Change in blog address

I just wanted to let you all know that I'm re-locating blog address's so I can use wordpress software to snazz up my blog and take advantage of some of their neat features that blogger unfortunately lacks. Check me out and bookmark me at http://elainemeyer.wordpress.com/.

Dan Seals is running in 2008

Good news! Dan Seals, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Rep for the 10th District of Illinois, with whom I volunteered last summer, is challenging incumbent Mark Kirk again in 2008. He already has a primary opponent too: Jay Footlik, an advsier to the 2004 Kerry campaign. I would be wary of anyone who's reaching out to John Kerry for campaign advice, as Footlik has reportedly done.

Terms That Annoy Me

And now for the annoying term of the day:

"power couple"

Usage: describes a successful and often pretty obnoxious husband and wife team
("husband and wife team" is another phrase which I hate)

Power couple examples that prove this to be true: Mary Matalin and James Carville, Lynne and Dick Cheney, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian

The term's high-intensity tenor is what gets me in particular. It's another one of those journalistic cliches that's often used in the context of politics or business to lend a snappy, knowing air to a piece.

Expressions in the power couple family: power lunch, business casual, power nap, heads down, suit up

The line blurs even more

Hillary Clinton's takeoff on the "Sopranos" finale, with special guest Bill and special reference to Chelsea is just about the blurriest that the line has been drawn between celebrity and politics--at least since Ronald Reagan got elected into public office. Just watching it, I felt like the Clintons were a television family that I had grown up with more than public officials. The jab at Bill's eating habits just puts it over the top.

Is it bad that,
(1) This stunt makes me like Hillary a little better?
(2) I've started to enjoy the Journey song after this and the Sopranos finale?

Yes, I think it is.

Boost for journalism school

I'm two years late on unearthing this, but for my purposes, it's okay:

The leaders of five of the nation's most prominent journalism programs are joining in a three-year, $6 million effort to try to elevate the standing of journalism in academia and find ways to prepare journalists better.

The unusual collaboration, which has been developing for three years, involves Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University; Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley; Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University; Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California; and Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Journalism school may be more useful than in the past, according to Berekley's dean:

While journalists have long debated the value of journalism schools, Mr. Schell, who did not attend journalism school, said he now thought such institutions were more vital than they might have been in the past.

"Things have changed substantially since we came up the journalistic food chain," he said. "As news cycles have gotten faster and more bottom-line driven, there has been less inclination and capacity in media outlets to train, mentor and guide upcoming generations."

I'll keep posting about my own investigation into journalism school. My first j-school visit is planned for the weekend of July 27th to Medill at Northwestern, my alma mater.

For the love of a non-scandal

Why oh why are blogs and news outlets implying that Barack Obama is guilty of something for which there is no evidence? In the next wave of "air of scandal" reporting that enjoyed such a following during the Clinton administration, Obama is being unfairly linked to a guy under federal investigation. Wonkette today links to Wizbang politics, which does this very thing, quoting a New York Times article which itself offers no evidence of wrongdoing on Obama's part but makes something out of Obama's connection with this guy Rezko anyway:

Mr. Obama says he never did any favors for Mr. Rezko, who raised about $150,000 for his campaigns over the years and was once one of the most powerful men in Illinois. There is no sign that Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, did anything improper.

Wizbang argues that "this presents a problem for Obama" because "[a]nything which clouds his pure-as-the-driven-snow image can damage his campaign, since he doesn't have a resume of experience to tout and depends upon that image." They are wrong. Rezko only presents a problem for Obama if blogs like Wizbang decide to talk it up. Obama has been proven guilty of nothing. It seems, as I have said before, that people love to knock down those who they see as perfect, or as Wizbang puts it "fresh face[d]." If Obama were an unabashed wheeler and dealer, I'm sure he wouldn't be getting this treatment. George W. Bush never did.

How do people afford this city?

In my new and unplanned blog series about how damn expensive life is, I explore D.C.'s cost-of-living and how increasingly unaffordable it is to live here on a non-profit or lower level government-worker's salary. I was reminded of this once again as I searched Craigslist for future housing options for the coming year. Considering that the once "cheap" and relatively well-located areas of the city like Columbia Heights are in the process of being uber-gentrified, it appears hope is lost for the automobile-lacking person who wants to live in a D.C. neighborhood that is in walking distance of a grocery store, Metro, and a few other commercial establishments that aren't liquor stores or Western Unions. The low-end of a 3 bedroom in Columbia Heights now appears to be 2800 per month or 933 per person, usually before utilities are added in.

Hypothetical: If I'm making $15 per hour at a non-profit working 8 hour days, five days a week, I make 2400 per month, before taxes, or 31.2 K per year. My D.C. income tax alone would be $400 per year plus an additional 6% of the excess income above 10,000, which in my case would be $139 per month. Federal income tax is 4,220 plus 25% of the amount over 30,650, which amounts to $4357.50 or 363.13 per month. Medicare and Social Security taxes are 199, by my calculations, so after taxes, I make 1837.87 per month. My health care premium might be around 60 per month (more if I have a "pre-existing condition"), so I'm down to 1777.87 per month. Now, subtract my 933 rent and a 50 utility check (add at least 25 more if I have cable), and I am left with 794.87. I have to eat, which we can approximate at around 250 per month and buy work clothes which maybe be around 60 per month. If I'm paying back 250 in student loans per month, I am now down to about 245, some of which I probably want to put into a retirement account (though it won't amount to the 10% of income that is recommended), the rest of which I should put in a cash reserves account. Keep in mind that Hill staffers often make significantly less than this hypothetical non-profit salary.

So the question is, why, in spite of the high cost-of-living and relatively low salary do young, aspiring public servants move to this city after graduation? I guess my reason was that it seemed like the most likely place to get the sort of occupation I've described and to meet other people with the same priorities, but often enough, people like me come to D.C. and get disconcerted that their peers aren't here for these noble reasons but rather to feed their own ambition. Members of this group are willing to stick out their financial necks to live in a city whose lackluster city services, absent mid-range dining and shopping scene, and pretty uniform group of professionals (i.e., lawyers and aspiring lawyers) can make it at times a trying place to live. Note to my peers: as long as we keep forking over our rent money (and I'm guilty like you), D.C. will continue to be increasingly unaffordable to people like us.

This flight from affordability is of course egged on by D.C.'s subscription to the standard mode of urban renewal today: gentrify, gentrify, gentrify. The luxury condos and shopping complex with the likes of a Target that have swept through Columbia Heights within the past year are a clear culprit for the recently increased rents; they're also the culprit for the continued lack of entreprenuerial character that D.C. maintains. Increasingly, D.C. has become a city for the very well-off, the young cash-strapped, and the long-time residents who seem to have fairly little say in any of this planning. Why I continue to live here, I don't know.

Adjustments

One adjustments that I've endured going from collegiate to working stiff is coming to dislike things I used to like. Most notable right now is my palpable aversion to summer. What used to be the season of freedom and idling is now that of sweating and thirsting on the walk to work. When I had jobs and internships in Chicago between the school years, I started to feel a twitch of irritation at humid days, non-stimulating work assignments, long commutes, and early (for a college student) mornings. When this all becomes a consistent fact, it is even worse. Mind you, not morale crushing or dire, just a disappointment when recalling the way summer used to be. Especially here in D.C., where summers means a stultifying combination of work attire and ozone warnings, it becomes difficult to look forward to anything about the season ,save its end. Even in Chicago where it tends to get humid, Lake Michigan's unpredictable wind patterns can bring cool days, the kind that relieve you from the 80 and 90-degree days that are accompanied by glaring, cloudless sun that feels like it is an imperturbable spy following wherever you go. Summer is no longer a relief from school either now that I'm working full-time. It is just another season that blends in with the slow-moving quickness of all of the others in a working person's year. Seasons are no longer about events or milestones but about dressing for the weather.

Postcards from Utopia

I just returned from San Francisco and am still revelling in the beauty of all of its sites. One thing I thought about while there is how San Francisco is one of several municipalities that is sometimes preceded with the jabbing moniker "the Peoples' Republic of..." Other places I've heard this prefix attached to are Alexandria, Virginia, the state of Massachusetts, and Evanston, Illinois. The truth is, all of these "Peoples' Republics "are pretty great places to live. While none of them are similar to the Communist states to which the phrase alludes, the policies that make these places seem more socialist or communist can't be too bad if they are such nice parts of the country to visit and live. Furthermore, a place like San Francisco is really a place of thriving entrepreneurialism, not only because it was one of the headquarters to the dot com explosion but also because it has the fewest amount of chain establishments one will find in just about any American city and a bevvy of competing small businesses in their stead. Without further ado, here are some photos from this aforementioned utopia:

(Photo credit: Steph Pituc)

(Photo credit: Steph)

Travel Lists

After visiting SF, I will provide my current, top five global cities list (among the cities I've been to) along with some other travel lists:
1. Paris
2. San Francisco
3. Chicago
4. Rome
5. London

And the top 5 most scenic cites:
1. Salzburg
2. San Francisco
3. Florence
4. Paris
5. Geneva
Honorable mention: Washington D.C. and San Diego

And the top 5 best airports:
1. Chicago O'hare-United Terminal (reason: the neon lights in the moving walkway tunnel, the bevvy of good vendors, the brightness, the exciting people watching, a lot of vendors after the security checkpoint)
2. Detroit McNamara-Northwest Terminal (reason: state-of-the art monorail that shuttles back and and forth between this huge terminal, tons of vendors, sobering bright white interior, like O'hare there are a lot of vendors after the checkpoint)
3. Amsterdam Schipol (reason: like being on an Austin Power's set, lot of weird cafes)
4. Washington-Reagan National (reason: other than it being cumbersomely renamed after one of my least favorite American presidents, the main terminal is nice, airy, and bright with decent vendors and just about enough of them to pass the time before a flight. getting stuck here might be dull though, as it's not that big)
5. Portland (reason: lots of independent vendors and claims to have competitive prices)
Honorable Mention: Dulles for the terminals, though probably not for the security checkpoints and lines

Top 5 worst airports:
1. Paris Charles DeGaulle (reason: uncontrolled lines, long waits, few vendors, unnerving 60s spaceship interior)
2. Raleigh-Durham (reason: it doesn't help that I got stuck in this dull airport because of a cancelled flight with only a Cinnabon voucher to keep me enthused about the wait)
3. Zurich (reason: dull as all get out, and it doesn't help that I had to sleep on an uncomfortable airport chair there overnight with my grandparents)
4. Rome (not sure if it's Fiumicino or Ciampino) (reason: like being inside an 80s hotel lobby, pink and green with fake tropical feel is never a good interior design motif)
5. Boston Logan (reason: meh)
Honorable mention: Frankfurt (reason: haven't been here in awhile so it may look better now, but last i was there it was a mid-renovation madhouse!)

Do we want another self-anointed CEO president?

The Times has a good article about Mitt Romney's career at Bain, the prestigious investment bank. The article implicitly questions Romney's claims that his business experience makes him a good candidate for president. Romney's business was the business of equity maximization where he exhibited not the skills of a traditional businessman--budgeting and attentive management--but the skills of an investment banker--salesmanship and presentation. Private sector candidates have a tendency to sell themselves as embodying every quality of a sharp businessman, but there are sharp businessmen in different industries, and the skills of a candidate like Romney should not be sold as the skills of a Bill Gates or Andrew Carnegie. Whether Romney's investment bank skillset are the prime qualities we want in a president is a question worth asking, one that should preclude his being labelled a businessman in the traditional sense, especially when his career has made him accustomed to fighting for the corporate good (profits)--

But Mr. Romney’s Bain career — a source of money and contacts that he has used to finance his Massachusetts campaigns and to leap ahead of his presidential rivals in early fund-raising — also exposes him to criticism that he enriched himself excessively, sometimes by cutting jobs to increase profits.

He made his money mainly through leveraged buyouts — essentially, mortgaging companies to take them over in the hope of reselling them at big profits in just a few years. It is a bare-knuckle form of investing that is in the spotlight because of the exploding profits of buyout giants like Bain, Blackstone and the Carlyle Group. In Washington, Congress is considering ending a legal quirk that lets fund managers escape much of the income tax on their earnings.

--and not for the public good.

The Silenced Majority

I know I often conjecture about the disparity of concerns between the media and the American people, often without any evidence save the nagging sense that the D.C. media's preoccupation with reporting on the trivialities of political strategy has indirectly contributed to the series of giant pickles we now find ourselves facing as a nation. The Andrea Mitchells and Chris Matthews are the Neros of our time, fiddling as the world--in some cases literally--burns.

There was a great article in a Times blog about the disconnect between the Washington media and the general populace and it manifests itself every time a public figure is badgered to explain himself after criticizing Bush and his administration. As this Times piece points out, the recent upbraidal of Jimmy Carter seemed to be a case of D.C. media imposing cocktail party decorum:

Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter's remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn't attack President Bush personally, but said that "as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," which can't really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.
In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken "an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president," and portrayed Carter's words - unfairly it seems- as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it "unprecedented." Yet as an article in this newspaper <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/washington/22carter.html> on Tuesday pointed out, "presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones."

This guy is absolutely right. I'm no presidential scholar, but I seem to recall reading many times of Teddy Roosevelt's vocieferous criticism of William Howard Taft's leadership. Anyway, getting in a tizzy over whether an ex-president criticizes a sitting president sanctions the office as a regal post where all former officeholders are loyal to the myth of the office, which runs counter to the fundmanetal tenets of this lower-case republican nation.

The recent acceding of the Democrats to the timetable-free Bush war funding bill is a prime example of the party being influenced by the popular though incorrect wisdom that their original war funding bill would be viewed as taking resources away from frontline troops. The writer offers a plausible exegis on the source of the Democrats dissonance and the resulting contrition it provokes on their part to the supremely unpopular Bush administration.

I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn't meet with enough criticism, and if that's partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think - when actually it often doesn't.

Psychologists coined the term "pluralistic ignorance" in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception - more a social than an individual phenomenon - to which even smart people might fall victim.
[...]
In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O'Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, "moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority." What is especially disturbing about the process is that it lends itself to control by the noisiest and most visible.
[...]
Think of the proposal to put a timetable on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported, the latest poll says, by 60 percent of Americans <http://pewresearch.org/pubs/473/closeness-to-troops-boosts-support-for-war-but-not-by-much> , but dropped Tuesday from the latest war funding bill <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/washington/23cong.html> .

As the title suggests, there is as much a silent majority today as there was back when Nixon first uttered the powerful phrase at the height of the Vietnam War, but this majority is even more silenced by the D.C. media's insistence upon what concerns the "average American." If you've listened to members of the mainstream media over the years, the average American has not been too concerned with the Downing Street Memo, the Abramoff scandal, the Libby conviction, the U.S. Attorneys firings, ad infinitum. Using this logic, some members of the media fail to report on any of these incidents in a meaningful way and instead analyze the culpabilty of the players as a question of how well they spin their innocence. As a result, the media has shirked its duty to bring attention to the plagues to a democratic society--venality and autocracy--by claiming unjustifiably that the American people are too stupid to care.

In San Francisco

I'm at my friend Steph's in San Francisco and have been up for almost 24-hours, though I did take some naps on the plane. My inclination when I visit new places is to make generalizations about the people who live there. When I walk into a coffee shop or store, I categorize everyone as a San Franciscan and view their actions as reflecting upon the vibe of their city. The crazy man who yelled at the clerk at Green Apple Books in Inner Richmond about how he "controls his own money" and "wants to be respected" (yeah, this guy was nuts--he was even carrying a rain stick!) is an emblem of the zany tendencies of some of the San Fran residents. The kind people who smiled at me when I moved my bags out of the way for them on the bus are imbued with a California calm that allows them to be much more considerate and thoughtful than the people out East. Today a car almost hit me making a right turn when I had the right of way, but rather than speeding through the turn or glaring at me, the driver actually waved apologetically. It's nice that people have some remorse for their unintended recklessness. Is this San Franciscan, though? Is speeding like a frazzled, over-caffeinated a-hole Distrcit of Columbian? Why is it so tempting to generalize about a locale, anyway?

Free and Alone

Larissa Macfarquhar's recent profile of Barack Obama for the New Yorker is full of probing wisdom about the American Dream and its implications for Obama as he presents the story of himself and his family. Macfarquhar suggests that Obama tried through his early adult life to tread against his parents' inclinations--which are American inclinations--to wander in search of something better and instead sought to cultivate tradition and a sense of place. Indeed, Obama's first memoir Dreams from My Father has a Roots sensibility to it. Macfarquhar's description is unassumingly poignant. She writes:

[W]hen it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He ended up in Chicago, back in the Midwest, from which his mother’s parents had fled, embracing everything they had escaped—the constriction of tradition, the weight of history, the provincial smallness of community, settling for your whole life in one place with one group of people. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory.

Obama's decision to move to Chicago to become a community organizer itself seems to speak to the sort of longing for entrenchment that Macfarquhar describes. I found this all very interesting because for me, whether it is better to work on setting roots or to try and continually explore is a nagging question. It is easy to imagine exciting places and happenings from afar and to believe that somewhere else is better/more interesting/dazzling/full of smarter people than here, and it is a destructive generalization because it is unconfirmable and usually just leads to despair wherever one is. On the other hand, curiosity is difficult to quell--and for a reason. I admire Obama's thoughtfulness about his parents' lives though, as it reflects a wise maturity on his part:

“What strikes me most when I think about the story of my family,” Obama writes, “is a running strain of innocence, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the measures of childhood.” Innocence is not, for him, a good quality, or even a redeeming excuse: it is not the opposite of guilt but the opposite of wisdom. In Obama’s description of his maternal grandfather, for instance, there is love but also contempt. “His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price,” Obama writes. “Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.”

It is a tricky thing, this balancing of freedom and rootedness, though the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. At the same time, the former tends to be the more glamorous route for a 20-something. The latter perhaps carries us further in the long run, but again, such approaches don't seem mutually exclusive to me.

Running on Reagan

I haven't been paying too much attention to Presidential Campaign 2008--partially because I think it's far too early for the likes of debates and the already established tiering of the candidates, mostly because I have only so much time--but Frank Rich's recent pieces about Falwell and the Republican debate say a lot about the little that the Republican contenders have to offer. As Rich said, the Republicans seemed to be putting on their best Reagan impersonations the other night. Now that he is dead, Reagan's legacy goes beyond even the gratuitous naming of buildings, streets, and monuments in his honor: it extends to his deification by the right. For them, he is riding horses in the heavens in an open white shirt and frowining down upon Bush's deviation from his formula for Morning in America, which on closer glance does not look that different from what Bush has done this last 8 years.

Indeed, what no fan of Reagan seems ready to acknowledge is that Bush is extreme Reagan, Reagn taken to his logical end. Reagan made government bigger, he built up the defense budget, he cut taxes for the wealthier and ended up passing those on to the less wealthy in the form of Social Security tax hikes, he actively ignored the AIDS epidemic, and on and on. Bush has either done this or would do this if he could (can anyone imagine him acknowledging AIDS if he were president 25 years ago?). His policies have kowtowed even more to the social conservative part of his base than did Reagan's.

Yet, Reagan remains that elusive Republican ideal. As Rich said, the Republican candidates mentioned Reagan's name in the debates 19 times, while they only mentioned Bush's once. "Meanwhile," Rich concludes,

most of the pressing matters the public cares passionately about--Iraq, health care, the environment and energy independence--belong for now to the Democrats [...] You don't see Democrats changing the subject to JFK and FDR.

The cover of a recent news weekly asked who the country's new Truman would be. Maybe we need to stop looking for saviors from the past and start acknowledging that the problems faced because of all of the corruption and waste wrought by this current administration are pretty unique to our time and were wrought by forces that could have been prevented but were not, over and over again. If we had a Truman around, the prominent political commentators would have probably derided him for lacking experience or being too unrefined or too deferent or too overcompensating. When there have been people as good or better than Truman around (Al Gore, for instance), they've been derided. We're far past getting or deserving a Truman at this point, and what we really will need when this administration is done is someone with the energy of an FDR and the vision to realize the last thing we can affored to dwell in right now is nostalgic escapism.

Breaking down what we broadly refer to as feminism

One of the greatest triumphs for a historian is to convincingly argue that a conventionally accepted account of a time period or event is incorrect or at the very least, simplistic. To realize that a common conception of the past is flawed or shallow is jolting and transformational. It revises how we analyze current problems and what we identify as their root causes.

Over the course of the last several years, I came to understand that my view of the 1960s and 1970s was formed by an overbroad paradigm: that during that short period of time, society and culture as a whole progressed. While I think certain events during the time period represented progress--women gaining admittance to college and pre-professional programs at greater rates, the end of state-enforced segregation--I realize that, as in so many eras, these are specific achievements that do not necessarily endorse other accomplishments of the time even if they lie within the same realm of "women's issues," achievements like the so-called sexual revolution. Nonetheless, people often conflate every achievement in the realm of women's issues into one great big movement towards Progress and Enlightenment. Others wholly vilify the entire era as the end of institutions' moral authority. I think that this recent era, like so many others, brought changes that should be examined free of these two opposing dialectics that so often hijack our conversation about them.

Take the women's movement and its legacies today. There is good and bad. The bad, in my opinion, is embodied by the "hook-up culture." I recently got into a pretty intense argument with some co-workers about whether such a culture exists and whether it is problematic. I think there have been some recent developments, the confluence of which make a hook-up culture more practicable than it would have been in the past. Here are a few: (relatively) easy and legal availability of birth control, a view that dating and going steady are the chaste activities of a bygone era, the equating of men's needs and women's needs, the trend of disassociating sex from emotion (and the idea that emotions are burdensome), to name a few. I'm not saying I find all of these developments problematic, but I think they are valid explanations for today's hook-up culture, a term which, when searched in google, yields a plethora of interesting articles and conversation; world like "perils" and "misery" immediately catch one's attention.

Of course, the bad always comes with the good, which means the sexual revolution should not be treated as a bogeyman, but it should not be treated as a natural outgrowth of feminism either. On the contrary, it can be vigorously debated without jeopardizing the achievements of women in other areas.

A good quote

Just have to note this, if for no one else but myself:

A prime test of an historian’s skill is the extent to which he does justice to these complementary forces, repetition and novelty.

From this article, by Roger Kimball.

How do they afford it?

Salon features a worthwhile interview today with One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding author Rebecca Mead on the subject of the modern wedding, now shaped by an entire industry of wedding apparel, wedding planning, wedding gift registry, honeymoons, etc. What I've heard anecdotally about weddings leads me to believe that they are incredibly pricey, time-consuming affairs to plan, and the Salon article confirms this. The average American wedding today costs $27,852. Even factoring in the dollar-value of all of the wedding gifts a couple receives, 28K must make a dent in the bank accounts of most Americans, who on average earn $46,326 a year.

All of this returns me to the question that nags American consumerism as it drives the sputtering engine of the U.S. economy: how do people afford all of this expense, and why do they submit themselves to this costly racket? What is the use in putting so much time, energy, and money into a one-day affair? I imagine some of it is driven by the impulse to keep up with the Joneses and some of it by the desire to have something to do in an age when consumerism is an ersatz hobby. Having weathered the same sort of excess for B nai Mitzvah, I don't look forward to witnessing the spending contest to which peers will submit as they plan the American wedding.

Aside from the nupital narcissim, I never understood how people could work up so much excitement over wedding dresses and floral arrangments. Being subject to protracted discussions about wedding details is painful, particularly for one who is not planning on getting married soon or has never been married, and therefore can find little relevance in conversation about beads, lace, and strapless vs. sleeveless or whether to get a custom made dress or go to Filene's Basement's annual wedding sale, or whatever else engagees find themselves obligated to discuss ad nauseum.

Finally, let's not forget the hefty expenses to which friends and family of brides and bridegrooms are subject, without question, in the form of gifts--for the wedding and the bridal shower-- traveling expenses, bachelor or bachelorette party expenses, and wedding wear. And why must there be an engagement ring and a wedding ring? Especially when engagement rings are a relatively new tradition--one-third of brides did not marry with an engagement ring in 1939--one egged on by jewlers and diamond advertisers.

The D.C. Public Library in all of its glory

In doing a search on the D.C. Public Library's online catalog, I came across location categories including: Assumed lost, Claims lost, Branch closed until mid-February 2003, Gone Astray, Gone Astray between branches, Gone Astray for a Long Time, Lost, Lost and Paid for, Material Long Overdue, Missing titles Discovered in weeding, Undergoing repair, Unknown. As for the item category, my personal favorite category is: Brief titles entered on the fly. All of this makes a lot more sense if you visit the MLK main branch.

An argument between letter writers on Salon has broken out over the question of whether college women who participate in a "Tennis Pros and Hos" party are revelling healthily in their sexuality or demeaning themselves. Many of the letter writers seem tethered to the paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s, namely, new feminism and hostility towards older generations.

One premise of the writers who found no problem with the "Hos" party that troubled me is the idea that women should not be subjected to double standard-fueled scorn for simply acting like men. This then inherently sanctions the behavior of men as the standard. I don't understand why it is such a problem for women not to act like men or not flaunt their sexuality for men (anyone who thinks "Girls Gone Wild" is a feminist exercise is deluded) and instead try and assert a new standard, one that does not conform to the hyper-sexualized media-driven absurdity of our current age.

Furthermore, those writers who place full faith in the judgement of 21-year olds and scorn the opinions of their parents are entirely possessed by the 60s/70s generation gap frame. They are jettisoning practical thinking, which is, why shouldn't a parent worry about their child, especially if she appears to be making poor decisions?