even if they exist, there’s still a good chance that people in the US will be able to clone themselves elsewhere, and keep some body ripe for organ harvest stowed away in another nation.

So then the question becomes, what law prevents this? Is there a law against Americans owning these bodies? Do these bodies have rights? Is there a law against returning to the states with harvested organs? Against returning with harvested organs within your own body?! What is the punishment? Removal?

This is good science fiction. I gotta get on it.

These are my ideas. Back off.

Soft Release

So I’m thinking about taking this blog out of beta and making it public and officially non anonymous.

I figure it’ll be a good way to keep in contact with friends back home, when I’m away at law school.

Stay of Execution has good post about a blog as a personal community thingy, and I’d like to think I could fashion my blog into something like that, if say, the enormity of people I know in real life were allowed to read this.

Perhaps I don’t know enough people who are blog readers. That’s definitely possible.

Anyhow, that’s just the current blog about blogging. That’s what I like to write about. Man.

Dear Bloggers:

I regret to inform you that a blog description containing the words “random,” “rantings,” or “ramblings” is hackneyed and off-putting.

Furthermore, you’re a writer, however amateur, and you should strive to intrigue, not bore your audience.

Inquiries on this matter will be dealt with through further condescension and aloofness.

Sincerely,

Editor, Neo Tokyo Times

PS: Of course I have room to talk about excellent and worthwhile writing. I have the word “Editor” in my title. C’mon.

T

History as Entertainment

A couple of roommates and I were watching the History Channel last night. The show was a profile of the development of the A-10 Warthog, which is a kickass close air support fighter plane that’s kickass. I’m pretty sure the show preceding it was something about Hitler, or WWII.

And then this commercial came on promoting an upcoming show on the History Channel, and it was about the historic relationship between some basketball coach and his team or something.

What!? Excuse me!? This is the HISTORY CHANNEL! It’s the “All WWII and maybe a few tastefully critical pieces on Vietnam” Channel. There’s no room for heartwarming documentaries about the Celtics, or the Yankees, or whichever familiar name in my mind represents a basketball team. I don’t watch sports.

The History Channel should only refer to events which involved guns.

I’m writing a letter.

I'm an Adventure Junkie

Last night I talked with one of my former interns from a previous campaign. She got promoted to interning at the Kerry campaign at the beginning of Spring Quarter, all through her own efforts, without, I imagine, even listing her then-current position on her resume. She’s got a bit of political experience under her belt.

Anyhow, after a quarter interning with the Kerry press office, she got offered a chance to do staff advance work, and just got back from her first trip. She was super excited, as she should be. Presidential campaigns are about the hottest ticket in town if you’re planning on a career in political operative-dom.

I’m a little jealous of her. She’s on a huge adventure with at least a 50% chance of rolling it over into a staff position at the White House. That’s pretty stellar. I’d love to work at the White House, and I only hope that three or four years at Georgetown’ll give me enough ins and cred to find me a place. And I don’t think I’m off in thinking that the kind of work I’d be able to do would be that much more substantive if I had a J.D. at the end of my name.

Ahh, but the adventure.

New Job

So far my new job has consisted of data entry and sifting through numerous boxes of old campaign materials. Wait, that’s not fair. I moved some boxes around to make the office a little more spacious. I mean, with a 10x10 cubby, its important to get every bit of room you can used.

But this is still the best job ever.

Yesterday I had a conversation with an LA consultant, and will be meeting with said consultant and the candidate on Friday to help choose pictures for a mailing piece. That’s awesome. And as soon as I get that damnable consultant on the line to pound out the details of our field program, I’m gonna hire interns and start doing everything in my power to demonstrate how invaluable I can be to a campaign with my mad organizing skillz. That’s Skillz with a “Z” people. Z-skillz. Z.

I’m such a West Wing fanboy. I’m like a political groupie.

Wallowing

I’ve spent the entire day wondering why I’m not feeling better. I got up early, shaved, bought a ton of delicious groceries, and resurrected my low-carb diet.

I honestly didn’t think I was going to feel particularly bothered by this death. I mean, death is always sad, but this is a death of a woman who I really didn’t know supremely well. It’s a second degree friend. I suppose I’ve just never had this kind of loss yet. I’ve lost family, a best friend, and a good friend’s father, but never a second degree friend my own age.

Part of my problem is a sense that I’m not feeling this as deeply as some of my peers. A couple of people have sent me condolence IM’s, Emails or phone calls, and while I do feel bad about this, I feel like there’s an expectation that I should feel worse.

I guess maybe my defense mechanisms of video games and beer are keeping me numb. Saturday I got up at 11, made a pot of coffee, and sat down in front of the Xbox at 11:15. I ate a bag of pork rinds at around 2, and didn’t get up till 8pm when my roommate and I went out for gyros. We beat Halo together, both spending a full 9 hours in front of that console.

I went to the grocery store today and avoided saying hi to two attractive women I know who happened to be there. I felt to empty to smile and flirt.

I really felt elsewhere. I was shopping for sprouted wheat rolls and just couldn’t think about anything. I felt like I was sleep walking. There was nothing else going on in my head. I usually use that kind of time to let my mind wander onto subconscious meandering to figure out the details of my life, but there was nothing. I was on auto pilot.

I tracked down the email address of the campus newspaper’s incoming News Editor and sent him a message. He hasn’t gotten back to me yet. I’m going to call his EIC tomorrow afternoon if I have to. I sort of enjoy pushing levers of power when I’m trying to get something out of someone. It’s especially enjoyable when I’m an unknown commodity to someone, and there’s little expectation that I have a sense of what it takes to maneuver someone in their own backyard. I guess I just want to feel like I’m making a substantive and worthwhile contribution to the whole “dealing with a death” effort.

God I’m a mess. I’m going to bully a student reporter in order to satisfy my sense of powerlessness against death. Whatever. I want to be able to tell Jessica’s family that there will be something wri