The other night Camille and I decided to celebrate my new apartment by having a sleepover of sorts. So I got out the guest-airmattress and air-matress blower upper and put it to work. Unfortunately it ran out of batteries about 4/5 the way through. I huffed and puffed and got it up to an acceptable, though ungreat, level. I plugged the electric one back in to the wall and placed it on the windowsill next to Sir Gus and Sir Adam.

Camille said that I might be more comfortable if I finish blowing it up. By that point the blower upper was recharged so there was no reason not to other than the laziness that ultimately prevailed. Camille wanted me to get her up at 5:30 and I figured I would go ahead and get up at that time to so that I could get to work early. When 5:30 rolled around, neither of us were willing to get up.

The preceeding paragraphs are important because if I'd done the "right thing" in either instance, the following would not have occured.

At roughly 6, I felt something smash against my head. And I mean smash. The sound alone woke Camille up. I didn't want to get up so I just laid there until the blood started getting in to my eyes. When I did get up, I saw more blood on the pillow that I had just cleaned. The remaining lump on my head was actually pretty small. The cut was actually pretty small there (my thought: How did that much blood come out of that?).

"To add insult to injury," Camille noted, "it looks like a really big pimple."

Just in time to meet her extended family this weekend...

I really should have seen Batman Begins sooner than I did. Unfortunately so many favorable reviews popped up that I went into it with what were probably unrealistically high expectations. That said, it almost met them, and that is a stellar achievement in and of itself.

One thing this movie really wins points on is originality. This is the first time that we've actually seen a young Batman in the movies... ever. Well, with the exception of Mask of the Phantasm, but even that mostly took place later in his career. Technically Michael Keaton's Batman was "just starting out" in Batman 1989, but Michael Keaton certainly could not qualify as a young Batman. Both the animated series and Adam West Batman joined his career a few years in.

This was all particularly significant to me because it's the first time that I've ever seen a Batman that's presumably about my age (well, he's two years older I guess, but close enough). Part of it is me getting older, but this is the first time that Batman hasn't at least partly been a father figure (with a Robin in tow or old enough to have a son Robin's age) and instead more like a peer. that alone made the movie interesting, though it doesn't necessarily make the movie good.

The characterization, however, made the movie good. Great, perhaps. Outside of comics, the only depiction that is even remotely as thorough and interesting is that of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, the animated film. While I'd have to give Phantasm a slight edge in the characterization of Batman, where this movie really excels is giving us a much closer look at Batman's perpetual supporting cast of James Gordon and Alfred as well as typically unrepresented Lucius Fox! Particularly James Gordon, a thirty-something depiction that still managed to come across as a somewhat grandfatherly nerd. I was sorry not to get to see more of him.

Though I am not the first to say this, the weakest character had to be Rachel Dawes. A mute district attorney would have won the movie decent political correctness points and would have saved us all from having to listen to her whenever she spoke. Okay, she wasn't quite that bad, but she was even more pointless than most Batman love interests are - and that's saying a lot. The most comparable love interest is Andrea Beaumont from Mask of the Phantasm, which already puts Dawes at a disadvantage because Beaumont was by far the best. But at least Julie Madison from Batman & Robin knew when to get out of the way (which was, thankfully, most of that film). Dawes, on the other hand, just kept talking and talking and talking. If the intent was to have her pulling Bruce towards the side of light, and I suspect it was, it needed to be counterweighed - and not by a villain. She was so unconvincing as to make me want to turn evil. But anyway, more on this part later.

One of the other interesting differences between Begins and previous set of Batman movies is how little it focuses on the villains. Jack Nicholson was the start of Batman 1989, Jim Carrey of Batman Forever, and so on. Begins had a handful of villains and while they were obviously important to the story, they were not the driving factor. We got to know very little about them and that's okay. They weren't the point of this movie. They were just greasing its wheels. But considered all of the villains well played, especially Scarecrow.

The villains backgrounds were okay. It was a bit painful to see Ra's and the League of Assassins/Shadows without Talia. Talia would have been a much better love interest than was Dawes. Or even having one tug him towards darkness and the other towards light. I'm not sure the logistics of it, but I see a two-bird stone in here somewhere. I think that Scarecrow would make an excellent marquee villain given his powers (save for the fact that few know he exists), but Cillian Murphy hit all the right notes and made his secondary villainhood into all that it could be.

The rotating villains also allowed for an outstanding deviation from the typical comic book movie plot, which usually consists of a villain or set of villains who dance around the hero until the tail end of the movie. In this case the villains were (mostly) done away with one at a time. Considering that there were four, it really helped avoid uncomfortable situatins where three or four villains must be dispatched in the span of ten minutes or so, as was in the case of Batman Returns where they essentially had to all dispatch one another.

They did break what I have dubbed the Gyrich Rule, which basically states that you do not use a specific character unless the character is particularly useful for the purpose you are using him. Gyrich, a marginal but recurring character in the X-Men mythologies, was given a bit part and killed in the first movie. That was unfortunate because he could have been used later on. Though few will really care, Mr. Zsasz is a second-tier rogue's gallary villain and most definitely not a mafia hitman. It's unlikely that they ever would have used him, of course, but even so there was no payoff for the fans in using an established character in a throwaway, insignificant role that was very much out-of-character.

But there were other fans payoffs abound for the fans. Commissioner Loeb is black this go-around and incoincidentally not as directly corrupt, but it was good to see him. I didn't particularly like Fleese's character (I liked Eckhardt better from 1989), but his inclusion was also nice. And Carmine Falcone. Though the plot didn't follow Batman: Year One very closely, I liked a lot of the inclusions. It makes me really hope that we'll get to see Sergeant Bullock in a future movie.

The look and feel of the movie was also a strong point. Gotham was less interesting than it was under Burton and Schumacher, but it felt a lot more real. They got a whole lot of the little stuff right. Batman's ability to disappear got progressively better as the movie went along and he got a better feel for how to do it. There was also something about the costume that was aesthetically uncomfortable to me. I'm not sure what it was, but I doubt it was an unintended effect.

Besides Dawes, there was one perpetually irritating thing about the movie. It can be between neutral-to-clever to at one point or another have a character repeat what was said to him earlier in a sort of turnabout fashion. For instance, the quote about intentions and actions recited by both Batman and Dawes was helpful. "Finders Keepers" and the memo quote, however, were not. I found them quite irritating.

The comic book fan in me actually enjoyed the movie more than the Batman fan in me, oddly enough. But both of me enjoyed it and it finds itself kicking Mask of the Phantasm out of my Top Five Comic Book Movies. At the rate Hollywood is going, though, I'm going to have to make it Top Ten before too long.

This is a general call for assistence with my computer network in the form of brainstorming. Anyone with any ideas as to what the problem might be, please let me know.

As most of you know, I have five computers right now: Maverick, Doral, Heineken, Foster, and Corona.

Last December, Doral started exhibiting symptoms. When burning a CD it would reboot. Sometimes it would reboot without burning anything. There were signs, I ignored them, and Doral overheated in an unheated apartment that was at about 40 degrees. At the time, Doral was running off of my Uvalde drive, which has been problematic since I got it.

I plugged the Uvalde drive in to Maverick and more-or-less picked up right where I left off. Unfortunately, some of the same problems started surfacing that had existed on Doral. It would sporadically reboot and I still couldn't burn any CD's to save my life. I replaced the Uvalde drive with my Dallas drive, which at last check worked without any problem. The rebooting problems persisted.

About this time I bought Corona from my friend Linus. Corona couldn't accomplish any CD-intensive tasks up to and including installing Windows. Linus came over at one point and we worked on it and we determined that there was a heat/circulation issue. It made sense: A computer and 19" monitor on a 4'x2' desk in an apartment with no circulation would be a not good thing, even in the winter. We strapped a second internal fan on to Maverick and aimed a fan right at the two computers.

Both computers seemed to finally be functional. Corona, which lies enclosed in a small case, continued to work while Maverick (enclosed in a case without side panels to allow for greater ventilation) would work only so long as I had both internal fans on and an external fan. If I turned the external fan away for anything more than an hour or two, it would overhead and die.

Deciding that the heat was caused in part by the heat emitted by the large 19" moniutor, I replaced it with a 17" flat-panel. I also purchased a new CD burner and new CD burning software. Overheating was no longer tied to CD burning, but still occured at the same frequency otherwise. The problem had not been solved.

I've now moved to another apartment. Because it's underground this apartment is naturally cool. For whatever reason circulation also seems better. It doesn't seem as "stale." There is no reason that a computer should overheat and reboot, but that's what happened.

So here is the basic chain of events:

• Doral was using Uvalde, a questionable harddrive, and crashed while burning a CD. Not the motherboard, case, CD burner, CD burning software, RAM, harddrive (Uvalde), PCI hardware or Windows install are still being used.
• Using the same HD, CDB, CDBS, RAM, but different MB, case, and PCI hardware, the problem continued almost unaltered.
• Switching out the HD lead to marginal improvement.
• Switching out the CDB and CDBS eradicated the problem of rebooting while burning CDs, but the general problem of random reboots persisted.
• Creating greater circulation with a fan allowed it to work without incident provided that the fan was functional and aimed directly at the naked case.
• Changing the environment by replacing the big-time, heat-producing 19" monitor with a more efficient 17" monitor had no effect.
• General temperature within the apartment (whether it was hot or cold outside and, because of open windows, inside) did not seem to make much difference.
• Corona works without needing the extra fan inside or outside, and works inside of its case. Hieneken does not appear to be working, but for unrelated reasons. Doral will not work again until I get a new case.
• With the exception of the remediated CD burning issue, the problems that existed on Doral and exist on Maverick are strikingly similar.
• Prior to last year, I had not had recurring computer overheating problems since I was staying at the UH dorms.
• I believe that the problems are related to overheating for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which that after they crash, the computers are very, very hot. The helpfulness of the fans is another indicator in my mind. However, because I believe it to be so does not make it so. I could be wrong.

After living here for over a year, I finally visited Pocatello's only comic book shop.

It's really quite dangerous to put me in a comic book shop. Not necessarily because of money, but because of time. I have the tendency to chew the fat with comic book shop clerks and owners for hours on end.

Though I can't pinpoint it exactly, I stopped reading comics in late 2001 or early 2002. I stopped collecting them in early 2003. In between the point when I stopped reading and stopped collecting, I made my annual biweekly treks down to my comic shop in Pasadena primarily to talk to my comic shop guy. We'd talk about comics, movies, politics, and even sometimes religion.

At the end, of course, I'd pick up my last two comic pulls, which usually were in the $40-50 range. They'd be put in a stack and - for the most part - never read. When he closed the shop, I stopped buying all together.

For those of you that know what a thrifty and generally utilitarian guy I am, you'll appreciate how out-of-character that is. But even before that guy there was another at my previous comic shop in Nassau Bay. There wasn't one at the comic shop in Baybrook, and not-entirely-incoincidentally I stopped going there.

So I stopped buy Poky's shop primarily to get a catalogue of trade-paperbacks. I figured when and if I do start collecting again, I'm going to go that route rather than the month-to-month. I also may go the eBay route. Not sure.

But in any case, I spent an hour or so talking to a guy I'd never really met about an entertainment medium that I haven't regularly followed in at least a couple of years and about a movie that I have not yet seen (but will this week, I hope!). The guy was so excited about Batman Begins that his daugther had to stop him from telling me about the whole movie.

I also entered a raffle for a giant Wolverine head-sculpture.

What in tarnation would I do with a giant Wolverine head-sculpture?

I'm moved in, my clothes stock is back up to specs, and my car has breaks that work.

These are good. Expensive things, but good things.

1) Your blog was one of the first I ever read. When did you begin blogging, and why?

I am, alas, deprived of any blogging anniversaries because I started by first blog in summer of 2002 but didn't post regularly until that summer. I was only a year or so removed from being a columnist for the Daily Cougar and I missed commenting on matters political. I was also not very far removed from a crumbled "relationship" and I needed to refocus some of my energies. At some point, for a variety of reasons, I moved away from politics and it became a place to share my thoughts on all sorts of matters, as well to tell stories of my day. I'm not sure what tomorrow holds for it all. I can feel myself starting to move back in a more political direction, but I'm also mulling over using it as a springboard for short story writing.

2) When I read your columns in The Daily Cougar, I remember remarking to law school peers about how one-sided and narrow the perspective reflected therein was.

Five years later, I now tend to think you're one of the more open-minded and balanced bloggers (people?) I 'know.' (Though I should mention that I think some measure of closed-mindedness is a relatively inescapable facet of the human condition -- we believe what we want to, to some extent).

What do you think this says about the columns you wrote, or my own predilections then vs. now, or your own predilections then vs. now?

The funny thing is that I was a lot more liberal than I am now. Certainly more libertarian, but also more liberal. For a variety of reasons that wasn't reflected in my columns. Partly it was to balance out the other left-leaning columnists and as time progress (and this was significant) I found myself a lot more comfortable espousing the conservative viewpoint on various issues. They seemed more intuitively correct. More so and more so the more I started exploring day-to-day issues. So as such I was a rightwing columnist before I was a rightwing thinker.

But that's not entirely your question. The narrow scope and point of view depicted in the columns came down to the 550-word limit a column was supposed to have. When I went over that I would get pushed to page four, which meant less readership. There really isn't much room to really expound on an issue in 550 words and present multiple sides in an issue (or, unfortunately, confront glaring counter-arguments). Some people could do it, but I couldn't. So I went full-force with the opinion that I had come to (sometimes half-heartedly). I frequently came across more forcefully than I actually felt.

Some of it was by word-limited necessity, some of it was by choice. Some days when people would stop me on the way to class, I much prefered "You're nuts, dude!" or "Fascist!" to people with more general complimentary things like my thoughtfulness or evenhandedness. It would also more forced me to defend my ideas if I put them more plainly and forcefully. The downside, though, are those columns that I look back on and now vehemently disagree with, archived with my name on the header for the rest of the history of the Internet.

3) The life of man is nasty, brutish, and short. Discuss.

The older I get, the more I agree with that. But not in an embittered or depressed way. My ability to delineate between black and white has diminished greatly. In life, we cannot avoid getting ourselves dirty. We cannot avoid being cold and ruthless, when the circumstances warrant. Sometimes it's for the best when you are. Sometimes justice is letting the criminal get away. It's hard to explain, really. I guess there was a recognition that life is too short to stay on the gravel the whole time to avoid getting dirty. And sometimes you have to know the wrongs your capable of to henceforth walk on the path of right. And to determine what exactly is wrong, what is right, and what can't be adequately described as either. I thought my teens were dramatic. Nothing compared to my twenties...

4) What, if anything, do you miss most about Texas?

Too much to list, probably. I mostly miss the people, the common identity that Texans with widely disparate experiences share. The diversity (not only ethnic, but of city and country) is something I apparently took for granted. And the music. Good heavens, do I miss the music.

5) Why do you like anime/manga so much?

Believe it or not, this is the short answer:

When I was a kid I watched a lot of television. A whole lot. I have probably seen every episode of Matlock, Family Matters, Batman: The Animated Series, and The Commish. I've seen entire seasons of just about every genre in existence. I am extremely familiar with American storytelling style (as it pertains to serial fiction). The most immediate appeal to anime, for me, is that it shifts the axis ever so slightly. The stories are coming from a slightly different foundation, different assumptions, and different expectations. So while I make no claim that Japanese animation storytelling is better than American storytelling, it's different enough that the mediocre stuff is more interesting to me than the mediocre American stuff. And there are things that they do better. Season-long story archs are much more prevalent. Shows in which you can just switch around the episodes without confusion are more rare. I like all different kinds of storytelling formats from the graphic novel to formulaic television to old-time radio shows. Anime gives me a new one.

Of course, it's not as new as it used to be and my interest has waned in recent years. But I do like variety and Anime is good to keep in the rotation.

---

The Official Interview Game Rules:

1. If you want to participate, leave a comment below saying "interview me." (Also, please leave a link to your journal/blog either in the URL box or within your comment.)
2. I will respond by asking you five questions -- each person's will be different.
3. You will update your journal/blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Things I learned cleaning up and closing out my apartment in Thrifthaven:

• Once upon a time I dated a girl named Lisa. While she was insane to the core, she knew a whole lot about cleaning chemicals. She mentioned that two common cleaning chemicals together can be lethal. I learned that I should write these things down.
• Bleach does a great job of cleaning out toilets.
• If you have bleach in a toilet and you urinate in that toilet, it does weird and interesting things. Remember when Jack Nicholson fell in the vat of acid to become The Joker? Yeah, that kind of reaction.
• I don't recomment doing the above unless you wear pants you're willing to throw away.
• When bleached, navy blue turns - of all colors - pink.
• A very unmanly pink.
• There is probably an evolutionary reason for this, discouraging men to clean by emasculating those that do and therefore adding an additional incentive to find a woman to do his cleaning for him. Don't kill the messenger.
• You know what they say about inhaling too much Tilex and/or bleach and/or Windex? Well, I don't know if they actually say anything about it/them, but if they do it's totally true I swear to you.
• There is no discernable difference between different kinds of Tilex.
• Contacts and Tilex/bleach/Windex fumes do not mix. Unless you hate yourself.
• Unplug the fridge after removing burritos from them.
• The one advantage of having a 12x12' apartment is that there is less to clean.
• The downside to having a 12x12' apartment in Thrifthave is that less stuff to clean seems to take longer.
• There is a long forgotten DC comics character named Terrorsmith. He can't touch anything cause it makes them turn in to monsters. This evening gave me an idea for Bleachsmith, a character who touched bleach and messed up his clothes and therefore is afraid to touch anything else ever again. He is, in fact, looking at his keyboard right now to make sure that the keys thereon are not becoming bleached.
• They are not.

Orrin Judd:

It's an odd notion the public radio folks have that running commercials would make them beholden to the business sector but that they can remain perfectly independent while suckling at the government teat.

Not really. The government is not sufficiently competent to manipulate public broadcasting without telling it what to do or bribing them to do so, both of which outrage the intellectual/smug class.

I have a post on public broadcasting coming down the pipe, but for now I would ask: Why is being 'beholden' to someone - essentially, being responsible to someone and being held accountable by someone, considered so unholy? Is it truly to the benefit of society to let those whose job it is to entertain and influence us to be completely insulated from our point of view? Or is it that our interest naturally run against those of the government and corporations. Most all of us would agree that they often do, but without the institutions that surround us, from what framework are those journalists/performers drawing from that gives them a particular insight to what we're interested in, what we need to know, and what we ought to think? And if they're wrong, what recourse would we have in changing that framework?

As I briefly mentioned a week or so back, I shaved my beartee off for a couple reasons.

And now, over the weekend, I spent a little too much time in the sun with incomplete sunscreen application.

As a result, the sun most generously donated to me a blistering sunburn just under my hairline.

When it started blistering last night I came to the conclusion that this was not going to fix itself in the next couple of days.

So rather than having the weird burn marks I've started combing my hair forward instead of back.

So two weeks ago I had my beartee and a back/up haircut, whereas now I have something almost resembling a "bowl cut."
I've gone from an Oliver Queen look to a Guy Gardner look.

Which is fine, as long as long as it's former Green Lantern Guy Gardner and not retired astronaut Guy Gardner.

My head is totally unsuitable for baldness and I can say from a brief two hours experience that my face was not made for a moustache.

Due to frequent malfunctions, RAW360 will soon be returning to an account/guest system until other arrangements can be made. If you do not remember your password, please let me know and we will get your account back on track.

The Guardian (UK) has a list of the twenty five most miserable, lonesome anthems. The list itself is unremarkable except for a few tidbits:

• They put the wrong version of Eric Carmen's "All By Myself". Celine's doesn't sound nearly as delightfully pathetic as Carmen's.
• They have neither version of "Without You." It's a tough call as to whether or not I'd put Nilsson's or Mariah Caray's, but one of them has got to be on there.
• I couldn't help but notice that most of these songs are way deep to the 14-17 set.
• The number of these songs that I like are outstripped by the number that I've never heard of. I didn't expect that.
• Verve Pipe's "The Freshmen" is apparently open to interpretation. As is Ben Folds Five's "Brick." See below.

One of the great things about the Internet is the ability to go in and make changed. It's a tough ethical balance between putting forward incorrect information and retroactively changing what you said. Their description of Ben Folds Five's "Brick" walks this line admirably:

13. Brick Ben Folds Five (1997)
(NB: Many listeners, including me, first assumed Brick was about a relationship ending. We discovered later that it's about a couple getting an abortion. The following is based on the first scenario. Therefore it's all wrong.) A gloomy piano-and-voice song about a couple breaking up (wrong), Brick tells of a guy who picks up his girlfriend, bitches, takes her someplace, bitches, waits for her, bitches, then brings her back home, referring to her as a "brick" (this is true). We never learn what's transpired in between (this is wrong). All that's certain is the couple wants to split up (this is wrong). Brick offers the same pleasure that comes with dropping one on your foot (this is really true).

I got a letter today from my insurance provider, placed a phone call, and learned something new:

If you go to the doctor because you're having monster headaches, my insurance company will pick up the tab for the visit with the exception of the $40 co-pay.

But if you go to the doctor because you're having monster headaches because you've made the very health-wise decision to quit smoking, the headaches are considered "self-induced" and visits to the clinic for such are not covered (and do not count towards any deductable).

Sure makes me feel better about the money I'm going to be saving my health insurance provider in the long run.

Learning lessons is good. Lessons costing in the neighborhood of $400 (for two visits!!) not so good.

• I usually don't loathe morning so, but I have just been dead these last couple of mornings. And it's not been because I've been saying up too late.
• Batman Begins is in theaters and all that. One neat thing about being up here is that I can watch it at a drive-in theater! One day next week I'm definitely going to stick around and catch it on the big big big screen.
• Being clean-shaven is generally a way to avoid acne, but since I shaved my beard off I've been having more acne trouble than I've had in a long time.
• My boss's first words upon seeing the new, shaven me: When did we start hiring 15 year olds?
• Since Camille is often mistaken for being younger than she is, we look like the perfect teenage couple... except that we're closer to 30 than 19.
• I had lunch with a couple coworkers yesterday. They'd had a BBQ the night before and we feasted on leftovers. I'd already wolfed down my steak when they determined that their meat was bad. Word still out on whether or not I have anything to fear.
• Camille's parents are in town and we're all planning to go up to Island Park this weekend. They asked if there was any food I wanted them to buy. I suggested Easy Cheeze. First, I had to successfully [explain] what Easy Cheeze was. Second, I had to successfully explain why someone would want to eat room-temperature-oils-masquerading-as-cheese-in-quasi-liquid-form. I batted 1-for-2.

*Edit made by TEFKAM to avoid confusion/comments

If anyone out there ever wants to see me at my most pathetic, here's a great tip of how to go about it:

Get me to believe, in the process of moving, that my primary data drive is not formatted. Extra points if there is a drive bought expressly for the purpose of backing everything up sitting on the table, waiting for the move to be complete, and even more points if you can somehow arrange it so that my previous backup was accidentally formatted over into a boot drive for another computer.

This sort of thing is happening so much that it's becoming this blog's own cliche.

Turns out that it was another heating issue. Heating and circulation is, lest we forget, one of the main reasons that I'm moving out of Thrifthaven. One reason, but certainly not the only.

Last night, Thrifthaven was crawling with police officers. It seems that the former couple across the way had non-overlapping expectations as to how custody of their little girl would go this week. He seemed more reluctant to leave when she asked him to than she was to call the police and have him escorted off.

I don't now if they usually bring a half-dozen cops to domestic dispute cases or whether it was just a particularly boring evening and none of them had anything better to do. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it wasn't the first time they had to stop by that particular apartment. I've met each member of the couple over the last couple of months and they exude drama. I feel sorry for their neighbor when they were together.

The entire time all of this is occuring, Strang is sitting on his deck chair watching on. Even though they were completely across the way, he appeared to be scared to the point of wetting himself. Not scared enough to go inside, but scared enough to give me the impression that it would be an inopportune time for a drug test, to pick a random example.

But there were some upsides. It turns out that my neighbor Saul the Mumbler has a truck, solving that particular problem. I'd forgotten all about that. Both he and Snowflake - two of the only three second-floor neighbors that were there when I moved in - are vicariously happy for me that I'm getting out. Saul said he's planning to get out, too, but I'm not sure how he's going to be able to afford it. Snowflake is herself packing. She's getting some pretty compehensive back surgery in Idaho Falls. She's quite verbal about her new relationship with God (or is that her relationship with a new God?) and seems happy about her life's new direction.

She's also got about 30 cans of RC Cola in her fridge, courtesy of the roulette dispenser. I'd left my fridge open the previous night so I didn't have a cold coke. I offered her to trade a warm coke for a cold one, but she insisted on giving me a half-dozen cans gratis. I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm never going to slog through all this cola.

One of the most interesting places to watch markets is the area of gas prices. I say "interesting" because from everything I understand, stations set gas prices at cost rather than to maximize profits. The rationale is that they make most of their money from the convenience store and low gas prices bring people in. I think that there's some truth to that.

In a pretty straight-forward way it can show you more than a bit about property value. For instance, if two Shell stations have different prices, then most likely one either pays higher rent or the other gets enough business that they can afford to sell the gas at a loss if it gets people to buy a coke and hot dog inside. I haven't taken enough business courses to understand all of it, but I have taken enough (and, to be honest, been stuck in traffic long enough) to think about such things.

I live in a town called Pocatello and I work in an equally sized town called Idaho Falls. What's been interesting to me is that when I first started working up in IF, the gas prices were 10-15 cents lower than Pocatello's. that interested me in and of itself because who would guess that 50 miles or so would create a supply shortage to drive up costs or that the markets of two nearly identically-sized towns could have different markets to warrant that kind of price differential.

But in January the prices reached parity and this week - for the first time - cheap-brand gas in Idaho Falls is more expensive than name-brand gas in Pocatello. Since it's most likely not a case of the gas stations marking prices up, I'm extremely curious about what has changed in the market over the last year to give Pocatello a price advantage.

As someone that has wasted hours of his life disputing an alleged "verbal agreement" that was quite different than what I did agree to, I'm not a really big fan of the concept of enforceable verbal agreements (unless somehow documented), as they pertain to, among other things, lifetime employment:

Your question involves an area of contract law called the ''Statute of Frauds'' that requires certain types of verbal agreements to be in writing to be legally enforceable. Your oral lifetime employment agreement falls under the statute category called ''an agreement that is not to be performed within one year from the making thereof.'' This is interpreted by case law to mean contracts that definitely and unconditionally state a performance term of one year or more. The key is the agreement's specific wording, not what happens after the agreement is made. This is often called the one-year rule.

For example, A verbally hires B ''for one year'' and fires him one week later. Since the agreement has a definite term, it's ''within'' the statute. Without anything in writing, it's unenforceable no matter how many witnesses corroborate it. If, however, B is verbally hired ''for life'' and is then fired, the agreement is ''outside'' the statute and is verbally enforceable because of the uncertain duration of anyone's lifetime. Most all states enforce verbal ''for life'' hiring agreements, which they view as exceptions to the general rule requiring a written contract.

Unless I am misunderstanding this (and I may be, it's getting kind of late), what this is saying is that a lifetime verbal contract is enforceable and a six month verbal contract is not. If anything, I would have guessed it to be the other way around. I'm trying to determine the philosophical rationale for this (lifetime ok, six month no), but I am incapable.

• I've got roughly two weeks to get completely moved and no weekends in which to do it (next weekend will be spent out of town.) Posting will be existent, but light. Luckily I don't have a whole lot of stuff to be moved. Unluckily, I've got a lot of cleaning to do. Cleaning up this place will probably take twice as long as moving in to the new one.
• Unlike the old place, the new one is unfurnished. It's funny how you take things like access to a van for granted. In Houston I had my folks', so any time I moved that was taken care of. Up here I have no such luck, so getting furniture shifted around is going to be tough. Camille's landlord may be helping me out and I'm getting my dream desk delivered tomorrow evening.
• I ran across the desk while shopping for some computer parts. There were two 5'x2.5' workbenches for $10 each that were absolutely perfect. But transporting them was an issue and very oddly he would not hold them for me for more than a couple of days even if I paid him up front. Luckily we worked out a deliveryman. I only took one of the benches... I'm thinking that I should have went ahead and got both. I may give the place a call tomorrow.
• Camille saw The Hole over the weekend and loves it. She had reservations about Thrifthaven, but she agrees with me that this will very much be a trade-up. On top of that, I get to stay in the University District, which is very nice.
• Across from Crime Alley is McDonald's. This is not a good thing.
• The Hole is a bit smaller than I remember it being. I had to drag a semi-conscious Camille out to help me plan what was going to go where. She liked it enough that it energized her and we excitedly talked about what was going to go where. And in newly-engaged-couple-fashion, we looked forward to when we get our own place. We actually have very similar aesthetic tastes, which should make that more fun than it would be for other couples.
• Speaking of the engagement thing, it has come in handy for the first time. Reading over the lease agreement, there was a troubling visitors' clause. I spoke with my new landlord about it and she said that since we were engaged, that would fall under the "family" exemption.
• While looking for furniture, I finally checked out the thrift stores in Pocatello. It is extremely dangerous to put me in a thrift shop, but I managed to get out unscathed. I did get a file cabinet, which I very much needed, but that's all. They were selling vintage and working class clothes for $5-10. I went to a coffee shop later in the day where they were selling the same stuff on a fancier rack for $25-50. God Bless America. I was originally at the thrift store looking for a TV stand, but couldn't find any with wheels. Picked up one at Walmart when I was looking for cleaning supplies. I was not as well-behaved at Walmart, racking up a $122 tab.
• I went shopping for cleaning supplies for the Thrifthaven apartment. I got one of just about everything. That might have been two conservative as I might need two of everything to get this place cleaned up. There is the issue with the water that ran non-stop for two months, which hurt the walls. Then there is the bathtub that was clogged for two weeks and I never entirely got that presentable. Part of me thinks I should just say "forget about it" since I may not be getting my deposit back anyhow. Some of this may be uncleanable and I have seven years bad luck from a mirror that broke because the cardboard disintegrated because of the moisture.
• Then again, Strang sold off the furniture to start a fire-hazard meth lab and they let him move back in, so they're the forgiving sort.
• I've decided that now is as good a time as any to start whittling down my wardrobe. Instead of giving my clothes the Goodwill or whatnot, most of my stuff should fit Strang, so I'll cut out the middleman and give him some desperately needed clothes.

According to the New York Daily News they are. And with anecdotal, everyday examples like Courtney Cox and Christina Aguilara, how can it ever be wrong? Not sure how nerdy David Arquette is, though. It depends on where you draw the line between nerd and clown, which can indeed be a thin one. A recent humorous post on Craigslist made a similar point. A long time and a blog ago, I pointed to a now abandoned post that made a good argument that geek is chic. His basic point was that last generations' geeks have spawned a legion of daughters that are either used to geekery or appreciate it in the sense that girls want to marry someone like their father. But a dark side to geekery still exists in the professional world, as I pointed out a while back. As they (we?) are not unfairly characterized as being unsocial or antisocial, they shouldn't be exalted. As does an inequity: in the Geek2Geek dating service mentioned in the NYDN article, Houston has 7 males 22-30 and no females. Los Angeles has 40 males and 4 females. That's even worse than anime conventions. A whole lot of thoughts percolating underneath this for a post at some point in the future.

As you may or may not notice, the header quote below the blog's title is now dynamic. If anything else looks different or wrong please let me know. Eventually I'm going to have hundreds of quotes so it'll be different nearly every time you load it. Right now I've just put in the collection of quotes that I've used before. Some are pretty specific to a point in my life, but I decided that it would still be worthwhile to have those in the queue.

My official move-in date is tomorrow, though I'm not sure how exactly that's going to work out. I need to call my landlord tomorrow. My landlord is, interestingly enough, spending the summer in Texas. I'll be living in her (their?) basement. Right now they have some friends housesitting.

Safety-wise, the good news is that it is not Thrifthaven. I will no longer have to be worried about my apartment getting broken in to. I'll get to the bad news in a minute.

I've already dubbed my new place The Hole for somewhat obvious reasons. Unlike a basement apartment I visited prior to moving in to Thrifthaven, this one is nice and tall (except for the stairs down, where at one period I will have to duck. It's a little more spacious, with a kitchen and actual closet space. I've also got a kitchen and a full-size fridge. Most importantly, though, I will have high-speed Internet. My rent will be more, but a little less than I budgeted.

But now the bad news, safety-wise. Behind Thrifthaven is an alley-way that I affectionately call "Crime Alley." It looks more like a little road, but cars generally don't use it unless 4th or 5th Avenue are closed. I think that's why it exists -- so they can close the two most busy streets for construction and still allow people access to homes and stores.

But in any case, that's where my car was parked when Quan broke in to it. It's also where Yale was jumped walking back to the apartment. It's also where The Hole's parking space will be.

The good news is that it's not Thrifthaven. The bad news is that it's only three blocks away.

I definitely know what I'm doing!

Looks like the WW2 rumor was bunk. Color me extremely relieved and excited.

Ralph Neas, the head of People for the American Way, made the following odd comment:

[Justice Rogers] believes we would be better off if we returned to a time when protections like the minimum wage, food safety standards, and Social Security and Medicare were ruled unconstitutional — never mind what voters and elected officials think.

Actually, what voters and elected officials think shouldn't matter and even Neas ought to agree with that. Or would he approve of the Constitutionality of, say, racial profiling or Guantanamo, if the people were to support it? In fact, quite a bit of the Constitution is devoted to the very porpose of neverminding what 50%+1 of the voters and elected officials think.

Very odd comment.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that health care costs for the uninsured are causing everyone's rates to go up:

About 45 million Americans lacked health-care coverage in 2003, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Washington-based Families USA said people without insurance pay about a third of their health-care costs, leaving doctors and hospitals this year with more than $43 billion in unpaid bills. Providers raise prices for other patients to make up the difference, the report said.

"When the uninsured get care in an emergency room, someone has to pay for it," Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack said.

What I find interesting about this is the prospect that a number of people will read it and believe that if they were insured these costs would somehow evaporate. Or that someone else would pay for them becuase the employers that are cutting benefits in the first place would never pass on the costs of mandated coverage to the rest of the company's employees and/or their consumers.

Now granted, use of the emergency room for non-emergency room issues is a serious issue, but it's not one limited to the uninsured. A number of people don't want to wait for appointments and know that the emergency room will see them right away. All they're paying is the deductable, so why not, right? A bigger issue in this picture is that people can't afford $100 to go see a doctor (or don't want to wait until normal clinic hours or an appointment), so they'll deal with the creditors over a $500 ER bill that they frequently will not ultimately have to pay. Insurance will knock that $100 to $20-40, which may be more digestable, but (a) to whatever extent that they take more out of the system than putting in to it (the costs on the provider end don't go down just because the patient is paying less) someone else is paying for it anyway (causing a different form of the lament we feel when we read this article), and (b) after the deductable is met it could easily encourage more rather than less unnecessary ER visits. The doctors may not have to recoup their expenses with the rest of us, but the insurance companies will.

The bottom line is that healthcare is expensive. This is not because of evil pharmaceutical companies, greedy doctors, mean capitalism, or tightfisted employers. It's because a doctor's education costs run six-digits high, drug innovation isn't cheap, and consequences of error are high and therefore so are jury awards in malpractice cases. No matter how we handle our healthcare, these things will remain somewhat constant. The best that we can do is provide the best incentives for responsible use of our resources. Does the current system do that? No, and that's probably the only thing I agree with the nationalize health care crowd. But since each of us are likely to find the current system preferable to what the other has in mind, the stalemate will likely stand.

ADD-ON: An interesting perspective in the WSJ's Opinion Journal comparing experiences with the American and British health care systems:

There is something seriously out of whack about 10 therapy sessions [in America] that cost more than a month's worth of hospital bills in England. Still, while costs in U.S. hospitals might well have become exorbitant because of too few incentives to keep costs down, the British system has simply lost sight of costs and incentives altogether. (The exception would appear to be the few remaining private clinics in Britain. The heart procedure done in the private clinic in London cost about $20,000.)

"Free health care" is a mantra that one hears all the time from advocates of the British system. But British health care is not "free." I mentioned the cost of living in London, which is twice as high for almost any good or service as prices in Manhattan. Folks like to blame an overvalued pound (or undervalued dollar). But that only explains about 30% of the extra cost. A far larger part of those extra costs come in the hidden value-added taxes--which can add up to 40% when you combine costs to consumers and producers. And with salaries tending to be about 20% lower in England than they are here, the purchasing power of Brits must be close to what we would define as the poverty level. The enormous costs of socialized medicine explain at least some of this disparity in the standard of living.

As for the quality of British health care, advocates of socialized medicine point out that while the British system may not be as rich as U.S. heath care, no patient is turned away. To which I would respond that my wife's one roommate at Cornell University Hospital in New York was an uninsured homeless woman, who shared the same spectacular view of the East River and was receiving about the same quality of health care as my wife. Uninsured Americans are not left on the street to die.

I'm a bit late in bringing it up, but that's never stopped me before. The Boston Globe reports that John Kerry's college transcripts reveal that he was no better a student than the President:

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.
Now, those of you that followed the election last year will recall that Bush was presented by his critics as being something of a dunce while Kerry was presented by his as a waffling egghead. Four years ago, interestingly, the same dynamic existed between GWB and Al Gore, whose academic career was also not remarkably distinguishable from the President's.

What I find a bit interesting here is how we basically had the same narrative in two consecutive reasons with the absense of proof. Now it's possible that Bush really is an idiot who happened to make good grades while Kerry's and Gore's mediocrity in spite of their genious is the product of disinterest.

But interestingly, three of the last four Republican presidents (GWB, Reagan, and Ford but not so much for policy-wonk GHB) have been derided as intellectual lightweights. Every Democratic presidential nominee since 1976 (Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry) but one (Carter, whose selling point was earnestness) has been regarded as particularly intelligent by Democratic boosters. Maybe Republicans like nominating idiots while Democrats like nominating eggheads.

Or, perhaps, Democrats like to believe that those they nominate are or should be more intelligent while it's not a priority for Republicans or even is perhaps a negative. I suspect that the dumb Republican versus nerdy Democrat framing persists because neither side has a particular interest in busting it.

It is my personal belief that a lot of voters who lean left do so because it makes them feel more intellectual. A lot of voters who lean to the right, on the other hand, do so because it makes them feel more self-righteous. Politics very often comes down not to policies but to self-image. For the record, I haven't commissioned any studies to prove this conjecture, but it's been my experience that political free agents - those whose livelihoods are not greatly affected by which party is in power - seem to break along these lines more often than not. Agree or disagree with these impressions that I have, but I mention them because they have helped me come to the conclusions outlined in this post.

With Democrats valuing integence (or at least intellectualism), it makes sense that a Democratic presidential candidate would do his best to come across as intelligent as possible. I believe that regardless of the grades they made, John Kerry and Al Gore are both intelligent men, and being such were able to swing a bit higher than their intellectual weight class. Being Democrats, they had more motivation to do so. Democrats, wanting to believe that their guy is smarter than the other team's guy, were quick to play this up. And they're quick to dress down the intelligence of the other team's leader.

Republicans, on the other hand, have a more acrimonious relationship with the intelligencia. Many of the rank and file have been looked down upon because of the drawl in their accent or their lack of a master's degree in the liberal arts. Many of them feel that they have been talked down upon by the opinion leaders not just because of the opinions they hold, but because of who they are. They also believe, not incorrectly, that a lot of "middle America" feels the same way. So while intelligence may be an objective good, they are suspicious of those that try to come off as such, not particularly quick to nominate such a person, and definitely not particularly quick to portray him as such when nominated (which is why they unsuccessfully attempted to frame George H. Bush as a war hero and not a genious). To compensate for this, they tend to portray the other team's guy as an egghead and a nerd that is out of touch with the American people.

So when the media picks up on the theme of Smart Democrat versus the Amiable Dunce Republican, neither side is inclined to refute that picture. Democrats are more likely to believe that the public wants a smart leader and Republicans are more likely to believe that the public does not want a leader that believes he is smarter than they are. Whichever side is right (and I think they both are, the Republicans being only slightly moreso), the dynamic is interesting to watch and consider.

This is not a rhetorical question and I'm not trying to score any points here. But to those Democrats and lean-Democrats in my readership, I'm curious as to what your opinion of how good or bad Howard Dean's leadership of the party has been since getting the leadership position. I actually figured at the time that he was probably a good pick, but have since thought that an architect like Leon Penetta might have been better for the position than a spokesman like Dean. But then I'm no the best person to make such a judgment, so I'm curious what you think.

Kathryn Jean Lopez laments a poll that says that more-or-less 80% of the public believes that pharmacists ought to be legally required to fill prescriptions that they find morally objectionable. In this case, the birth control pill.

Fairweather libertarian Glenn Reynolds, however, disagrees. That's not a surprise. What is a surprise, however, is that he is using libertarian ideals to do so:

Of course, this only matters because pharmacists enjoy a government-created monopoly on the dispensing of prescription drugs. Just take that away, and the problem disappears, too. In the meantime, like others who enjoy government monopolies, they are forced to make some concessions to public convenience. That doesn't strike me as an overwhelming imposition, but if the pharmacy profession feels otherwise, I'll be the first to support a move to eliminate its privileged position.

I'm afraid the not even the libertarian in me can buy this argument. In fact, it's the libertarian in me that musters the most opposition to it.

In my mind, this has little to do with birth control pills - the existence of which I support. This also is not about someone else imposing their morality on someone else. This is simply a case of the government imposing the morality of some (in this case the FDA and woman seeking birth control) on others (namely, those that object to it). Reynolds's rationale is, in my mind, a cop-out.

The first question is whether or not we have a right to drugs that we recieve a prescription and the money for. That's an iffy statement, but even if we grant that right that does not translate into forcing someone to do business where they don't want to. Reynolds suggests that because the pharmacists are licensed by the state, they are agents of the state and therefore the government should be able to have this sort of control over them. I would agree with this if, and only if, the government hand-selected who could and could not be a pharmacist or partitioned pharmacists over a particular area as they do with television and radio frequencies or phone companies. But if one pharmacist will not fill birth control pills, another one can open shop and do it instead. The "monopoly" of which Reynolds speaks applies to accredidation boards. If an accredidation board were to prevent pharmacists from filling out certain prescriptions, I'd completely be on board.

But the logic that Reynolds applies to pharmacists could be applied to any number of people in any number of ways. It could require, for instance, that doctors perform abortions even if they don't want to. After all, they're a "monopoly" too, right? It could even require doctors to perform euthanasia if it were to become legal, no matter how opposed they are to it. To bring it back to pharmacists, it could require them to fill prescriptions for morning after pills or even suicide pills were they to be legalized. I'm not sure what to call that, but liberty it is not.

Liberty, as some like to say, is not license. This distinction is one that libertarians themselves often use when people advocate making something which they see as immoral into something illegal. What keeps liberty from becoming license, however, is societal disapproval. That which remains legal mustn't always be tolerated. Society's disapproval for certain behavior helps keep some in line. The only sanctions we have against, for instance, marital infidelity are social. And whether we agree with their disapproval or not (and I disagree with doctors that won't prescribe birth control and pharmacists that won't hand it over), we should not force them to become complicit in the acts they abhor.

I don't like being judged. Nor do I like to be inconvenienced by the preferences of others as I was with the smoke-free music shows in Houston. I would very likely boycott a pharmacist that believed he knew what was right for me. Not just for the things they wouldn't sell me, but for the things they would sell me, too. They have their choices and I have mine. That is liberty.

Pocatello Creek Road, one of the more consequential roads on the east side of Pocatello and the connection between Eel's place and the freeway, is next on the city's hitlist of repairs for the second year in a row.

They've been putting up ominous signs over the last week. Ominous and a bit ambiguous. It says "Construction to start 6/6" and "find alternate routes," but didn't say explicitly whether or not the entire road would close. It's one of the only roads in town I don't think that they could close entirely, though they could deter most traffic through an unholy mess of longwinded detours.

But on Friday they set up the orange cones on the side of the road, presumably so that yesterday morning they could take them out to the road and do whatever they were going to do, whether it be closure-and-detour or one-laning it. Since it's a road that I travel frequently and there's no parallel road available for easy detour (civil engineers take note, this is what happens when Interstates don't have access roads!), their presence was an ominous sign all weekend long. They were like an invading army lining up. They posed no threat where they were, but the problem was that you knew they wouldn't stay there.

It reminded me a bit of the end of the Star Wars Episode Two. The clones, up to that point, had saved the Jedi (and others) from death at the hands of the droids. Yoda and others had worked with them before. They obviously posed no particular threat at that point-in-time. Though, of course, you knew that the clone troopers (along with later drafted human recruits, of course) would eventually become the storm troopers that plagued Luke and Leia and all.

That same ominous feeling.

The cones invaded yesterday and as near as I can tell they're just knocking it down to one lane each way, which is perfectly fine. Coinciding with the lifting of school zone speed limits, it's actually pretty much a wash.

Assuming, of course, that the cones stay at their stations.

[ominous music here]

"Welcome home!"

"Hi!"

"Have a good time in Louisiana?"

"A great one! Woah, what happened to your face? You defoliated the forest*!"

"I did! Don't worry, it's temporary, though."

"Thank gawd."

"... I missed you, too."

*- Eelspeak for "you shaved"

Reuters has an article about obesity that contained an interesting nugget or two:

More than eight hours' TV a week or less than 10-1/2 hours' sleep a night for a three-year-old increase the risk of piling on the pounds, [experts say.

No doubt that the sedentary nature of watching TV can lead to weight gain. I'm less certain what the connection to sleep is, though I'm sure a case can be made that the multitude of problems that lack of sleep causes would include metabolism.

But I can't help but wonder if there is another factor at work here. Rather than being simply cause-and-effect, they could just be associative conditions of something else entirely: overly permissive or disinterested/busy parents.

I'd imagine that permissiveness is a pretty big factor in childhood obesity today. I think that today parents face a certain guilt that wasn't as prevalent in previous generations because of the dual-income household. The lack of time would also contribute to parents not having the time and energy to monitor their childrens habits, whether it be sleep, television, or diet. And, of course, it's no secret that television is the second best babysitter that there is after our public school system. And I'd imagine for some parents, letting your kid stay up in his or her room is less trouble than checking in on them and having inevitable arguments about going to bed.

It's possible the study controlled for that comparing siblings, though there's no indication that it did.

I found this review while searching for a picture of the Care Bears for another post. I can't remember if it was on Amazon or IMDB that I found it, but I found it funny enough to copy and paste to notepad immediately. So here is someone in England's review of the Care Bear movies:

The 'Care' Bear movie. A dangerous plethora of twisted images from the American psyche are explored in this woodland repression vehicle. A dark dream of the degree to which writers in a modern society are prepared to disrupt reality in a bid to blindfold the new generation into the shooting gallery of puberty. Does the carebear have an armpit? The sanitation of children's programming has led to a generation befouled by mishap, angst and Celine Dion. The carebare is a eunuch, there is no personality, no real love or care. They simply serve as a scattered kaleidescope from which to view a one dimensional form of an emotion that short sighted writers have tried to simplify and compress to a generation of consequentially disenfranchised infants. Too much sugar leads to rot and as the Care Bears use their plateau to infect the 'savage' woodland creatures with their semi psychotic care ideology, the creatures lose all hope of developing any sense of identity. They find themselves crushed by the oppressive force of the 'care' and soon they too are carrying the Fascistic emblems, branded, on their bodies. All in all a terrifyingly shortsighted catapult into the ideological catacombs of children's broadgramming. Both chilling and powerful.

See some more of my thoughts on that movie here.

Fifty Cents is too much to pay for a can of RC Cola.

Ten cents is good.

Eight Cents is better.

Two cents, however, represents the best haul I've ever had.

The odd thing is that I didn't even want a coke, really. I was down there waiting for management to get back so that I could pay the rent. I figured that while I was down there I'd take a spin of the roulette wheel. Why not?

Twenty-four cans. I didn't know the machine held that many. I know I can't hold that many. How am I going to drink them?

"By Britain we mean England. Asking us to take seriously the Welsh, Scots, Northern Irish and Cornishmen is a little much, given that the English don't. And, of course, by England, we mean London." -David Cohen

Well it was bound to happen at some point, but it has become official. Eight days from now a new lease will start and twenty-two days from now, I'll be checking out of everyone's favorite converted motel for the last time.

I wasn't intentionally waiting for summer, though it was a really good idea that I did. In the month of May there was a new "Now renting" sign appearing on my way home every day. That gave me a lot of different options, though interestingly the first place I called was perfect and I signed on. More about the new place later.

Moving out of Thrifthaven is not going to be fun. When the water ran for two months last year it really did a number on the walls. Since the markings, warps, et al weren't there when I got there, I am responsible to get it fixed up as well as I can. I also hope that whoever moves in after me doesn't mind that the fridge smells a bit like green burritos, though I'll try to spruce that up as well.

In the meantime, I need to track down who is left of my neighbors and see if I can get those that owe me money to pay up - except Strang, whom I've written off. The good news is that most of them - ahem - got paid on the first of the month. The bad news is that I couldn't track them down yesterday and it's now the second of the month so the money may be all gone depending on whether or not they could get rides to the liquor store.

I was on my way to the mailbox when I was approached by Strang and an unfamiliar woman. She was a petite woman in her thirties. She actually looked a bit older, but I could tell that she was younger than she looked, placing her right back into her thirties. Strang was a bit affected by an undetermined substance or was otherwise incomprehensable. I could understand her no better. Strang was saying something about helping her out and she was saying, I think, "Come here." as she pulled me downstairs.

"Those people scare me," she said. "I mean, I hope they're not your friends."

"I wouldn't worry about that. Now, can you explain the problem again. Slowly, please?"

She kept talking, though I couldn't particularly understand a word that she said. She drove an extremely nice car with Maine license plates and windows conspicuously punched out. When I could finally understand her, she asked if I wanted to buy her husbands new boots.

"Excuse me?"

She asked me again, opening her trunk. Inside were a pair of rather nice-looking RedWing boots. She stopped, looked over at me, and then collapsed in to me. I could smell the whiskey that was slurring her speech. She apologized and said that the boots almost surely wouldn't fit. Did I want a toolbox instead.

It turned out that the boots were size 15. Exactly right.

I tried them on and sure enough, they fit. I put my shoes back on and went over to talk to her. "Where you headed?" I asked, trying to gauge exactly what was going on. Though I'd already more or less guessed it, she said that her husband had shot out the windows of her car. Okay, that last part was a surprise.

"Did you say 'shot?'"

"Yes."

Well, that did explain why she was so interested in selling his stuff. I wasn't sure how hip I was on wearing the shoes of a man that shot out some windows. "You probably shouldn't drive," I said.

"Yeah, but I got to keep going," she said.

"Well, take care."

"Do you want a drink?"

"Excuse me?"

"Do you want a drink? Hey, are you married?"

"I'm engaged."

"Oh, sorry."

"No problem."

"I gotta go," she said as she pulled out.

Tomorrow morning I might wonder if it's all a dream, but the RedWing boots she left behind will tell me that it wasn't.

The New York Times has a fascinating article on romantic love. It particularly caught my interest because of an analogy I made almost a month ago:

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers.

"When you're in the throes of this romantic love it's overwhelming, you're out of control, you're irrational, you're going to the gym at 6 a.m. every day - why? Because she's there," said Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and the co-author of the analysis. "And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live."

[...]

In a follow-up experiment, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Aron and Dr. Brown have carried out brain scans on 17 other young men and women who recently were dumped by their lovers. As in the new love study, the researchers compared two sets of images, one taken when the participants were looking at a photo of a friend, the other when looking at a picture of their ex.

Although they are still sorting through the images, the investigators have noticed one preliminary finding: increased activation in an area of the brain related to the region associated with passionate love. "It seems to suggest what the psychological literature, poetry and people have long noticed: that being dumped actually does heighten romantic love, a phenomenon I call frustration-attraction," Dr. Fisher said in an e-mail message.

One volunteer in the study was Suzanna Katz, 22, of New York, who suffered through a breakup with her boyfriend three years ago. Ms. Katz said she became hyperactive to distract herself after the split, but said she also had moments of almost physical withdrawal, as if weaning herself from a drug.

"It had little to do with him, but more with the fact that there was something there, inside myself, a hope, a knowledge that there's someone out there for you, and that you're capable of feeling this way, and suddenly I felt like that was being lost," she said in an interview.

And no wonder. In a series of studies, researchers have found that, among other processes, new love involves psychologically internalizing a lover, absorbing elements of the other person's opinions, hobbies, expressions, character, as well as sharing one's own. "The expansion of the self happens very rapidly, it's one of the most exhilarating experiences there is, and short of threatening our survival it is one thing that most motivates us," said Dr. Aron, of SUNY, a co-author of the study.

If I had to pick the ten longest days in my entire life, two of them would be December 27th and December 28th, 2000. That was the day that things with Audrey came to a crashing halt and while they weren't entirely over, nothing was going to be the same again. Not for her and not for me. I was less than two weeks out of my relationship with Anna. Over the course of those two weeks I'd lost two futures. To be frank, I wasn't concerned about Anna. The day after things were over with Anna I allowed myself unrestricted emotion for Audrey. A couple days after that... things started to fall apart. It took almost a week for them to completely unravel.

It was unfortunately Christmas break at the time. Other than work I had nothing to be doing. I tried to sleep for hours on end. I wanted to go to bed and wake up when I would be over it. Unfortunately it doesn't always work that way and sometimes you have to suffer through it. It's part of the process of expunging your dreams. It's part of a process of ripping a part of you away - of ripping the spine out of the life you had, lost, and suddenly needed to rebuild.

If I had to pick two more days to be in the ten longest, it would be April 25th and April 26th. A little over a month ago, I was at Applebees making the comparison between December of 2000 and what I was feeling right then. Among other things, it reminded me of one of the Carebear movies I saw when I was young. A little boy trying to learn magic was turned over to the dark side. to represent this, the illustrators put black bags under the eyes of the young man. The shy and timid boy was now brash and evil.

That's how I felt. Anger. Bitterness. Instead of being the product of some evil magic book's evil deeds, it was the product of fear. I hadn't realized how much of my life had been revolving around the cigarettes. I figured that since I was down to a few a day anyhow that I was 90% there. I figured that since last year in Florida I managed to go an entire week without a cigarette, without going crazy, and without much in the way of physical withdrawal symptoms (day three and four are a bit tough, but some advil and ephedra always did the trick).

But what I didn't realize was that the difference between quitting for a little while and quitting permanently is the difference between leaving your lover for a week on a business trip and moving out. It's different entirely. The cigarette during break at work had somehow become a part of my coping with the every day stresses of work. The victory cigarette after work was the bridge between work and play. I'd used them to digest food, to pontificate, and to relax. It wasn't a matter of numbers, as I'd previously thought, it was a matter of having that escape. It was a matter of her being home when I got there... even if we weren't ineracting nonstop when I did.

Just as in late 2000, the days were dragging on forever. The stresses of work - in both cases - were suddenly a welcome relief from the haunting ghost in the back of my head and the fear that it would consume me. I was afraid to run and I was afraid to confront it all. I knew my life was about to seriously change, which is hard enough, but I didn't have the first clue as to how it was going to change.

And then... and then... things get better. I forget what I really saw in her (temporarily, but that's another story). I find it hard to believe that I was ever a smoker. I do. After a month. It may be the strangest thing I've ever experienced. There are gaping holes in the middle of my day that I have to fill. There are still things I don't know how I'm going to cope with. But as even a little time passes I look back and I laugh at myself. And I shake my head and sigh.

And, oddly, I don't regret a minute of it.

And I hope I never, ever, have to do it again.