Meek New World

In a second, I'm going to be the five-billionth person to talk about technology and how it's changed our lives. So, you know, brace yourselves for innovation.
As has slowly become more and more apparent, my natural inclination is to introversion. This is only fractionally surprising because I had about a 6-7 year run starting in college during which time I was pretty legitimately extroverted. Basically all my life before and after this sustained bout of openness has been what I now clearly deem to be my true state of being.
It's not that I don't like people or that I don't enjoy being around them, it's just that usually I don't need other people, and in fact I not-infrequently prefer to be totally alone. Additionally, in most instances when a decision could be made to do something either more or less socially, I will almost always choose the "less."
Anyhow, this fancy thing called the text message just happens to allow me to much more easily be myself.
People surely remember what it was like to communicate without text messages. You actually had to speak to someone else, like verbally. And you had to listen at the same time. It was weird. And awkwardly intimate. If someone was your friend, you had to call him on the phone to make plans to see him, plus you'd inevitably have to exchange pleasantries while doing so. There would be no sports or asinine commercials on the TV to use as a social crutch. And assuming you were trying to get together more than just one other person (again, the group setting to be used as a social crutch), you'd have to repeat this verbal conversation several times, likely even more than once for a couple of individuals. The horror, indeed.
My own personal timeline with this is a little bit undescriptive because wholesale texting started not too long after I left college and clearly my social dynamic was changing a lot at that time anyway, but I can pretty easily say that I communicate directly with far more people now than I did pre-text.
As long as you don't engage in many one-on-one dinners or conversations with people, it's much easier to maintain seemingly meaningful friendships in the texting world. I'm probably a little outside the meaty part of the bell curve on this, but think about your own list of regular communicators. I dare you to tell me that you would talk all of those people as regularly if you actually had to talk to them every time. No chance.
When you are in college, you have lots of "friends" who are such largely because of ease and proximity. They aren't actually your friends, because as soon as you or they move away you stop talking to them. Sure, it's easy to reconnect every once in a while and you would probably still get along fine, but they aren't on your speed dial. There are certain people who are your friends in college who truly are your friends and you in fact do keep in at least semi-regular contact with them afterwards, but there are more who you don't.
The text message allows a lot of those people who are fringe friends to stay in your inner circle. They aren't simply proximate friends like in college but their existence is your life is just as lazy for you. Because you don't have to really invest or engage or share those awkwardly intimate moments of direct one-on-one verbal communication, your dissimilarity or true standing with each other never has to be confronted. The text message lets us all be cowards. Which is fine with me, as long as I don't have to tell you that to your face, with actual spoken words.

A Nice Run

(As promised, here I am going to talk briefly about something nice.)

A city as big and populated and well-known as New York, so much so that a lot of its imagery is little more than cliche at this point, can still amaze. I'm going to say thank you now to Red Hook for giving me something different to see, and doing it so close by.
Yesterday I started a run near dusk, planning to head toward the harbor waterfront and then south into Red Hook for a little bit, then return home. I did this, sorta, only my mind was in just the right place so I got swept up in the sights and I went farther than expected. A lot of times when running I glaze over and simply cover the appointed ground, but sometimes my eyes are wide and my course is spontaneous and any turn can be exploratory.
I ran south as close as you can get to the water (which, until you've gotten through Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens and into Red Hook, is not that close. Good-sized chunks of land that look no better than parking lots separate the road from the water) until starting to zig-zag westward until coming onto Imlay Street. This is a very unattractive street but in my state it was so barren and desolate that it became fascinating. The very long continuous warehouse running along the west side of the street for a while impressed me. In my horribly gentrified way, I wondered what it would be like to live there, turning one of the upper floors into a huge flat. Think of the sunsets, at least.
Continuing south and west as the darkness started to come in earnest, I think I had a little sense of freedom, the kind a city-dweller gets when confronted with openness or aloneness for the first time in a long while, just running along the blocks, seeing no one, warehouse after factory passing empty and quiet, the sidewalks getting rougher, Brooklyn seeming to keep jutting farther and farther into the still-unseen water. What must it be like to spend parts of your day or even your life in that corner of the borough, so obviously unlike so much that surrounds it (what's the antonym of aloof?). Does any of that industrial footprint see honest use anymore? I finally took a right turn on Wolcott Street and got very near to the water next to what might be a Snapple factory. There was a chain link fence that I stopped and stared through just about 15 feet from the powerful water. I was standing just across a narrow channel of harbor from the bottom end of Governor's Island, so the currents were fairly imposing, almost as much as the large sharp rocks lining both shores. This is not some place I'd want to take a swim. And yet the scene was at the same time very peaceful, and the view was certainly stunning. Straight north up the channel was a perfectly framed image of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. And out across the harbor, with little Governor's Island acting as a shield, whatever quicker pace might be represented by downtown Manhattan was totally drowned out and spread thin and wide across the entire harbor, absorbing itself into the shores of Jersey and Staten Island.
Finally I turned from my trance and for the first time on the run, headed away from the water. I was close to the bottom of Red Hook and decided to keep following the curve of land, into more and more desolate surroundings, which is why it was so odd to see, on Van Dyke Street, a very small sign and driveway (yes, a driveway) leading off to a place selling key lime pies. Maybe they're imported pies from Europe, I don't know. Straight off the boat, you know.
A few blocks further, near the corner of Conover and Reed, after having not seen another human for probably ten minutes, I improbably came upon a youngish woman carrying grocery bags. To my shock, I discovered a full-size Fairway market around the corner of Reed Street. With a full-sized suburban parking lot and everything.
Just a block or more away from the Fairway, on the other side of yet another big long warehouse on a pier, there was an inlet coming right up to an open chain-link fence that offered me a clear view of the waterfront scene. In the deepening dark and stagnant water it was entirely decrepit except for the odd sight of perhaps ten large and expensive-looking private boats. Like a marina in Connecticut, only amidst the Red Hook wasteland.
At this point, I was just a block or two away from having the whole scene open up thanks to the brightness of Ikea. Here though I made yet another surprising discovery: Ikea did an amazing job of revitalizing the waterfront behind their massive store. There is grass and a little waterfront parkways for walking or biking or whatever. They even left the massive docking machinery on the long skinny piers (hell, it may even still be in use). I ran and weaved my way along the water all the way to Columbia Street, stopping once to be almost confused by the low buildings out a few hundred meters across the water. I knew it was too close to be the rest of Brooklyn, but it seemed way too far away to be a pier. Lo and behold, after I got home and checked a map, but there is a huge hook-shaped pier at the bottom of Red Hook. It was too dark for me to tell if the pier was itself red, but I'd like to think that it must be.
Anyhow, I meandered home along a more familiar route, enjoying the cool air of early fall, even if that air conspired with my warm sweaty body to chafe my nipples. The point is that I spent maybe 45 minutes and traveled no farther than about 1.5 miles (as the crow flies) from my apartment, and yet I was able to feel like a little kid exploring new places.
This is a thing that I'm sure most New Yorkers take for granted. Our city houses 8 million people, and has been crowded for many many years. So there are experiences--both to be had to be remembered--all around in every corner of every neighborhood on every foot of land. You just can't get that in many places.
So thanks New York, thanks Brooklyn, thanks Red Hook.

Chicago Errata

I never took the time to mention anything about my Chicago trip from a couple weeks ago, so now here are some bits of impression:
1. Chicago is a very segregated city. I mean, very segregated. I was looking at a website while there that had demographic info on each of the many neighborhoods (Chicago prides itself on being a "city of neighborhoods," if you didn't know. Presumably that's to make it seem more friendly). I can't remember which, but one had a Hispanic concentration of 97%. That's 97, not 9.7. I made the joke to a couple people that NYC doesn't even have single apartment buildings with that high a concentration of any one race or ethnicity. It's pretty ridiculous, but evidently that's how it works. I guess there are some benefits to having an relatively exclusive community to yourself if you belong to a minority, but that can't be good in the larger sense.
2. The is a punk club located in an oddly barren spot along North Ave that's called Exit Chicago. On its marquee it offers two proclamations: "Chicago's first punk club," and "since 1983." That's cute, Chicago. Really, 1983?
3. Another bit of date oddness: I went to a basement bar/seafood restaurant (that was pretty cool and good food actually) that claimed on its outside sign to have been open "since 1969," while the sign inside claimed its founding at 1968. This wouldn't be as odd, but the two signs are literally not more than 5 three-dimensional feet away from each other.
4. Location isn't terribly important when it comes to the cost of renting apartments. You would pay close to the same cost for a decent 2-bedroom in a far northern neighborhood as you would for an identical place in the more conveniently located and hipper Lincoln Park. Obviously this is a gross simplification of things a realtor told me, but taken in context to my six-year residence of NYC, it's pretty jarring information.
5. Chicago is on a grid system too. Now, truly--forgive me for even suggesting this, but--their grid is probably even smarter than ours. It's not simply based on numbered blocks, but actual measured blocks. As opposed to having a bar located at 86th St and 2nd Ave, you'd have a bar located at 2400 North Clark and 800 West Diversey (that address is not necessarily perfect, I'm just making it up from memory, though it's probably not off by a huge amount). All you need to know is that the N/S/E/W quadrants zero downtown, and that it's a half-mile for every 400. So really all you need is the address and you're there. It's just a full mathematical graph, whereas NYC's is more of a single-quadrant graph. I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting to something new. It's increibly intuitive though, and that's right up my alley.
6. The El is a horrible idea, and it's the great stubborn fault of the city itself that they've never put it underground. It's dirty, it's loud, it's exposed to their horrible winter, and it's slow. How the El ever came to be some romantic image of Chicago is beyond me. Wake the fuck up, people.
7. This says more about me living in NYC than anything else, but there is a lot of light in Chicago. You don't get the constantly-shaded canyon effect there. At 3:00PM on a sunny day, you can walk down the sidewalk and be bathed in sun. There are definite benefits to not having many buildings taller than 4 stories, and not as densely packed.
8. If anyone ever wanted to know where Chicago sits on the continuum of American cities, there were far far more areas there that reminded me of Columbus than New York. This is slightly unfair, as NY is unique, but it's also true. While Chicago is certainly large and definitely has the feel of a city some magnitude larger than Columbus, it feels to me even more than that smaller than NY. Maybe "smaller" is not the best descriptor. It's residential. It's downtown stacks up nicely with anyplace, but it goes almost immediately from there to endless blocks of houses and townhomes and small apartment buildings.

Another for the "Well, No Shit" File

Today is a cover-the-reception-desk-at-work day. It's also a leave-early day, as I'm out at 4:15 to catch a flight to Chicago for a long weekend. Because of this, I knew I knew I'd have some time to maybe do a post, and almost jokingly I asked Sara what I should write about. She said "getting married." Ok.

1. For reasons that will become clear, I believe that the one thing a man should keep secret from his woman (above your ATM pin or any other important financial passwords) is the password to his Netflix account.
2. Over the last two nights, I spent a total of 134 minutes watching the Sex and the City movie.
3. Ommitted for effect.
4. If you've watched a movie and are having a hard time deciding if it was any good, let me offer this tip: start it up somewhere randomly in the middle and make your judgement soon after; you don't need to watch more than the first 4-5 minutes. Make sure you start it up cold, meaning without any memory or residual emotion leftover from your first viewing. When you do this, you are getting only the quality of the film and you're most likely not getting a big climactic scene (that would have been closely edited by the filmmakers). You're also totally divorced from the emotional build-up, so the natural tendency of even the worst movies to suck you into the story is gone. (A feature film is like a book in that the simple time investment to complete it implants an automatic austerity to it. A thiry minute TV show that's of equal production value to a two-hour movie will never feel as good as a movie. Even two hours worth of TV shows would not be the same. After you've read even a mediocre book, there is always a period of time immediately afterward where you are smitten with the book and would be inclined to inordinately praise it. So too with movies, and that's why you need to strip away that bond.)
5. You noticed before I said I saw Sex and the City spaced over two nights. Sara gets sleepy early and so we only got through just under an hour on night one. She was angry with me for the first 20 minutes because I couldn't stop picking on the movie's shortcomings, but I started following the story and quieted down eventually.
6. Sex and the City is a horrible, horrible movie.
7. On night two, we started it back up where we left off and yowzer once again I couldn't stop make comments about how bad it was.
8. There wasn't anything different about the first five minutes we watched on night two (maybe minutes 55-59 of the movie) and the last five minutes from night one (minutes 50-54), but it was painfully easy to find fault with the former while glossing over the shortcomings of the latter. The emotional flow of the movie had been interrupted and the movie was left open for me to see it for what it was.
9. This effect might be in some ways similar to why it's often difficult for an actor to do live theater work, compared to films. In a theater, the actor has to do his own work in sustaining that emotional bond, while in film, any number of editing or directorial choices will cover an actor's deficiencies.
10. It almost feels frivilous to comment specifically, but Sex and the City is really bad. I will admit that I've watched several episodes of the TV show, sometimes enjoying them, sometimes even respecting their relative quality. The movie, however, is terrble. Almost every actor just phoned it in, though not so much as the writers. You would think that a writer constrained to 30 minute storylines would love the opportunity to add real depth to his characters when given two-plus hours to play with. Not so here. If anything, the characters are flatter and less interesting. Again, it's probably a waste of time to criticize this stuff as the movie was clearly made with its only purpose being to lure women into the theater. As with lots of our contemporary culture, mission accomplished commercially, mission big fat fail substantively. I guess it just offends me when someone who has the option to make something at least passably competent with what wouldn't even be any additional effort, but chooses instead to fill the cracks with shit. I don't really like the term "sell-out" as a slander because usually it's used hypocritically, but pretty much everyone involved in this movie sold out. Good for them, as long as they knew that's what they were doing.
11. Someone does indeed get married in the movie, in case you couldn't stand the garbage and turned it off before getting to the end.
12. On a brighter and barely relevant note, I read somewhere recently that Chris Noth's character on Law & Order is being replaced and the character is to be played by Jeff Goldblum.

This is slightly unfair for its generalism, but do you want to see where racism lives in America?
Take a look at what is my favorite election map so far (it's my favorite for two reasons, just one of which is racism). Click on "Voting Shifts" on the left, and just leave the "Compare to" button over 2004 for simplicity, and because the farther back you go the more and larger political variables you encounter. That is one ridiculously blue map. It shows how each county voted as compared to 2004. Things to remember when looking at the map:
1. Nationally, the number was red +2 in 2004, blue +6 in 2008, so on average those counties should be 8% redder in 2004 (or bluer in 2008).
2. Campaigning and thus exposure to both sides is hugely disproportionate to the battleground states, so those should have smaller swings.
3. Many states overall flipped red to blue in 08: VA, NC, FL, OH, IN, IA, NM, CO, NV, so these states should include bluer counties than other states on average.
4. Indiana and Arizona contain home-state advantages to consider. This is why Arizona holds 8 of the 10 counties to go more red in the entire Mountain and Pacific time zones, and also why Indiana is the bluest state on the whole map.

So, absorbing all that, what does the map tell us, besides the obvious and instant fact that the Democrat did much better this time? Or, given the 8 point swing from 2004, plus the more inclusive nature of this campaign's advertising, leaving us to expect a generally bluer map all over, what would be the reason for the clustered deep red on the map?
John McCain received his greatest disparity of support over what Bush received primarily in one congruent area of the country centered over Arkansas but running from East Texas and Oklahoma across Tennessee and up into Eastern Kentucky and far western Virginia and West Virginia. The national vote (from D perspective) went from -2 to +6, but Arkansas managed to go from -10 to -20. Softening the national swing because Arkansas is a deep Republican state, we still should have expected something more like -6 for the Democrat this time, not -20, and that is a huge difference.
Outside of this corridor of increased Rep support, look at one of the blue flip states, Ohio. As I said before, we might expect some of the margins in this massive battleground state to be smaller than nationally; however, the vote there almost exactly mirrored the national in 04 and 08: -2 and +4. So why did 13 of its 88 counties vote more red in this election? Those 13 mostly reside in southern or eastern parts of the state.
I think it's clear that there is one possible answer to all of these questions, the one I mentioned at the beginning: racism. It's always controversial to accuse people of racism but sometimes the truth is hard, and problems will never be overcome if they are kept hidden. (I'm obliged to say that I'm no expert on local politics of the Ozarks, so there might be some mitigating factor that causes the region to buck the national trend. My perhaps lazy conclusion just seems fairly likely. At the very least, it's a large part of the whole answer.)

The other striking thing about the map is how it illustrates the comprehensive nature of Obama's performance relative to Kerry. As per my usual, I'll use numbers: 22 states saw every single one of their counties with increased Democratic numbers. Four more had all but one county, and three additional had only two counties show Republican increases. 29 out of 50 states had two of fewer counties give more support to Republicans. That's amazing. It wasn't just pockets of strength that gave the Democrats the edge, it was across the board. That would be ominous news for Republicans. They better hope that most Americans view Obama as a transcendent figure and crossed idealogical lines just to vote for him personally, rather than his party.

Some notes on voting this morning, but first a couple follow-ups to my last post:

1. I read my post again, and I notice it seems naive, almost precious. What can I say, the guy does that to you. I do not rescind anything.
2. I would be seriously remiss to mention my Obama-vote without placing it in the context of my life with Sara. She is as intense a supporter of her home state/home city-man as any I've encountered. She's such a staunch liberal/Democrat that she gets physically upset when watching anyone from the Bush administration speak. Democrats could nominate Karl Marx and she might question his moderacy.
Anyway, when I said I was researching the candidates last night, I was doing this (at least initially) while sitting on the couch next to her. She asked me what I was up to, and I said I was deciding who I was going to vote for. She said "For President?" and I said "Yeah." The utter disappointment/horror across her face as she said "You're not voting for Obama?" was striking. I followed with my standard reminder of my no D/R position, but even though she has heard this screed before, it did not serve to placate her much. Shortly after she left and went to bed I resumed my skull session in earnest. I think had it not been for her bluntly honest reaction to my intents I might not have come to my relative epiphany regarding what I see as the true and transcendent nature of Obama's candidacy. I mean, I've known all along from a historical standpoint that this is really a big deal, but it hadn't much trickled down to me personally.
I don't think that we will always vote for the same people--far from it--but in certain special cases, I think it's important to note the inevitability, spawned by our closeness, of our one mind.

3. Voter turnout, particularly among blacks and youths, has been a point of discussion throughout this campaign. But I'd like to state from eyewitness report (albeit a pathetically small sample sized-report) of my experiences voting this morning, the turnout this year could be spectacularly large, so much to cause potentially big problems in some states. I've never taken more than 3-5 minutes total to vote in any NYC election, including for governor and for mayor. Of course these are far less attended than a presidential election, but a respectable 30% of the electorate voted in the 2005 mayoral election, which is roughly half of what's expected to be something near 60% turnout nationally in this year's contest. Anyhow, it took me almost 90 minutes to get through the line this morning, and I arrived at 7:50AM. The line was distinctly longer when I left. Also, in NY this year there is only one ballot proposal, and no other race above the US Congress-level. Of the perhaps 8 races in NYC this year, plus the proposal, it couldn't take even a complete dunce more than 30 seconds to finish voting (an assumption I can confirm from my time standing in the long but fast-moving line).
So I'm going to predict that turnout for this election blows away the expectations, which is clearly a good thing in general but a bad one specifically:
4. There are going to be big problems in some swing states, problems that will invariably end up in courts, something that will do huge damage to what would otherwise surely turn into an easy and triumphant night for Obama. I'm not suggesting something like 2000 where it's December before we can confirm a winner, but turnout will overwhelm polling places to the point that perhaps we will finally get some reform on the matter. How there is not some tiny temporary % tax increase initiated to upgrade voting systems on a comprehensive scale is borderline criminal. The machines we at least still use in NYC, with their pathetic punchcard results, would barely be suitable in a third-world country.
5. It's really just about time we declared Election Day a national holiday and got the day off work. I say this not lazily, but more as a way of reforming the polling place voting experience. Of perhaps 20 people working my location this morning, maybe 6 were remotely competent. This is unsurpising because who would take time off to volunteer to work the polls? A memory from my childhood is tagging along with my parents when they voted and spending maybe 30 minutes there with my grandmother, who worked the polls every year. That's right, a 4 year old was playing inside the polling place while his aggressively and menacingly Republican (75 year old) grandmother acted as gatekeeper to democracy. Today there was a man with one eye (one bad eye, he was in charge of reading people's cards to ensure they were where they should be. I saw he squint and lean in to try to read a card given to him. He struggled for 4 seconds before realizing he was reading the back--blank--side of the card.), two women too obese to stand up, and several people unable to direct as many as ten people into two lines.
If everyone had the day off, you would get intelligent and competent people volunteering. I would even make it mandatory of poll workers to attend two rehearsal sessions: one to organize the team and space, and another to do a full walk-through. This stuff need not be difficult. Lord knows it's important enough to devote some energy to trying to get right.

invariability

i'm going to relate something for you which probably isn't remotely surprising or shocking to anyone, but that doesn't mean it isn't noteworthy. it got me to thinking, at least.
you see, it pretains to stereotypes--what they are and what they mean to both us as a populace and them as the -typed. is it justification for the generalization when it manifests itself, often repeatedly? is it condemnation of the generalization when it does the same, because maybe that's just an inherent way of life, a wholly natural action that happens to be propagated by a marginalized group? is it in any way deductive to even define these "stereotypes," any more than it is to attempt to divine understanding simply from a person's diction or his hair color or his waist size? am i, as a member of a majority, often looking down my nose at the subjects, actually the one being manipulated--fooled into rejecting the presence of individuality by the recognition of a shared trait that is really in no way inherent but actually ascribed by me upon them? or are they unfortunate and unknowing actors in a play that's been scripted for them by someone else, relegated through time, circumstance, and repetition to merely doing what's expected of them? are they ignorant byproducts or are they beautiful naifs? am i an ugly definer or an enlightened discerner?
decide for yourself. what follows is as truthfully as i can relate something i witnessed on an F train this morning.

i was standing in the closed entrance well of the subway car when several people entered through the opposite door, including one black woman, perhaps 28-30, who stood in the other half of the entrance well to my left. also boarding the train was one large black man of similar age who ended up directly opposite the woman after the doors shut behind him. the woman was wearing a black overcoat and some kind of skirt/dress that left her whole black-stripe-stockinged lower leg exposed, and below that a rather garish pair of black, red, and excessively silver heels. it was this silver which briefly caught my eye. what caught the man's eye was neither silver nor brief. i'm not sure how long it took me to notice that this gentleman was doing some serious perving on the woman, but to say that he was "checking her out" is akin to saying that the bomb we dropped on hiroshima did "a little damage." the woman wasn't leaning against the doors like i was, instead standing about a foot in front of me, so i couldn't get her reaction to the man's leerish affrontery, but i can assure you that while i am in no way prudish, it was surely making me uncomfortable. of course, just as i had about reached my limits with his slow up and down rape-eyed stares, what did the man do but start to slowly lick his lips. i'm not sure how i kept myself from laughing. thankfully by this time we'd nearly reached bryant park and i didn't have to ponder if i'd have to intervene in a felonious assault by the time we got to queens. then, to my surprise both the woman and the man exited in front of me at my stop. here i became truly curious and lagged behind slightly to see what would transpire. of course, if you've been reading this whole thing, you can probably guess: the woman reached into her purse, scribbled what can only be assumed was her number on a card, and handed it to the man. sufficiently amused by this resolution, i passed them on the stairs went about my business, smirking and philosophizing.