Are my eyes really blue?

One of the toughest things to do in life is to stop trying to be the person you were and become the person you are. I am struggling with this 40 thing like you wouldn’t believe. I’m in compete denial about how old I am and I don’t really have a good point of reference for other people my age without children. I’m trying not to be glum and grim and fatalistic and make myself 60 already and sit around wondering what kind of crippling disease I’ll invariably succumb to, but the bloody painkillers aren’t helping.

This is not as grim as that setup makes it sound. But it is disconcerting nonetheless. Over the last couple of weeks ,I’ve been conducting a major wardrobe audit, occasioned largely by the wife’s discovery of those thin fuzzy hangers that let you fit more in the closet. It’s forced not only a wardrobe appraisal but a reassessment of the pile of shoes covering the floor.

(God, this feels strange to write. Nevertheless, onward.)

And what I learned, most unsettlingly, is that the leather jackets and the Dr Martens boots just aren’t who I am anymore.

Some of this makes perfect sense. My black ForLife Docs and my Solovairs are ill-fitting in opposite directions, the riot reds aren’t the sort of thing you can wear around, and the steel-toes, while comfortable as hell, are impractical as daily wear when I’m not driving or working light industrial. And I don’t want to wear out the date-night Docs.

But more unsettling is the jacket situation. The black leather car coat has been in storage more or less since moving to California, and the brown suede trucker jacket has always felt wrong somehow despite my best efforts to force it to work – not least because it’s just a bit too heavy for all but the coldest days here. But there’s the Indy jacket – the brown leather jacket that was the trademark of my wardrobe in DC, the thing my wife thinks of from our early days. It was iconic. And looking at myself in the mirror now, it looks wrong somehow. Like a guy coming back to his high school reunion in his letterman jacket.

Shoes and outerwear have always been critical to my sense of wardrobe. Hat too – and I didn’t do that much with hats in DC or here until the last year or so, but now that black Vanderbilt baseball fitted is my everyday hat, and I do mean every day. But now, my barnwood Topsiders feel more like me. Or my Palladium ultralites (which I just replaced) or my waterproof Palladiums in moss gray leather for winter. Maybe those boat shoes are appealing because I can skip the socks, like in the DC summer days. Or maybe they just look sufficiently mature somehow.

So the jackets then. The Uniqlo stuff is working out nicely. The peacoat is at long last the very thing I want for cold weather (and looks absolutely perfect). In the meantime, I’m looking at what’s in between, debating the work-jacket look (for almost two years now) and vacillating between a ScottEVest Standard (which would hold the iPad) and a Filson-Levi’s trucker jacket (which would lasts a lifetime and be more water-resistant).

I guess this is all part and parcel of accepting that I am not the person I was eight years ago, when I first grasped I wasn’t the person I used to be. And despite everything, I can’t really get away with looking like a grad student anymore. Fewer polos, more button-ups, casual sportcoats instead of shells and fleece and leathers.

Whoever it turns out I am, I should look the part. It’ll cost money, but that’s the price of not looking like a grad student at 40.

In my mind, the movie begins with the opening strains of Enigma’s “Return to Innocence”. Silhouette of a figure in the back yard with an empty mason jar, bending over to scoop out the earth from the spot where his sandpile used to be as a kid. Then, a couple hours later, the Pet Sop Boys with “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing” as the two-car procession tears up 65 to 440 before turning onto 21st Street to arrive in Hillsboro Village for move-in day. A couple of days to stockpile groceries, buy the things that weren’t packed, plenty of souvenirs for everyone from the bookstore, and then the family left…and there I was, alone at Vanderbilt.

I wasn’t really worried about anything. It was political science, which I’d already proven I was good at. It was a department of people I had met in March, felt like I’d fit in well with. It was the school of a million Southern dreams, achievement and validation all in one. And they were paying me to be there. If only I hadn’t had my girlfriend…but that’s another story.

I bought “Mystery Road,” the Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ album of my undergrad freshman days, and played it on my year-old boom box with my apartment windows open in the cool bright spring afternoon of early September. I flipped between six different stations on my car stereo – KDF, Lightning 100, Thunder 94, a couple of top-40 offerings and WRVU. There was plenty of music to go around; after Birmingham, it was unbelievable to have a station for every slot. My memory is full of Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, the late-grunge era before “alternative” became a meaningless label.

I could walk to Calhoun Hall in ten minutes – the beginning of nine years of non-car commuting over the next decade. I could walk to the Munchie Mart in three, and swipe my Commodore Card for snacks and drinks until midnight. I could walk over to Rand for meals, or hang out in Sarratt for movies or just coffee at the Overcup Oak. I had all the trappings of a real honest-to-God college experience, right up to a smashing win over Wake Forest in my first ever football game for an academic institution I attended.

I had an email address – my second one, after my brief eWorld experience when I first bought my Mac – and would walk down to the main computer lab at Peabody with its array of Macs that allowed me to download software to take back to my own machine and experiment with. Or just telnet onto CTRVAX and exchange email with the tiny handful of people I knew who had it. I started puzzling out things like Gopher and FTP. I was even tempted by Mosaic, although there was precious little at which to point it.

Even the wardrobe had changed. Slightly. I had a rack of new sportcoats that were meant to be my new go-to outerwear, although I would have traded the lot for just one solid reliable Harris tweed with elbow patches and sturdy enough to roll up as a pillow and wear an hour later. I would still get through a ton of Nikes, and before 1994 was out I would buy a pullover Vandy Starter jacket and a big new leather coat that became known as The Elk. I had new Vibram soles put on my Eastern Europe boots and bought my first Wayfarers from the bookstore.

I felt different. I felt like I knew who I was and who I was going to be. It felt like the world had changed – Cold War over, Soviet Union no more, Democratic control of both halves of Congress and the White House to boot. There was an information superhighway opening up and before long, we were all going to be living in the future. And here I was in a new town – new freeways to learn, new malls to peruse, new stations on TV, new restaurants to take care of dinner. Hell, there was Target and there was Boston Market, and we sure as hell hadn’t had that in the old country.

I was 22, and the future was perfect.

And the kids who are moving into the dorms at Vandy for the first time this weekend were born that autumn.

It’s not the years, it’s the mileage. Dr. Jones nailed that one with accuracy and precision.

1) As more than one commentator has noted: can you imagine the outrage if a Democratic candidate who never served in the military announced a VP pick who never served in the military – from the deck of a battleship?

2) Also as more than one commentator has pointed out: this is the first ticket in American history without a Protestant. LDS and Catholic. In a way, this is a tribute to how things have changed – tribal loyalties have shifted and political team trumps everything else on the right. Because if you’d run a Mormon and a Papist thirty years ago down South, that campaign would have been deader than fuckin’ fried chicken…but in 2012 the Romney/Ryan bill will sweep the Deep South states without a fight.

3) More amazing (and personally gratifying to me) is that even though the Republican platform could not be more intrinsically Southern if you dipped it in buttermilk and fried it in pig drippings, this is the second consecutive election in which neither ticket will feature anyone even tangentially Southern. The last time this happened unambiguously was 1920-24, a time when there was no such thing as a GOP down South and when the national Democrats were still on the run from “rum, Romanism and rebellion”. 1968-72 was ambiguous; Spiro Agnew was from a former slave state that never seceded, Tom Eagleton was from Missouri (even if he only lasted a few days on the ticket), and George Wallace actually won states as a third-party candidate (the last man to do so) so there was still a decisive Southern politician in play for ’68.

I say all that to say this: sixteen years ago, the core of my proposed dissertation in political science was the proposition that Southern politics were being nationalized, especially on the right. And now look at the GOP platform and its commitments: loudly partisan and patriotic, anti-taxation, pro-business, opposed to government expansion, dismissive of public services when not outright taking the “root hog or die” position on things like Medicare and Social Security, fiery in its advocacy for radical individualism, leavened with a lot of sotto voce racism in its treatment of minorities, explicitly religious, and ripe with personal attacks and deliberate opprobrium with a casual regard for truth…this is basically the essence of Southern campaigning for the last century, almost from the moment the Democrats regained the whip hand in the states of the old Confederacy.

And this platform, this mission, this belief system – this is the basis for a campaign by a Mormon from Massachusetts and his Catholic running mate from Wisconsin. Two decades after a couple of guys from Arkansas and Tennessee brought us the New South Presidency, two candidates from the states of Kennedy and LaFollette and out to deliver the Old South version.

I was right. I was dead solid right and I nailed it exactly. The older I get, the better I was. I just hope I’m wrong about the other thing I thought twenty or twenty-five years ago.

Of which, as I say, more later.

4) Last but not least: this is a pick that was met with ecstasy on both sides. For the GOP, Paul Ryan is the 21st century Newt Gingrich: the big thinker whose ideas and genius will tear those filthy Democrats limb from limb. For the Democrats, the prospect of running against somebody who proposes to scuttle Medicare and Social Security, whose deficit-hawk bona fides curiously only appeared once Obama was inaugurated, who is on the record with his admiration for an avowed atheist and wealth-worshipper – the general consensus appears to be “PLEEEEEEEASE DON’T THROW ME IN THAT BRIAR PATCH”.

Romney may yet win this election. But if he doesn’t, there’s a good case to be made that he lost it this morning.

If its really Paul Ryan…well, this means several things:

1) it means Multiple Choice Mitt is in serious fecal arrears with his base, and needs the poster child for the Serious Austerity Right to shore up the faithful.

2) it means a hell of a lot of hue and cry over a budget that apparently enjoys approval ratings similar to herpes…which get worse after people analyze it. It also means that the Ryan Budget will get serious national attention, and they may not be glad it did.

3) it’s a bet – a HUGE bet – that they can buy off baby boomers and get away with shafting everyone under 55. As someone who just broke 40 myself, I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea that I now have to start saving for my own basic health insurance on top of my own retirement – essentially it’s the “ROOT HOG OR DIE” approach to retirement for everyone born after the Eisenhower administration. In other words, a reversion to pre-New Deal ideas of growing old in a world where life expectancy has grown by twenty years or so.

Romney is already in trouble – the Reid-led attacks on his taxes have found the mark and Team Obama is firing for effect. As a rule, when you’re complaining about the fairness of the attacks against you and asking for a truce – of any kind – you’re losing. And with the economy showing signs of life which could improve by November, it’s rapidly beginning to look like this election may turn into a referendum on the future of Social Security and Medicare. And a lot of the country may react negatively to securing the future of the original Me Generation at their own expense.

Besides, Nixon was right: a VP cannot help you, he can only hurt you (and not to be utterly sexist, but She – so far – ruins you). If you’re relying on a VP pick to save your campaign, you’ve lost already. The rest is just scoreboard.

Back to action after a badly needed week off.  The Tahoe portion was just right – some getting away from it all, not just sitting around doing nothing but not pressured to do anything either, and two nights away was just the right amount to leave time to accomplish everything at home – whether that consisted of getting projects done or determining they didn’t need doing at this point.

Not least among the achievements was finally cleaning up the home Mac mini and its iTunes management and backup solution.  The machine was bought in February 2010, but it was the previous model (in an internal Apple new-old-stock clearance) and it’s showing its age, so getting reliable backups set up and a less complicated model for managing iTunes was nice (the wife and I share an iTunes ID but have different content and playlists, and previous attempts to fix and consolidate had left a slew of duplicates and no room on the hard drive to maneuver. Comment if you want details; it’s too boring even for me to recount.)

So hanging out the wash for Monday morning:

* ‘Er indoors is changing jobs.  Which is always exciting and terrifying in similar measure, not least because it means willfully giving up your track record and institutional memory and regenerating, and putting in the necessary time to progress from Rookie of the Year to Most Improved to MVP to The Wolf.  Fortunately, I have absolutely no doubt that she will do it, and faster than I could, because she has a bunch of stupid stuff like “diligence” and “professionalism” and “initiative” and “talent” and bullshit. ;]

 

* The Apple-Samsung saga continues, this time with the extent to which Samsung ripped off iOS wholesale for its own UI – literally its own UI, as Samsung’s Android devices use their own proprietary TouchWiz UI over top of Android’s native interface. Color, graphic elements – it’s absurd. The hits just keep on coming from the media covering the case, too – this article actually does a good job breaking down how even the packaging design abruptly changed after the iPhone hit.  Not that any of this is particularly surprising for those who saw the “Blackjack” and “Blade” launched in the wake of the success of the Blackberry and RAZR.

 

* So another tragic shooting, and this one pretty clearly the work of a white supremacist with more guns than intelligence.  At this point, it’s absurd – James Fallows has the definitive lines, which I will quote in full:

One person who (unsuccessfully) threatened the lives of his fellow airline passengers ten-and-a-half years ago has changed air travel for every single passenger on every U.S. flight in all the time since then. We responded (and over-responded) to that episode with a “this won’t happen again” determination, like other countries’ response to mass shootings. It is hard to know what kind of mass killing with guns would evoke a similar determination in America. The murder of six people including a federal judge and near-killing of a Congresswoman last year obviously didn’t do it. Nor, in all probability, will these latest two multi-death shootings. In their official statements of condolence yesterday, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney replicated their achievement after the Aurora murders: Neither used the word “gun.”

This is where we are at – the media, the elected officials and the very citizenry of this country have been so completely mau-maued by the NRA and its apologists in conservative media that no one will even table the possibility of doing something to impede, however slightly, the ability of one person to obtain military-grade weapons and ammunition and attack without warning.  One hint that somebody might make some sort of secret terrifying Wonka bomb and we’re dumping our drinks out and putting our shoes through the X-ray for years. Two mass killings in a month, enabled by assault weapons, and what are we prepared to do?  Fuckall.

This isn’t difficult. No weapon with a sporting purpose honestly needs more than five rounds between reloads. I’m willing to countenance ten, even.  But I’m having a really hard time understanding why you need thirty shots and instant reload unless you’re deliberately looking for trouble.  And yet, as I say, as long as we remain in thrall to the people who want to need the guns, we’re going to have trouble.  Of which more later.

 

* Mat Honan famously ran into trouble this week when somebody managed to social-engineer a password change out of Apple tech support.  The problem was, since his Google account was sending its backup email to that iCloud mail address, it was a simple matter to get the Google password reset – and from there it was a piece of cake to start wiping his devices.  And because he had his Twitter account linked to Gizmodo’s, once they had a way into his Twitter, they were able to use Gizmodo’s for all sorts of mischief.

The problem with the cloud is the problem of any ecosystem: you need diversity.  You can’t put all your eggs in Apple’s basket, or Google’s, or Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s. A non-trivial chunk of what I do is run on a private system where I married the operator’s sister.  None of my Twitter accounts are linked together (although some do follow each other, what do you want from me).  Large pieces of the system don’t overlap at all – nothing in Google points back to iCloud, nothing in iCloud points to Yahoo, there’s no remote support to fiddle for my private system, etcetera. Diverse ecosystem = robust ecosystem.  If one piece of my operation falters, I have something to fall back on, pretty much across the board.  This is not by accident.

 

* Starting tomorrow, we’ll find out whether “early to bed and early to rise” is going to happen for yer boy.  Fingers crossed.

 

For a long time, I’ve banged the drum for the notion that the only hope for the South will be when everyone for whom segregation is living memory is dead and gone – and quite possibly their kids too (and yes, I know this means me).  The counter-argument has always been that you need that living memory – you need the people who remember what it meant to have separate drinking fountains, the people for whom To Kill A Mockingbird rings dangerously true, the people who can say with authority “no, I know this sounds absurd but it really happened.”

The problem is, having living testimony isn’t worth it anymore. Having people around who want to go back? That’s a much greater impact now.  And it’s spreading, especially now that they’ve discovered an “immigration crisis” to allow them to try to legally crap on brown people and “assaults on freedom of religion” to let them lash back at gay Americans, or even ordinary women who might want preventive care without mortgaging the house to pay for it.  And now that you can show The Other a great big middle finger with the simple expedient of eating the right fast food – has there ever been a more perfectly Teatard demonstration? Ever? – I’m more convinced than ever that the whole alternate reality occupied by the Old Ones is going to be a problem going forward.

And that’s why it’s not worth it.  If nobody who remembers segregation (and wants to go back) is still around, that living memory isn’t going to be all that necessary anyway.  And right now, the Old Ones form far too much of the rank-and-file of the army of delusionals who want things back “the way they used to be” – even if much of it is a figment of the popular imagination.

History and memory are important, but we’ve gotten to the point where the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

Some people say you get old when you sign your first mortgage.  Or when you have your first child. Or your second. Personally I’d say I really started feeling old when I first started wondering whether any given set of aches and pains was going to be there for the rest of my life.  But aside from that, I’d throw one other criterion in there: you’re a grownup the first time you realize you can’t remember the last time you checked your balance at the ATM before just getting money out.

Alternately – and this is what put me on this train of thought – maybe it’s when your default ATM withdrawal goes from $20 to $100.  I had to forcibly make myself only get out $40 at a time, both in an attempt to force more spending to the credit card (where it can earn Starwood points and be more easily audited) and to prevent the slow leakage that comes with extra cash on hand. If you’ve got $89 in your pocket, you’re less likely to think twice about throwing two bucks on a bottle of Zero.

I don’t have a really good sense of money.  I famously agonized for months over buying a $21 Nerf gun (with accessories) a couple of years back. The ridiculous thing was that I could have packed my lunch one day and not bought any sodas or snacks between meals for two days and HAD the $21.  The amount of money I’ve sunk into short-term soda rental in my life is truly staggering, if you think about it, and I can’t afford to.

But then again – there lies the problem. My shoulder was largely better until a couple of nights in a strange bed with unhelpful pillows skewed the whole thing again, and the temptation is to run down to a nice reputable spa and have somebody give my shoulder the business.* The only thing is, that’ll set me back a slick $90 plus tip – and the benefits of it may well be gone in a day or two.  The watch I agonized over for more than a year and finally bought myself for my 40th birthday with assorted gift money?  Basically a little over two massages, and that could well last me for decades.

Ultimately, that may be the biggest part of how I stopped buying cigars (not just a question of smoking locations) or how I made it two nights in Tahoe without ever stepping up to a craps table and putting down money.  Or why I’m far more likely to spend my impulse purchasing on Kindle books.  Or why I stopped chasing cell phones with a guaranteed lifespan of only a couple of years, or why I was so reluctant to take the iPad plunge for so long. Or why cocktails have replaced straight liquor when going out drinking – I could buy a bottle at BevMo and get out cheaper, so put the money into something I don’t have the time, ingredients or skill to make myself instead.

Maybe that’s why I’m still sidelong-glancing at that Filson jacket.**  Lifetime warranty? Now that’s value for money.

 

 

* When I did this in December, they did a full hour and change of hardcore Swedish therapy massage.  By the end of it, my nose was running, my ears were ringing, I was too dizzy to walk and I’m pretty sure I gave up the location of the secret Rebel base.

** Having just completed a jacket audit (and getting ready to start on shoes), I’m more convinced than ever that I have to have something done with drugs or surgery about the jacket glee.  If I’m serious about avoiding “performance outerwear” as the look, it’s going to be damned difficult to do water-resistant without being too heavy.  Might be time to custom-tailor my existing oilcloth coat and see if I can make the pockets work for me…

NBC would find a way to botch a gangbang in a whorehouse. But you would have expected that, given that the Today Show’s executive producer is in charge of Olympic coverage. As a result, events are delayed eight hours and then delayed further so Ryan Seacrest can tell us what Joe Jonas was Tweeting about the opening ceremonies LAST NIGHT.

This isn’t sports. This is sports thrown in a blender, drowned under entire tankers of schmaltz and nonsense, dumbed down to appeal to the kind of people who think the Today Show is a newscast, and then they shower themselves in celebrating their own cleverness. And the worst part is that we don’t have a choice. We have to dig like hell if we want to somehow steal an illegal stream of the BBC’s coverage, because the “live streaming” NBC claims to offer has yet to function all day for me (thanks largely to basing their tablet app around the binary abortion that is Adobe AIR).

Nobody wants to watch the shit NBC throws up there. They watch because they’re a captive audience – they have the only Sunday night NFL game, they have the only home games for Notre Dame, they have the Olympics all to themselves. They pay to get it and then we are stuck with them. So much for the invisible hand of the market – NBC is apparently content with just the middle finger.

So don’t let the numbers fool you, Peacock Network: your coverage has taken the Pea out of your name. If we had any sense, we’d all rely on the stream and only the stream and maybe move the needle a little. Except, because we “need the contextual help”, NBC wouldn’t stream the opening ceremonies.

Cocks. All of them.

Bill Simmons stole my thunder a little, with his huge Grantland post about the summer Olympics as the signposts of his passing life.  He sticks only to the summer games, which leaves out a lot as far as I’m concerned – I’ve always liked the winter games better, and they are my own set of signposts – 1980 as the first Olympics of any kind that I actually remember. 1988 bound up with the Presidential primaries and a friend’s huge sweet-16 surprise birthday party and those first inklings that there would be something to this college business. 1994 tied in with the last semester of undergrad and watching ice skating every time it came around. 1998 in that strange liminal period after first moving north, 2002 seen from DC in the wake of the attacks, 2006 invariably tied to the wedding of Team Black Swan East and my transition at Cupertino Hexachrome Fruit.  2010 should be brighter in my memory, what with curling-mania and the fact we had a friend working the Games, but apparently not yet.

But this is summer, and I’m thinking of the last couple of games.  2004, when we’d first moved here and were kind of housesitting-slash-sorta-babysitting at my sister-in-law’s house, with their much bigger TV.  And the ubiquitous AT&T ads that pushed me to want a faster and more capable phone (though it wasn’t much of a push). Again, that liminal period when I hadn’t really gotten a sense of where I was or what my life was going to be like, having just started a contract job with an uncertain future (albeit, in retrospect, one a lot brighter than it would become a couple of months on).  And 2008, which overlapped with my latter time on the NASA contract, when I was still pretty miserable about work and wondering what I was going to do.  Six months later, I had the job I have now – a job which is driving me up the wall at present.  Good job the wife and I are taking a week off.

Four years seems to be a pretty good marker – long enough that you can see what’s happened in your life with a little bit of distance.  And yet not so long that it seems forever ago.  I’ve been here at this job longer now than I was at my first one, even including contract time – but it doesn’t seem like as long.  Maybe it’s because I’m older and time goes faster, or maybe because I haven’t had as many changes of job duties and my general role to act as markers.  I’ve avoided surgery at this job, at least, and that’s got to count for something.

And now London, first three-time host.  The Olympics weren’t yet the Olympics in 1908, not as we think of them now – the main point was washing away the bad taste left over from the horrific sideshow-trainwreck of St Louis.  And 1948 was the year of the famous “Austerity Games,” the UK staging an Olympics three years removed from war in Europe and rationing still in full effect.  This time, it’s the real, full-blown, modern Olympic machine in full roar.  We were there in London in April 2005, before the games were awarded, when everything was “BACK THE BID” and enthusiasm was high.  And then they got it, and then the July 7 bombings, and then seven years of “how exactly is this going to work?”

I haven’t seen the opening ceremonies yet, thanks to the worst network in America handling the coverage – NBC, the people who brought you “plausibly live” tape-delay coverage of an Olympics held in Eastern Daylight Time – but the spoilers and bits and bobs leaking through Twitter make it sound like it’s going to be a right knees-up and no fooling.  I hope it is.  I hope they get to enjoy it.  I hope I enjoy it, which is largely to say I hope the iPad battery holds up and the streaming doesn’t suck.

Light ’em up.

Not enough that Samsung came out with a thin-and-flat flip phone called the Blade, or a keyboard phone called the Blackjack, or that their tablet’s charger looks amazingly like a certain 30-pin connector, or that their trade show booth in Germany was chockablock with the icons of iOS default applications…

Now comes the one-two punch: the judge sanctions Samsung for destroying email after already having notice to preserve documents, and evidence in court suggests that Google actually warned Samsung off the design for the Galaxy Tab because they thought it looked far too much like an iPad.

You don’t have to be a MacMac or a fanboy or think Apple is some kind of saintly organization made of rainbows and puppies to realize that as it stands, they’ve got a pretty damn good case that Samsung is a colossal rip-off artist.  This is the legacy of that intro speech in 2007, when Steve Jobs said they’d patented the hell out of the iPhone and would defend it.  This is the ghost of Steve Jobs remembering the “look and feel” case against Windows and, once again, doing everything in its power to make sure Apple would never be taken advantage of again…