About Me
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
—Emily Dickinson
In the Cayman Islands, on the way to the airport, there’s a building that looks like a strip mall, except there’s no H&M or Orange Julius: it’s all hedge funds.
Now, they say wind from Washington might blow it over. Somewhere, on some island, a golden spike is being driven into the ground to begin construction on a new strip mall. This time they’ll think to hide it behind tall hedges.
On Love Stories
Just saw Slumdog Millionaire, a fantastic story about a boy in the slums of India overcoming the most adverse circumstances, but, of course, it was all wrapped up in a Hollywood bow of love story. She, in the end, is why he does everything: why he endures.
Perhaps romantic love really is the most important thing in the world. It’s the one gesture of choice you have, the one conscious choice you can make in the entirely random circumstance of the family you were born into. Making your environment a little more hospitable to you isn’t a bad way to spend your life.
But what was he in love with? He barely knew this woman. They were children together, briefly, and yet the ideal of her remained inside his head his entire life. It couldn’t have been her he loved. Though she was beautiful and seemingly lovely, she was only a slip of a character. His great love for her obviously wasn’t about who she was — she represented his romantic ideal of making whole his childhood loss. It wasn’t about loving her. I’m not sure why women find that romantic.
Or maybe it is better to be loved as a deity, with all the passion that engenders, despite the fact it has nothing to do with who you are. Human love is much more fleeting. Perhaps love only survives in the hothouse of ideals.
Best. Christmas. Ever.
A Christmas miracle happened today! I was starting to get anxious since I hadn’t started my Christmas shopping yet. (It was only yesterday I realized I wasn’t actually going to knit everyone sweaters like I’d been planning.) Then, I heard about this e-commerce site on NPR. It is one-stop-shopping with the perfect Christmas present for everyone, such as, “a malaria net for a child in Africa” or “a year of school for an orphan.” Perfect! Who wouldn’t pretend to love that?
Now, everyone knows that if you have a family, you should never, ever mention a preference for a specific farm animal. My mother mentioned casually, about 12 years ago, that she thought pigs were cute. So, every birthday, every Christmas, thus after—each holiday we were obligated to buy her stupid shit to prove we loved her, well, it was always a ceramic pig, or a country-home style pig portrait. Last Christmas, I sat in our kitchen, counting the pigs. There were 62. I heard my mother sigh as she added another one to the shelf.
“Mom, do you even like pigs?” I finally thought to ask.
“Not really,” she said.
So this year, what did I buy her? A pig! An actual, real live pig! (For a family in Africa.)
From there it was a shopping bonanza. I bought a “small business loan for a woman living with HIV/Aids” for my sister; “10 fruit trees” for a family in Africa for my grandmother; a “goat for a woman” for my father; and “a blanket” for my great aunt.
But the best of all? For my sister’s boyfriend I bought “hope for sexually exploited girls.” At only $25, I thought it was quite a bargain. (The pig was $60.) I couldn’t figure out why hope was so cheap this year, particularly in a recession. Then I realized—Obama has flooded the market. Basic economics: more hope on the market means the price goes down.
Steve Schmidt - the guy who’s running John McCain’s campaign - is like Karl Rove’s son. Schmidt is probably one of the best targeter of voters in the country. He really knows how to connect one-on-one with voters. He doesn’t just do polling like other consultants - he uses commercial market studies. He reduces voting to who shops at Wal-Mart, Target and Costco and how to talk to them. He doesn’t give a damn about Wilkes Bashford or Nordstrom shoppers. He checks out what kind of cars voters are driving, where voters shop, what kind of things they buy, what programs they watch on TV, what they do on weekends. Then he does the assessment and tailors the campaign’s message to convince you that his candidate has your deepest interest at heart.from Willie Brown’s Column in the San Francisco Chronicle
