Consider death for a moment. Americans have this tendency to view death as tragic without really thinking about why we shake our heads and make that soft clucking sound in the back of our throats while our eyes refuse to light anywhere because actually making eye contact might force us to acknowledge another human being’s raw feelings.

I think that a lot of times someone’s death is seen as tragic because we dwell on the cessation of the deceased’s experiences - that the 16 year-old killed in the car accident will never grow up to find love and live a a full life; that the child died before she got a chance to mature; that the middle aged woman will never see her kids grow up to do all of those things that we expect parents to be proud kids do (Random question: How come no one ever says “Thank God Linda died of cancer before she could see little Billy become a junkie with AIDS?” ’cause not every kid is going to grow up to be president and sometimes that’s pretty damn obvious…but I digress).

We fail to realize that death is the natural end of the cycle. Jim Morrison may have been a narcissistic lush but never a truer line was written than “no one here gets out alive.” Or, as Chuck Palahniuk wrote, “On a long enough time line the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” And while I’m not saying it’s wrong to grieve the deceased’s lost experiences, there is an unspoken thread there, a fear so primal that I think it takes years, if ever, before any of us realize that it’s there.

Though I was first introduced to it as a concept of Judaism it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that other religions incorporate the idea that a loved one isn’t really gone as long as she’s remembered by someone still living. It’s a comforting concept that just by cherishing your loved one’s memory you carry a little piece of that person around with you for as long as you live anyway. In many ways it mirrors the reality of our experiences; the people we care for, whether we loved them or hated them, influence our decision making processes and our outlook on life in ways many of us don’t understand and most of us don’t bother to investigate. Sure, it’s obvious when someone has daddy’s eyes or mommy’s chin or when you suddenly look in the mirror at 50 and realize that you’ve got the same sagging jowls as your paternal uncle, but the influence someone can have on the way with think and act reaches far deeper than that.

And if you’re at all aware of that influence, it’s quite likely you find yourself wondering just how that person would react to something. When it’s someone you loved there’s a little bittersweet wave of sadness when you come upon something she would have enjoyed. When it’s someone you loathed there’s often a feeling of self-righteous indignation that manifests itself in that “ha! showed you dad, didn’t I?” strain that is so common in American culture.

My Grandmother died at 79 years old and I bet I’m the only one of her grandchildren who ever got to hear the story about her and her roommates splurging a month’s salary in 1939 to buy a piano so they’d have something to do in the evenings in their tiny little fourth floor walk-up in downtown DC (the story about the piano men delivering it is something that still makes me grin 25 years after hearing it). Thing is, even though I heard that story, even though I could tell my cousins that story, the essence of the experience is at best diluted.

The unspoken, unacknowledged fear is the one that stems out the real tragedy of death: that we might have no idea how someone would react because we didn’t really know them well enough to begin with. Once that person we cared for is gone not only is all of their first-hand knowledge and experience lost we have squandered the opportunity to dig deep, to get the stories that make that person worth knowing and loving, to absorb the sum of their experiences and attitudes in a way that allows us to truly know someone. We count on having time to do this and even if someone is lucky enough to have a “natural” lifespan we often don’t.

The real tragedy of death is that we squander the time we have with the people we love on fripperies and effluvia. I’m not saying that every moment spent with someone you care for has to be packed with meaning, full of discovery and knowledge sharing. That would be too hard (after all, sometimes you just have to talk about the designated hitter rule). But maybe we need to find a balance, to find a way not to try and pack so much meaning into someone’s last weeks, days, or hours so that the actual process of dying might be a little easier on the person who is doing it.

My uncle would have been 63 today and I have no idea what he’d think about the state of the world right now. I wish I did.

I think I finally figured out why I don’t like Barack Obama. It has nothing to do with the color of his skin, or who he’s married to, or the fact that he’s a lawyer first and a politician second, or a politician at all. Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that he wasn’t my candidate of choice.

No, one of the reasons I dislike Barack Obama has to do with him and one of them is stone cold on me.

I wouldn’t call Steve Kroft’s interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday a good interview but it wasn’t necessarily bad either. Softball questions feel appropriate at this time in the honeymoon period. But watching the interview in which the Obamas, both of them, were spot on, not a hair out of place, not a misspoken word, not a single fleeting reaction even made me realize that I don’t like Barack Obama because he’s perfect.

Despite the myriad rumors about Obama - he’s a muslim; he’s a domestic terrorist; his campaign was being funded by foreign nationals trying to overthrow our government to name a few - so many rumors that his campaign started a web site specifically to address them, no one was able to find anything truly controversial about the man that he did not admit himself. Hell, the doubt about Obama ran so deep that requests for his birth certificate were so numerous that the Director of Health for the State of Hawaii had to issue an official statement saying that she personally verified the authenticity of the document.

Even though he has been the most closely examined candidate in presidential history neither objective nor partisan digging has been able to find a hair out of place, a misworded e-mail angrily sent, nothing to mar the man’s public image as an adult. Indeed, all of his youthful mistakes give him “character.” It is as if he’s been running for President since he was about 19 years old, as if every move in his life, even those youthful indiscretions, has been calculated to culminate in the moment during which he strode on to the stage in Chicago with his wife and his daughters by his side to claim victory in the election.

And the thing of it is, and this is the part that is solely on me, I want to believe him. I want to believe the image he presents: that he’s a good, decent man with maybe not exactly the same views as mine but with good intent to do the right thing by as many people as he can, to make life a little easier for those that have it the hardest, to make the world a little bit more fair.

But I know deep down in my soul that even though this President is my president - he’s the leading, bleeding edge of Gen X and chronologically we have a lot in common - he is, at bottom, a politician and when 100% of your experience tells you that lurking somewhere inside every politician is a disappointment it’s hard not to wait for the bomb to go off or the other shoe to drop.

The Bad, vol. 1: I asked for more vacation during my review. Request denied. “We can’t have a special leave class for one employee.” How about, let’s make the leave policy not suck so hard then?

The Good: I’m still getting the 5% raise, retroactive to my anniversary date in October.

The Aggravating.: I want out of our 401k plan. Legally I can do an in-service rollover of all my monies with no penalty if I never control the funds, Financial Institution A tells me. Yep, that’s sure true, says Financial Institution B, but your plan prohibits withdrawing any monies that have been contributed while you’re an employee. Oh, says I, who sets those rules. The plan administrator, says B. Our plan administrator tells me she has no control over the rules. Um, no, I’m hearing the same thing from two separate financial institutions and you’re telling me not-that-thing. Someone is either lying or mistaken. Please check into it.

I really didn’t want to know that: During our weekly meeting I mentioned a task in my workplan for a particular regional office. Of the two people in that office, he asked me, which of them does the bulk of the work on this project? I told him I had no clue. Apparently one of these two people is getting laid off, and soon. Having been laid off it makes me want to tell them both to prep. But I can’t, can I?

Forty-eight years ago today my grandfather had one day to live. It was a Friday so I expect that he got up, showered, shaved, made the coffee and had breakfast, and went to work like he’d done the previous four days in the week. He probably did a good day’s work that last day; after he died they hired three men to replace him where he worked.

I’m sure he had lunch, though I don’t know if he got a sandwich or if he took a lunch bag. I’ve never thought to ask my mother about that. I know for sure he had dinner with his family because, well, that’s the kind of family it was. I think my grandmother may have been working nights at the GPO then, though again I’m not really sure. It all kind of runs together into one big mushy family story, the details lost to time and telling.

The thing of it is: he had no idea when he got up the morning of November 18, 1960 that it would be his last day just the same as we have no guarantee of our tomorrows. Yet here most of us sit, whiling away time like it’s a renewable resource, like we’re sure that there will be a next month or a next year or even a tomorrow for us.

We are exhorted to carpe diem, to live life to the fullest, to make sure that all of our time is “quality time” yet we’re given no yardstick or guidelines for what that means (if the party people define living life to the fullest then most of us, in truth, are pretty much fucked; if it’s the fundies, well, the same applies) and this huge responsibility: don’t waste time.

Is it any wonder so many of us are uncomfortable in our own skins, cranky and dissatisfied no matter how many creature comforts we have?

1,440 minutes doesn’t seem like a lot of time, does it? If we’re lucky, it’s what we get in a day. If. we’re. lucky.

I admit it: I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly. It’s not cheap nor is it easy on the planet; it is a weekly after all. But it keeps me relatively up to date with pop culture. As one of my official duties at home is Minister of Culture (skip the cat eating spaghetti search on YouTube…trust me), it’s important to know what’s hot, what’s not, and what’s worthy of spending time on. Sometimes the way those three groups join is surprising.

This week EW put out yet another list issue: top 25 entertainers of the year. Typical of these types of lists, they also included a list of five entertainers to watch. Said list included Demi Lovato who at 16 is a apparently a huge star with the Disney channel set. She’s the star of Camp Rock and she has an album coming out most of which was written and produced by those other Disney Channel products The Jonas Brothers. And just by continuing to breathe she proves that all pop culture is now derivative.

Go ahead, plug “demi” into Google. I dare you.

You’ll get Lovato’s fansite, some YouTube video links, a link to wiktionary for a definition of the word demi (origin: latin; meaning: half) but right there in slot number two you’ll get the IMDB link for the original celebrity Demi. That’s Moore, Demi Moore.

Lovato: born in 1992 while Moore’s popularity as an actress was still high; also named Demetria. I may be stretching given that her mom was a Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleader, she was was born in Dallas, and has an older sister named Dallas which kinda says that maybe mom didn’t reach too far when it came to names, but when we’ve got the second wave of starlets with the same funny name that showed up on the scene 25 years earlier…yeah, I’m going with derivative.

QED: Love Don’t Cost A Thing

It’s amazing how many Fall chores there are. Today’s: Weed and mulch the front flower garden.

What a mess! I haven't weeded since the middle of July.

Looks marginally better after raking out the leaves...except that it just shows how much it needs to be weeded.

These mums cost $11.99 at Kmart last year. I was surprised they came back.

I am Jill's neglected garden. These irises bloomed in April; they should have been trimmed by now.

A little better after the first weeding. The key is to look at it from different angles to see what you missed.

After the second weeding pass and ready for mulch.

The pile of stuff I pulled out. Weeds in this garden come in three types: crab grass, dandelions, and violets. In the Fall you also get fungus (eeewww!).

Ready for winter: the black-eyed Susans have been trimmed and the seeds sown, the irises trimmed, and everything weeded. In a month I'll have to cut back the mums.

So…that was my afternoon. Oddly, it always makes me feel better to get my hands a little bit dirty.

The stock market, which normally acts like a group of 13 year-olds hyped up on too much sugar, dropped more than 4% just before yesterday’s closing bell. Some of that drop had to do with reported losses from Freddie Mac (Freddie Mac ruins everything) and changes in the rates for Treasury Bills. The bulk of it, though, had to do with the drop in consumer spending in October.

The numbers released yesterday reflect a 2.8% decline in consumer spending in October and a 4.1% decline from October 2007. This report reflects the largest monthly decline since the Commerce Department started keeping this index in 1992. Since personal consumption spending accounts for 70% of the U.S. GDP^*, if people aren’t out there spending their money on stuff the economy naturally shrinks. And while it’s perfectly valid to look at the spending numbers - a 5.5% drop in automobile sales and a 2.2% drop in retail sales excluding automobiles - combined with the rise in the unemployment rate (6.5% in October which is a bullshit number any way because it doesn’t take into account people who have dropped off unemployment roles because they are no longer eligible to collect unemployment, people who are underemployed (want to work full-time but can’t find a job that lets them), and people who have just plain stopped looking) as a measure of consumers’ outlook on the economy I think there’s also another reason why people have stopped buying stuff: There’s nothing to buy.

I will grant you that DC-proper (vs. DC metro which includes the suburbs) isn’t necessarily the best yardstick by which to measure the availability of goods. Smart retailers will stock their outlets with the products that move at those locations which is why you’re not going to see a lot of high end washers and dryers at an in-city outlet of a chain store but you might see three different models of stacked apartment washer and dryer combos. Thing of it is, I think the retailers have gotten stupid.

Circuit City, which has been in trouble since they laid off 3,400 of their most experienced salesclerks in April 2007, recently declared bankruptcy and announced they were closing 155 of their 700 stores. Now, Circuit City has been a feature in the DC area for over 25 years but the thing of it is that in that time I’ve only ever successfully made one purchase there.

Most of the time this is how it would go: I’d go in to look at a piece of electronic equipment (TV, stereo component, what have you) and I’d either be ignored so hard by the salesclerk that I had to go searching for someone to fill out a ticket and take my money or I’d have the clerk giving me an anal probe to prod me to buy. Invariably, I’d make my purchase and take my ticket to the merchandise counter. Someone would take my ticket and disappear behind the plastic sheeting only to return enough minutes later that I was frustrated to tell me that nope, sorry, they didn’t have any of those in the back despite what the salesclerk’s computer said. At which point I’d spend another 15 to 20 minutes at the customer service desk to get my money back. Then I’d go to either a local shop or to Best Buy and get something equally good for about the same price. The problem is that lately all of my brick & mortar shopping experiences have been like visiting Circuit City.

I was at Best Buy yesterday because, well, it was proximate to what I was doing and I wanted to pick up a copy of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. I also wanted to fill in a few holes in my DVD collection (Burglar, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and the 50th Anniversary edition of Touch of Evil (deal with it)). Admittedly, two of these movies are more than 20 years old so it wasn’t a shock to not find them. What was a shock was that not only did the Best Buy I was in not have a copy of the Touch of Evil anniversary edition, which was released within the last 60 days, none of the 9 Best Buy stores in the metro area had one either.

Now, I could write this off to Best Buy sucking camel nuts if I hadn’t had the exact same experience, minus the clerk looking at me dumbly and mumbling “what’s Touch of Evil?”, at Borders not two weeks ago. And if I hadn’t had a similar experience at both the Office Depot outlets in the DC area when I went to look for recycled printer paper; not only did neither outlet have it in stock the clerks had never even heard of it. The story was the same at Target last weekend when I went to look for new rugs; half the shelves were empty.

So yeah, people aren’t spending money in the retail market because they’re worried about whether or not they’re going to have a job in a month, or two, or six. They’re not spending it because the difference between the price of gas/gallon the price of a gallon of milk never varies by more than 15 cents. They’re not spending money because health insurance premiums are going up and like everything else that goes up the price never quite drops back down to the level it was at before it started to cost more.

But maybe, just maybe, they aren’t spending as much money in the retail market because when they get to the mall there just isn’t anything to buy.

^* Dr. Wikipedia says the best way to understand Gross Domestic Product is to think of it thusly:
GDP = consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)

Hey, I’m entitled. See the blog title right up there? It allows for a little randomness.

• Why is it you hardly ever see pet found flyers?
  I was over on the other side of town today and posted all up and down the avenue were flyers reading “Found: Brown Beagle” with a date and a description and I got to wondering: why is it that you hardly ever see found pet flyers? Lost pet flyers, complete with heart rending picture of said beloved furry friend, abound but found pet flyers are few and far between. I wonder about this in particular since our streets aren’t covered in the corpses of pampered house pets who just happened to squeeze out between their human’s legs and the door while the human signed for that UPS package, so where do all these lost pets end up? I do remember when I adopted my pets from the shelter I had to have a home visit and when I asked the woman why she said that one of the reasons was that people sometimes adopted pets and then turned around and sold them to medical labs. The mind reels.
• Where do cravings come from and how can I make them stop?
  OK, I get it: if my electrolytes are low I often crave salt. Around a certain point in the month I want protein. But where the hell does the craving for curry lahksa come from? Seriously, in my genetic heritage spicy broth, chicken, green beans, noodles, and tofu not so much with the race memory.
• Why are phone menu systems so fuzzydumb?
  I’m trying to roll my 401k plan money out of my employer’s chosen institution (they aren’t managing my investments, I’m doing that myself, and they’re the only investment house to ever charge me a maintenance fee) but getting through their phone menu system is like trying to read ancient Sumerian. Yes, I want to talk to a counselor. OK, yes, I have a question about withdrawals but the menu you just sent me to doesn’t have an option for that. I finally just called back and entered all zeros when they asked for my social security number. That got me a live person right quick. Still, is it any wonder why people are pissed off by the time they get to the representative?

And finally, do you know your personal dewey decimal number? I have two:

It’s a yearly ritual and companies both big and small…the annual review. It starts with the self-evaluation form in which you have to balance your opinion of yourself - why yes, thank you, I’m spectacular; I’m glad you asked - with something that tempers that so your supervisor has room to suggest improvements in your performance - this makes your boss feel like he or she actually has something to do.

The next step is going through that review. Your supervisor has to reconcile your view of yourself with the feedback from your coworkers and with his or her own impressions of your work. Then the hard part: the confrontation. Your boss is forced to evaluate you to your face.

If that goes well, you get to the salary negotiation phase during which your boss tries to put a monetary price on your value to the company. And no matter how much it is, it’s never enough.

And no matter how much somehow there’s always this unspoken vibe that you should be grateful for what you’re getting, lucky to have made it through your review and still have a job. The entire review structure, making you evaluate your own performance, wondering what anonymous feedback your colleagues have given your supervisor, having to be polite while your supervisor details your perceived strengths and weaknesses and makes concrete suggestions for improvements, the whole thing is designed to put you on the defensive.

The thing of it is, your annual review is one of the few opportunities you have as an employee to get yourself on a better footing with your employer. Most people blow their primary opportunity which is at hire. The only other time, which is pretty dicey anyway, is if you have another offer from another employer. By then, though, you’re pretty much out the door anyway.

Today my boss offered me 5% which is nothing to sneeze at in this economy and in the state the organization I work for is in but in the spirit of expansiveness that has pervaded the country since the election I asked for what I wanted: more time.

Given that America is the only industrialized nation in the world that has no legal minimum for vacation, time is worth more to me at this point that money. After all, it’s the only thing you ever really run out of.

I’m gradually realizing how important music really is to me. Three years of XMRadio will do that do you. Tonight I’m heading over to The Birchmere Music Hall to see Bob Schneider, one of my favorite working musicians. If you haven’t heard him, check him out. If you’re not interested in checking out some new music, take a wander over to the Utne Reader for their take on the near-biological connection between music and mood.

Update: 23:25

As blog entries go, this one was pretty much crap. So, I share with you my double geeky treasure. Since it was a really good Bob show I went ahead and bought the live CD…then I got it autographed. My name (which is still there in hard copy), the smudgy thing at the top was blurred to protect the extraordinarily geeky.

Great music...scary visual art.