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Random notes from a strange early spring

It has been gorgeous here in DC for the past few days, unseasonably warm with highs in the upper 60s even passing the 70degF mark. Gorgeous weather isn’t necessarily the best for contemplation. It’s too easy to be distracted by suddenly visible flesh and the feel of the sun on your face. Still, a few things have popped out over the past few weeks that bear mentioning.

Fashion

Something is wrong with us culturally. I say this truly not because of the usual reasons why someone declares our culture sick or simply wrong. No, I say this because we have no coherent fashion motif other than shear chaos. Our local PBS station ran this past season two documentaries on our fair city, Washington In The ’60s and Washington In The ’70s and even though culturally and historically the 1960s and the 1970s overlap by quite a bit (really what we think of as “the ’60s” began in November 1963 and ended April 4, 1975), it’s not hard to look at the footage and tell with a fair degree of certainty which time period you’re looking at. The same can not be said for walking down the street in the present day.

During our recent good weather shortly after seeing the 40ish gentleman with the p.o.r.n. ‘stach worthy of something from the Linda Lovelace era I spotted a guy who couldn’t have been more than 23 years-old wearing the following: off-white khakis with a crease so sharp you could cut yourself on them, topsiders, not one but two Polo shirts (in complimentary, pastel colors) with the collars turned up, that hint of stubble meant to look like two days’ growth, and oversized sunglasses in black plastic and a style that would have said “nerd” in 1955. Now, can you name that year in gay fashion? If you guessed 1983 or 1984 you get the grand prize.

If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?

Ah…spring, and with it come the tourists. Normally, we wouldn’t be seeing hordes of confused, scared looking people with maps until early April when the Cherry Blossoms are predicted to be in peak bloom. This is not a normal year.

Yesterday we had not one, not two, but three major events downtown – the national marathon; an anti-health care reform rally (um, yeah, ’cause I like getting denied coverage because “being female” is considered a pre-existing condition), and an anti-war rally – all at the same time. Aptly labeled “the first fringe of spring” by DCist.com, this is more crazy than even we’re used to. Good thing METRO has made sure that they’re cutting back on weekend track work in April so all those wonderful folks from out of town can get around ’cause hey, if you live here you’re used to being trapped at home on the weekends or adding an extra hour to a trip that normally takes 20-30 minutes.

What do you mean “all the lights are on?”

I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR lately and between reports about the health care bill and why it might move forward or might not move forward, there have been several reports about the stalled climate and energy bill. That combined with the way my brain works got me to thinking how tied to a certain way of life many of our idioms are.

“All the lights are on but nobody’s home” describes someone who seems to have life in hand but in reality isn’t either fully engaged or is incapable of being fully engaged because of lack of intellect. This is an expression that depends upon the idea that energy is cheap enough that leaving “all the lights on” in your house is something you would routinely do. And I wondered as I sat in my car on the way to the inspection station if I would live to see a time when there were people wandering my country who couldn’t parse that idiom because energy was so expensive no one would think to leave a light on any longer than necessary.

The apocalypse may very well have arrived

America is about to become the only first world nation without reliable mail service.

And in totally unrelated news, my employer hasn’t paid rent on the office I work in for more than 6 months. Last week we got a “pay up or get out” notice from our landlord. Now, how realistic is the idea that we could come up with $100,000 in back rent in 10 business days when we haven’t paid full rent on time in 6 months? Not very, I think, which is why I went in over the weekend and got pretty much all of my personal items out of the office. Any one want in on the unemployment date pool?

Things I should have said

I’ve got a neighbor who refuses to shovel her walk. Not for 4 inches of snow, not for the 26 inches we just got over the weekend. When I asked her about it this afternoon while she was busily digging out her car and throwing the snow from that onto the sidewalk she hadn’t bothered to shovel her response was “I did the best I could on the front.” And my reply was “It’s your property and you’re required to shovel the walk.”

Her response: “I’m tired.”

And what I should have said instead of “Yeah, and I shoveled for 7.5 hours on Saturday and managed to get my walk and my mother’s walk right across the street cleared so I know about being tired.” was

“I don’t care.”
or
“Really? And were you tired when you didn’t shovel the four inches of snow we got last Wednesday?”
or
“Then perhaps you should park your vehicle in front of your house instead of on our short, no-outlet street with limited parking.”
or
“Well, if you can’t maintain your property, maybe you should move.”
or
“Gee, you know, my mother told me people like you existed but I never thought I’d actually meet a permanent, full-time asshole. Thank you for a unique life experience.”

If it didn’t take so much energy I would, tomorrow while she is at work, shovel the entire walk into the parking space she so lovingly cleared. It’s going to be especially fun with the 10-20 inches of additional snow we’re predicted to get overnight Tuesday.

Of course, the other thing I’m left to deal with besides my OCD and my impotent rage is an absolute rapture at the stupidity of pissing off someone who knows where you live. Not that she doesn’t know where I live but were I a more vengeful a person I would dare her to prove that I’m the one who injected soda into your driver’s side door lock during the night so it could freeze solid for several hours before a work day.

Update: Petty Revenge

Our trash collection happens in the alleys in my neighborhood which means that it won’t be happening probably for the rest of the month.  I have two ways to get to my can: I can go out the back and open my gate or I can go out the front and walk down the alley with my trash to my garage where my trash and recycling cans are sitting.  With 2+ feet of drifted snow against my gate, going out the back wasn’t an option.

And as I was trying to figure out how I was going to drag a trash bag and a bag of recyclables down an alley piled with with snow and rutted with ice crusted tire tracks I noticed that my neighbor on the corner had very carefully cleared the snow off the top of her city-issued can.

Well, you know, I was tired from shoveling all that snow so I just put my trash in the most convenient can.  I just can’t help it if that means that her trash can is now full and she won’t have any place to put her refuse.  ’cause, you know, I was tired.  Petty, yes?  But you know, the problem with karma is that you hardly ever get to watch in in action.  And yeah, maybe I’ve done my own karma some damage by doing something mean, but I think it all balances out.

Snowpocalypse Redux

It's a big one. And it's roaring like a freight train.

I’ve been mostly awake since 3 a.m. This is not a new phenomenon. What is new is having that same giddy feeling I had as a kid on Christmas morning. I shouldn’t be excited. I really shouldn’t. In an area that normally gets maybe 8 inches of snow a year we’re in for our third storm in less than 45 days. And it promises to be a doozy.

I confess that I am a little tired of shoveling snow on my time; this will be our second accumulation of 12 inches or more over a Friday night/Saturday morning. Seriously, could we have 11-17 inches of snow on a Wednesday? Even with that “flinty Chicago toughness” of President’s, OPM would be forced to close the Fed.

But still, I can’t help but be moved out of my usual winter torpor by something that is forcing everyone to rethink how they do business. And by everyone I do mean everyone. The law firm my mother works at closed preemptively yesterday. Don’t think it was out of the goodness of their hearts, though. Accumulation has been predicted to start around 10 a.m. Eastern time and our subway system announced yesterday, a full 24 hours in advance of the storm, that 8 inches or more would force the closure of all above ground rail stations. You can’t very well have people coming into the office for an hour or two because some of them will, stupidly, stay longer than they should and then the firm has a liability issue. The prediction is that this will be the biggest storm since 1996.

For the record, in 1996, the subway was closed for three days.

Why wasn’t Haiti important last Monday?

I think I need to have my head examined: I agreed with Bill O’Reilly today. Before we get to how there needs to be a little background.

While I am amazed and astonished by the donations that have rushed in to help the victims of Haiti’s recent earthquake – as of Friday, January 15, reports about the “text a donation” to the Red Cross campaign put the figure some where between $7M USD and $8M USD which doesn’t include the $2M USD that has poured into Wyclef Jean’s questionable charity or the donations by individual celebrities – I am also moved to ask a fundamental question about this sudden compassion for Haiti and its people: Where where was it on Monday before the earthquake?

On Monday, before Port-au-Prince collapsed in its entirety, Haiti was dismally poor with a population suffering the effects of decades of not just mismanagement but outright corruption. According to a 2005 USAID report, the average life expectancy in Haiti was 53 years-old. Literacy rates hovered between 48% and 52% and the average per-capita income was about $400 a year where income distribution left more than three quarters of the population living below the poverty line. Even though the report doesn’t say anything about it, food insecurity – which is a wonky way of saying not having any clue where your next meal is coming from or when – was probably frighteningly high.

Haiti was and is by all estimation the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

Stunning to think about isn’t it? Just imagine for a minute: for the U.S. in 2005 comparable figures would have meant 224,772,395 people living below the poverty line. And given that the poverty line is a bull shit number anyway – it’s calculated on the cost of feeding a family of four in 1966 for a year – that is an even more frightening statistic regardless of which country you apply it to.

And these stats are for Haiti after the country received $865M USD in aid from the U.S., Canada, Taiwan, the EU, and a World Bank/IMF credit in 2003. In 2004, more than $1B USD was pledged for two years for relief and development efforts in Haiti. Or, to quote Mr. O’Reilly:

TV talker Bill O’Reilly, for example, said he gives to a private charity that helps Haiti but has a dim view of government aid: “[T]he USA will once again pour millions into that country, much of which will be stolen. Once again, we will do more than anyone else on the planet, and one year from today, Haiti will be just as bad as it is right now.”

– “‘The earth shook to open people’s eyes’ to needy Haiti”, Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post, January 18, 2010, A6.

Yes, absolutely, we need to help with earthquake relief efforts. The devastation is amazing and heart wrenching and the human cost will be, when all the bodies are found, stunningly high. But why wasn’t the poverty in Haiti important to us as a people, not as a government but as a people, before now? Because it wasn’t in our face and we have the capacity to ignore indefinitely what isn’t pushed in our face by some natural or man-made disaster?

Or is it because we do care but it’s damn hard to be really invested when you know (but can not prove), that the effect of your donation – because let’s be honest, most of us aren’t going to quit our jobs and go be relief workers anywhere: it takes a special class of person to do that – is going to be virtually nil because the system into which it’s going is designed to benefit the top 1% and the top 1% already have so much more than everyone else that your $10 isn’t even going to register?

Given as a country we’ve said that we will send Haitians who land in the U.S. directly back to Haiti, I don’t know what to think.

The only thing I do know is that our attitudes as Americans toward poverty, both in and out of our country, make my head hurt.

If you are moved by the devastation in Haiti and care about making an impact on poverty in areas not 60% populated by TV commentators, try giving to an organization like Doctors Without Borders (U.S. – Other locations) or Action Aid (U.S. – Other locations) which consistently work to reduce the effects of poverty around the globe.

It keeps everything from happening at once.

Only twelve days in and it’s already been an interesting year.

I had a job interview last Friday with a firm that has been head hunting me for over a year. They’re a good company, a vendor that provides an essential web-based application to the organization I work for now. Smart people, progressive, both in the small and large sense, who understand that it’s what you produce not what you wear while you’re producing it that matters. They recognize the benefits of keeping their employees happy. In a lot of ways, they embody the best of the mentality that came out of the dot com era: work hard, play hard, try to remember you have a life outside the office.

My interview was at 9am and I was told to allow for an hour. It took two. I find that the interview that runs over because you ended up talking longer is a good sign; generally if they don’t like you they’ve made up their mind in the first 20 minutes or so. We talked about my philosophy of tech support – communicate, communicate, communicate – and about side projects I might be interested in doing – um, yes, the HTML code that your application puts out is unstylable because it’s not standards compliant and even unrelated elements are classed – and about which comic book or cartoon character, past or present, I would choose to be if I could choose one (yeah, it’s that kinda place). And we talked about salary, which is the place I thought it would all go to hell. They were fine with my floor, and fine with my preferred starting point for negotiations which is $5,000 a year above my floor.

I would say it went well given that in the time it took me to leave their offices, get the subway, ride one stop, and walk to my office they made me a formal offer that included a week’s more vacation than I get at my current job, 6 more administrative days off (aka: public holidays) than I get now, and $5,000 more a year than my current stated salary. The only catch was the level of support they expected me to provide to my clients.

The job would have been supporting 10 or 12 of their biggest clients, and it would have required me to be “on call” until midnight every night. That would have meant not only would I have to actually see midnight every night – seriously, that 9:30 bed time I railed against in high school…little did I know that it was my mid-life future – it would have required me to take on the additional expense of an actual cell phone plan rather than the pay-as-you-go personal pay phone I carry around now.

The expense wouldn’t have been a problem. It was the time.

I am a little OCD about my job. It’s the way my mind works about any problem, really: take the problem in, throw it into the processing unit to be worked on in the background, and eventually find a solution based on the stated parameters – you can see this process at work every week if you watch House; when he has his revelatory moment during which he solves the case after all their floundering you’re seeing the end point of this type of problem solving. And because I am a little OCD about my job, I’ve spent the last five years very consciously drawing a line between work time and home time with clear markers (that’s why when I do work at home I actually get completely dressed rather than wearing my jammies; dressed means work time).

Being “on call” would mean that I could never relax, that I would always be alert for the phone ringing, always waiting for someone to throw a hand grenade at me so I could respond to it. And while I can do combat readiness, it’s no way to live daily if not absolutely necessary.

To put it more bluntly: the idea that a client could call me at any time of the day or night actually gave me a rash while I was thinking about it. Literally, big red splotches on my chest and neck.

So instead of doing what seems even in fourth or fifth thoughts like the smart thing and taking the job – more money, better holidays, stable company – I declined the offer to stay at the creaky, robbing Peter to pay Paul, Christ, I didn’t mail my paycheck until Monday I hope it clears, what do you mean we get MLK day off and not another holiday until the end of May? non-profit because even with the shitty holidays it does give on a daily basis me more of the only thing you ever really run out of.