Deutschland

In Germany. More later. Otherwise I will be late to class.

A haunted monastery, class trip to the Euopean Central Bank, a pub crawl, schnitzel in a cellar, new friends.

Later

The past six weeks have been all-consuming. I feel like I am just now waking up out of a haze, worried that I'm going to look at everything that's happened and see a lot of broken pieces.

So, school is over for the semester. Spring term is over. I took my law final over the weekend in a group. Hard! And important to me bc I am still, in my heart of hearts, lawlorn.

Work has also been busy, or at least annoying. many stupid little things have gone wrong, requiring me to right them. The big event has been an argument with one of my vendors. It is a long story but, if all goes well, we have a resolution at hand.

Finally, one of the non-profits I work with has been dumb-stupid regarding their budget, which I have been shepherding. In the past two months they've voted to approve specific projects that increase their budget significantly, in a year when they need to be reducing their expenses. Not only that, but the source of their funding is at a critical point. I've sat through three meetings now that ran very late, and they STILL don't know what they're going to do. We parted last night with a bigger gap than we walked in.

This weekend I travel to Germany, for a little work-study-travel. When i get back, I'm off to California for a conference. In a way, the next month seems just as busy as the last, effectively blocked out, but hopefully, less hectic and less stupid.

90 Days

We're 90 days into 2010. It's hard to believe. I keep two printed calendars at my desk at work, and I diligently cross off each day, like a prisoner, or an island castaway, marking the time until - what? I'm not sure. Multiple deadlines, my progress through school, the hope that one day, I will have a better job, or that kayaking season will arrive, or a vacation, or a class I want to take.

Meantime, life keeps happening. In the past 90 days I've dated, then broken up with someone. I've gone to school events, taken midterms, I've been to a spa, I've gone to the gym (hardly enough, it feels like) and corresponded with one of my aunts in Oklahoma. My baby brother has a baby of his own now, and my other nephew and niece have grown tremendously since I saw them last December.

Tea in a Tizzy

I'll say up front that I've been skeptical about the Tea Party activists practically since their inception. I've been skeptical about how they were formed, skeptical about their politics, and skeptical about whether they even qualify as a political party. I've debated with a paramour what their fate will be; he's afraid they'll actually gain power, while I've long thought that eventually they will get co-opted.

On this last point, I may be a little less certain. However, after reading this article in the NYT, it's still hard for me to take them seriously as a political party.

A tax code limited to the number of words in the US Constitution? Seriously? Would you like to build a baseball stadium based on the total number of hot dogs sold in the first year of baseball history? The tax code is a tool for the government to encourage and reward behavior, and it applies to citizens and corporations alike. Do you really think you'll have enough room in such a limited document to, say, require corporations to re-invest money in the US instead of parking it off shore? 4500 words is about twenty double-spaced pages. That's not a tax code, that's a term paper. The best you might hope for is tax code haiku.

Divine intervention? At least they're trying to manage this part of it. Did you know that it's possible to be fiscally conservative and not believe in God? Did you know that many people who do believe in God do not believe in divine intervention, at least not in the sense that it is commonly intended?

You want to promote States' Rights? Really? So if a given state enacts strong gun control measures, you won't run up to the Federal level to repeal it? Politically, it makes sense to prefer States' Rights, because then you can make incremental progress. However, every States' Rights proponent I've ever known, liberal and conservative alike, drops that plank as soon as they stop getting what they want at the state level.

The Tea Party is full of symbolic ideas. They are going to collapse if they ever obtain any real power. They do bring up some very valid issues, but they barely have an affirmative platform (until I read this article, I didn't think they had an affirmative platform at all).

So go on Tea Party. Bitch about the government. Bitch about taxes, bitch about the economy. Maybe one day, when you grow up, you'll be able to do a better job, but until then, keep trying.

Article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/us/politics/13tea.html

Grifting Starbucks

So here is the deal. Starbucks is offering a couple of different promotions right now. One, they've dropped the price of their default blend (Pike Place Roast) by fifty cents. Two, they're offering a coffee of the week promotion that culminates in the award of a free bag of coffee. It's this latter promotion I'm interested in.

Starbucks is promoting a different Bold blend every week. If you buy a bold coffee, you get a little "passport" featuring eight coffees, one for each week for eight weeks. When you buy a bold coffee in a given week, you get a little stamp to add to your passport (shades of "collect them all"). At the end of the eight weeks, you can present your passport to a Starbucks to receive, gratis, one bag of your choice of bold coffees.

Thing is, you only get one stamp a week. Once your Yukon blend is stamped, you're done till the next week.

Here is where I come in. I like Starbucks. I like their bold coffees. Every morning, I buy a tall toffee nut bold coffee to start my day. Most days, the clerks don't even bother asking what I want. I am that predictable.

I also work in Penn Plaza, and there are easily half a dozen Starbucks within walking distance of work. I don't have to go far out of my way to visit a different every morning of the week. So, I'm basically planning to tote around five passports, order the same coffee I would normally order, and collect five pounds of coffee (MSRP ~$50) in two months.

It's free, because I'm not doing anything more than I would normally do, except visit other stores. Well, maybe not totally free. I didn't figure this out until halfway through the first week, so I had to buy two coffees I otherwise would not have bought (even the Short, which is smaller than the Tall, counts). So I'm out $3.52 that I would otherwise not have spent.

So we'll see how it goes. I have to say, I'm not a fan of the Yukon blend, but I do like the Italian Roast and the Cafe Verona blends. I am looking forward to the Gold Coast blend; I like the art.

Cabbies

I don't take cabs often, but tonight I took two. After spending some time with my um-friend, I took a cab from midtown to the upper east side to meet up with a couple I know for dinner.

When we got to my prescribed intersection, the cabbies started asking me about my personal life. Was I having a good night ? No parties? No? God husband? We spent five minutes talking about the nature of the man I have been dating for a few weeks, before I quietly extricated myself from the conversation.

Later, on the way home, my hack, and older Indian man, had a conversation with a car service cabbie he had once worked with. He later explained that - this is Harlem, mind you - when he first moved to the US, he worked in car service, and the black people taught him all the highways and roads. When he moved on to being a yellow cab driver, he felt very loyal to them, and would not pick up fares in Harlem.

The way he explained it, the car service cabs augmented their income by picking up street fares, which while strictly speaking is against regulation, is generally not prosecuted except in the business districts.

The thing is, knowing that African Americans (well, black people) complaining about not being able to get a cab - maybe that doesn't apply here. Certainly, one of the big changes for me moving to Harlem was having car service cabs honk to pick me up. The way this hack described it, the yellow cabs let them do the work up here, since they are usually in Harlem only to drop off.

Two Sides

There are two sides to this story, this tale of disintegrated childhood and ramshackle youth.

On the one hand, a yearning for order, efficiency, a sentimental ache for the trappings of stability.

On the other, a desire for freedom, to leave, petulance, greener pastures.

Depressing News Day

So, in the news lately:

1) Supreme Court affirms corporate donations as "free speech", maintaining the potential for corruption within our political system.

2) Health care reform, already so badly mangled as to be negligible in effect, is now in real danger of not being passed at all.

3) New York's unemployment rate now exceeds the nation's, which is already and a long-time high.

Being an amateur student of history, it's remarkable to live through these times, to look back at similarly divisive debates, and hope that eventually, we'll get ourshit straight. We have to, in order to manage whatever comes next.