Sadly, I have no time for a lengthy post this week. I'm at my in-laws for the weekend in South Carolina, and it's like a zoo here. I have a little bit of peace and quiet right now, because everybody, ironically, is at the actual zoo. I stayed behind to take a little break from the chaos. I also need to save my energy. There's a 7-year old here, and she's wearing me out. We've developed a game in which I pretend to block her path and then she runs around me and giggles. It's fun, for awhile, after about the fifth iteration I'm like, "Hey, wanna learn how to do a crossword puzzle?"
All told there are 13 of us with one more arriving tonight. It's like Little India here. One nice thing about this is that I make my wife wait on me hand and foot. If she protests I say, "Sorry Babe, that's the culture. I don't want to offend anyone. We'd better just go along with it." It's been a surprisingly effective rebuttal so far.
Anyway, happy belated Thanksgiving!
[Nothing quite says Thanksgiving like the Dallas Cowboys and South Indian food.]
So the other day I'm driving home from work on US-29 in Takoma Park, Maryland. At the section of the highway I'm on there are three lanes in each direction and no shoulder. I mean no shoulder. It goes lane, six inches of yellow stripe, median moving to the left, and lane, six inches of yellow stripe, curb moving to the right. The speed limit is 45, so most the time it drives like a major freeway, but there are stop lights on it.
I'm nearly home, about a mile away, and approaching one of these stop lights. It turns yellow, so I have to make that punch-it-or-slam-on-brakes decision. I punch it, and get through the intersection fine, except for the fact that an unmarked SUV behind me lights up and starts blaring a siren. I'm getting pulled over. To quote Rick Perry, "oops".
The problem is that there is nowhere to pull over. It doesn't seem safe to stop on the highway immediately next to a lane of fast-moving traffic while completely blocking another one. I remember when I took drivers ed, 19 years ago, a state trooper came to talk to us once, and he said that as long as you slow down to indicate you aren't trying to flee, you can always find a safe place to pull over. Well, it turns out that that's not really a universally shared feeling among police officers.
I slow way down, wave my hand a few times to indicate I'm not running away (admittedly this is hard to see as it's dark out), and look for a decent place to stop.
One Mississippi... two Mississippi... three Mississippi... that's all it takes, and the SUV is next to me with the cop in the passenger's seat screaming.
"STOP YOUR FUCKING CAR RIGHT NOW!"
I stop. The officers stop their car and the following exchange occurs.
Cop 1: (approaching the vehicle) ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDED? ARE YOU A FUCKING RETARD? WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU STOP WHEN WE FLASHED YOU?
Me: (rolling down my window) I was going to. I slowed way down. I was just looking for a safe place to pull over.
Cop 1: WHEN YOU SEE AN OFFICER'S LIGHTS YOU FUCKING STOP! I DON'T CARE WHERE YOU ARE!
Me: I was told that if you don't feel it's safe to pull over, that you can find a safe place. I was just looking for a side street. I didn't think it was safe to block a lane and be so close to the other traffic, especially in the dark.
Cop 1: THAT'S NOT YOUR DECISION! LICENSE AND REGISTRATION! (I give him my credentials. He leaves. His buddy comes up to the other side of my car.)
Cop 2: ROLL DOWN THIS GODDAMN WINDOW! WHEN A COP TELLS YOU TO STOP, YOU FUCKING STOP! YOU DON'T DECIDE WHERE TO STOP! WE DECIDED THAT!
Me: OK, fine, sorry, I was just looking for somewhere safe, I didn't think I was doing anything wrong.
Cop 2: YOU WERE WRONG WHEN YOU DIDN'T STOP WHEN YOU FIRST SAW OUR LIGHTS!
Me: OK, fine, you don't have to yell. I'm right here.
Cop 2: (taking his voice down a few decibels) I'm not yelling. I'm giving you suggestions. (He says this as if yelling and suggestion giving are natural opposites. He leaves and then Cop 1 comes back to the driver's side.)
Cop 1: Do you still live in DC?
Me: No, I just moved to this area a few weeks ago.
Cop 1: Do you have a Maryland license? (He's no longer yelling. He's gone into smug, tough guy, trying-to-intimidate mode.)
Me: No.
Cop 1: You are sure?
Me: Yes.
Cop 1: Why do you think I'm asking you this?
Me: I have no idea.
Cop 1: I'm asking you this because I know you have a Maryland license. Do you know it's illegal to have a license in two different states?
Me: I don't have a Maryland license. I used to have a Maryland license. I lost a Maryland license about four years ago, maybe this has something to do with that.
Cop 1: Ever think to take care of that? (It's difficult to convey just how smug he's being at this point.)
Me: Yes, I did take care of it, when it happened. I went to the Maryland DMV, reported a lost card, and got a new one. When I moved to DC, the DC DMV made me give them this card before I could get my DC license. If it's saying I have two licenses, it's some sort of mistake on the DMV's part.
Cop 1: Well, it's on you isn't it? You're the one who's going to get in trouble for it.
Me: I'm going to get in trouble for a processing error I didn't know anything about and had no reason to assume occurred? That doesn't make any sense. I mean, what was I supposed to do?
Cop 1: Take some responsibility. Step up and take some personal responsibility.
Me: Take some responsibility?! For what?! I didn't do anything! (I'm indignant and raising my voice at this point. I look at the officer. We stare at each other for a few seconds.)
Me: I don't know what you want from me.
Cop 1: You can start by being honest, being truthful.
Me: I've been honest this whole time! What do you think I'm lying to you about? Look, I'm not a criminal. Maybe I've committed a minor moving violation, but... (He cuts me off.)
Cop 1: Don't start with that or you're really going to piss me off. (He walks away, talks with his buddy and comes back.)
Cop 1: I understand your theory about wanting to pull over where it's safe, but it's the wrong theory. When you see our lights, you stop... And slow down! (He goes back to the vehicle and they drive off.)
And that was that. No ticket, no warning, not even an explanation about why I was pulled over, other than the last sentence. (I guess I was driving too fast.) It was weird. So weird that for the rest of the trip home, I created hypothetical scenarios that would explain the officers' overly aggressive behavior. Maybe I matched the description of somebody they were looking for. Maybe they thought they turned their lights on miles ago. Maybe they were having exceptionally stressful days. Maybe, but probably not. Probably they are hotheaded, thin-skinned assholes, and they took it as a personal insult -- an affront to their authority -- that I didn't pull over immediately. When it started to click that I really didn't do anything that wrong, they had to carry on with the whole Maryland license BS as some sort of idiotic self-justification of their brutishness. That's my guess, anyway.
I told S about it when I got home, and she was beside herself. She said suggested I lodge a formal complaint (as did my friend RT), but I never thought to get the officers' names or plates. I don't even know what department they are from. Plus, ultimately nothing happened, and sometimes it's best to just let things go.
In other, much more pleasant news, S and I are buying a house in DC. It's a nice house in a nice neighborhood. I don't want to say too much about it, lest I jinx things (I don't believe in jinxes, but just in case), but if all goes according to plan we will be homeowners and moving back to DC in January. We will also be broke, but what good is it to just see a bunch of numbers on a statement? I'd rather have a house.
I can't say how much we're paying for it, because S specifically asked me to not say it on my blog. She's already annoyed that I stated my salary in a previous entry. She's weird about things like that. Or maybe I'm the weird one. I guess it's impolite to talk about personal finances, but I don't really care. We all work to make money, some make a little more than others, some a little less, what's the big deal? I remember once when S and I were dating I asked how much she made, and she wouldn't tell me. She said, "it doesn't matter," which is an odd response in that it implies the exact opposite. If the answer to a question truly doesn't matter, you just say it, you don't say, "it doesn't matter." It would be really weird if you did.
"What kind of sandwich is that?" "It doesn't matter."
I've been watching the new season of Beavis and Butt-Head. I forgot how funny that show is. It's basically the same as it was 20 years ago, except that during the cut away video parts Beavis and Butt-Head are much wittier than they used to be. During these parts, it's more like an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 than it is an old B and B episode. Watch the clip below to see what I mean.
This whole Tim Tebow thing is really something else, huh? I'm still somewhere in between the "he sucks" and "he's the second coming" camps, but after watching his final drive on Thursday, I'm starting to lean toward the latter. Whatever the case may be, it's just cool to watch him make plays like below, and then practically start speaking in tongues on the sidelines afterward. (Seriously, watch the end. He's muttering to himself.)
I've come to the conclusion that our country -- nay, the world -- would be a better place if everybody thought like me. I'm not saying it would be better if everybody agreed with me on all issues, or if everybody liked the things that I like, or took the same moral positions as I do. I'm saying it would be a better place if everybody tried to look at issues objectively and come to fact-based conclusions like I do. I'm starting to realize that many people, perhaps even most people, don't do this. They base their positions on other things like faith, ego, or predetermined ideology (how they wish things worked, not how they actually do work), and then they try to make the facts fit their stances instead of vice versa. Probably I've known for a long time that this is how many people make decisions, but the older I get, the more decisions I see being made, and in particular the more closely I follow politics, the more egregious it becomes.
[Galileo Galilei: great thinker and the most famous person whose first and last name differ by only one letter.]
And right now, mainstream Republicans are leading the charge on this backward way of thinking. Nearly all their positions on major issues, from climate change to healthcare to the economy aren't backed up by facts. They are always complaining that their critics have a "liberal bias", but it's not a bias, it's that most of they time they're just objectively wrong. (If it's bias, then God apparently has a liberal bias.) Take one of their latest BS talking points: the 2007-2008 financial crisis being caused by government agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (This "theory" was recently espoused by independent NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well.) This fits nicely with the simple-minded government-intervention-is-bad-markets-are-good ideology of the GOP, but of course, it's simply not true. (Fannie and Freddy certainly were involved in risky loans, but they joined the game too late, and had far too small a role in things to be anything close to a cause of the meltdown. You can read a somewhat wonkish take down of the GOP's position here or a completely un-wonkish take down here.)
[There is a legitimate chance that one of these people could be our next president. Gulp.]
The thing is, I can understand why people peddle horse crap if they benefit from peddling horse crap -- politicians spew BS to get elected, businesses spew BS to make money -- but what I can't understand is why anybody else believes it. I mean, the only reason the average citizen should care who caused the financial crisis is so that we can take the necessary steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. All we should care about is accuracy. Same thing for global warming, same thing for healthcare or any other issue -- all we should care about is getting it right.
And how do we get it right? We listen to smart people who think logically, use unbiased fact-based analyses, and who have gotten things right in the past. What we don't do, or at least what we shouldn't do, is listen to people who have a clear bias and twist facts. Do you think it's a coincidence that almost all studies cited by mainstream GOPers to back up their positions emanate from the same few "think tanks"? It's because they aren't real think tanks. They're puppet organizations, and they don't even try to hide it. Read the mission of the Heritage Foundation. How can you possibly treat as credible any study that comes from a group with such an openly biased mission? You may as well believe the doctors who were funded by the tobacco companies about the health risks of cigarettes. If the mission of a think tank isn't "to perform objective analyses and come to unbiased conclusions", then nobody need believe them, end of story. And by the way, this isn't some new crackpot way of thinking I just came up with -- it's called the scientific method. It's been around for, oh, the last 400 years. Let's use it people.
OK, I'm dismounting my high horse now.
[The statue in Thomas Circle, Washington D.C. -- a symbol of my figurative high horse.]
I've also come to the conclusion that you can be too analytic when it comes to personal relationships. My wife has probably come to this conclusion as well, since roughly 70% of our arguments start because she wants emotional support for something, and I, out of habit, offer only analytic support. For example, she recently ordered a box of checks from our main bank (we have five banks, but that's another story). Receiving them ended up being a whole ordeal, because they were sent late, and then we moved, and whatever, I don't know the story exactly. But finally, they were shipped to our new place, but we weren't home, so UPS put a note on our door. Our subsequent conversation went something like this.
S: Ugh! This is so annoying! We're never going to get these checks! D: They'll try again tomorrow and the next day. S: Nobody will be here to let them in? D: Well then, they'll take them to a distribution center, and we can pick them up when we get the chance. S: Yes, but we desperately need checks. D: We still have a few. S: Yeah, but if this whole house thing goes down, we'll need checks for everything, the deposit, the down payment, all that stuff. (We were considering making an offer on a house.) D: We can write checks from one of our other banks. We have a bunch of checks for our other accounts. S: We don't have any money in there. We need checks for our main bank. D: Well, why don't we use one check from our main bank, make it out to ourselves and deposit it into one of our other accounts. Problem solved. S: That's not the point! It's just annoying. Fine. You are right, we don't absolutely have to have checks from this bank. D: Then why did you say we desperately need checks? S: Why do you have to take everything I say so literally?! Can't you just let me be annoyed for a few minutes? You're always trying to tear a hole in my logic, instead of just letting me vent for a while. It just makes it worse. D: Sorr-y. I was just trying to help.
But of course, I wasn't helping at all, because their wasn't really a problem, other than S being annoyed. I probably should've recognized this and just said, "yeah, you're right, that sucks" and given her a hug or something, but that's not really my way. I'm not really a hand-holdy type of guy. Plus, I'm still new to the husband thing. I'm sure I'll be properly trained catch on, soon enough.
In other news, apropos of my comments last entry about the iPhone, I read a piece by Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs the other day. It was really interesting. The underlying premise is that Jobs wasn't the big-picture visionary that he's reputed to be. On the contrary, he was a "tweaker", meaning he took other people's grand ideas and tweaked them so that they were much better. All of Apple's big products under Jobs, the point-and-click based personal computer, MP3 player, smart phone, and laptop tablet, all already existed before Jobs got to them. But, they all "sucked" (Jobs is repeatedly quoted using some form of this word when talking about the competition), and Jobs made them un-suck.
The article also portrays Jobs as kind of, to put it eloquently, a whiny little bitch. Apparently, he was super petulant, he would unabashedly take credit for work his underlings did, and he would get furious whenever the competition "copied" Apple's products, even though Apple had already done the same thing to some other company. There is a famous moment, when Jobs allegedly assailed Bill Gates for stealing the Windows premise, and Gates responded, "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
There is a biography out about Jobs that the article frequently references. I'm considering buying it. The only thing is that I read a biography about Albert Einstein by the same author, Walter Isaacson, and it was l-o-ng. It's rough reading 800 pages on somebody, I don't care how interesting they are.
Well, that just about does it for this entry. Join me next week when I detail an encounter I had recently with a few fine, upstanding, not-at-all dickheaded policemen. I'm not going to go out looking for "fights" with asshole law enforcement officers, but when they happen, and you didn't do anything wrong, and you stand your ground, you feel pretty good about yourself.
For some reason, I've always gotten a huge kick out of people who talk differently than me. In high school, I had a friend who immigrated to the US from Korea when he was 12, and although he spoke pretty good English overall, he had a few quirks that would entertain me to no end, like he could never get the 's' at the end of a word right, even in a name ("My favorite third baseman -- Wade Bogg.") I used to poke fun at his linguistical foibles so often that my sister once claimed that the only reason I hung out with him was because I liked the way he talked. Not true, but it certainly add to the friendship. (I had a Chinese friend in grad school who had some similar speech patterns. He's the feature of this old post.)
Along these same lines, it was great being in Australia where people didn't "want to do" things, they were "keen on" them, and where Madonner is a classic pop star and Florider is a uni in America with a good gridiron squad.
Now, being in the DC region with it's large urban population (urban is the word white guys use when they don't want to sound racist, by the way), I hear other gems like "the PO-lice" and "MAC-donalds". But, my favorite is "axe", as in "let me axe you a question". I don't know why, but this cracks me up inside every time I hear it just a little bit. When my car was towed I called the DC DMV, and the automated voice suggested I go to the DMV website and read the "frequently axed questions". I laughed a little even though I was trying to track down my goddamn towed car.
["CussWords" by Too $hort. One of the most ingeniously bad songs, lyrically speaking, of all time. "Ronald Reagan came up to me and said, 'Do you have the answer? To the US economy and a cure for cancer?' I said, 'What are you doin' in the White House, if you're not sellin' cocaine? Just axe your wife Nancy Reagan, I know she'll spit that game.'" This video is highly unsuitable for work, by the way.]
My friend likened the axe-ask phenomenon to the way Southerners say "y'all". It's a pretty apt analogy, and it shows that America still has residuals of racism running through it. For ask yourself this, if there are two exactly equal presidential candidates one a folksy, "aw shucks" Southern who says "y'all", and the other an inner city black man who says "axe", who's getting elected? If Obama says "axe", does he even have a political career?
It's ridiculous too, because by and large you just speak the way you were brought up to speak. You don't have all that much control over it. After a certain age, you can't really change your speech without considerable effort. I don't think speech reflects on your personality or intelligence, just on your upbringing. I used to work with a guy -- very smart, math Ph.D. -- who said "axe" and also pronounced the "rth" sound as an "f" sound. ("In those calculations, did you account for the curvature of the Earf?") That's just how he learned to speak. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. (But of course, I also don't think there's anything wrong with me poking fun at it.)
OK, enough about that. On a different topic, S and I each bought an iPhone when we returned to the States a few months ago. I like mine so far. The apps are great, and it's pretty simple to use, but there are two main things I don't like about it. The first is that it automatically leaves open apps after you are done using them which drains your battery. To close open apps you have to double click the main button and then hold an icon until it starts to jiggle and then you can close them. Why such a process? Why not just close the app automatically when you're done with it? And if there's a good reason to keep apps open, why not have them turn a different color or glimmer or something, so you know which ones are open and can close them easily. If a friend didn't randomly show me how to close apps, I never would have figured it out. It's not really something you'll stumbled upon in regular use.
[Notice something missing from this keyboard?]
The second, much more annoying thing is that there are no left and right arrow keys in the text editor. If you are typing a text and realize you made a mistake at the beginning, you have to delete everything and retype it, or hit the screen with your finger in the perfect spot, which is very annoying for an adult male with fingers of normal adult-male thickness like myself. This makes absolutely no sense to me. How difficult would it be to add arrow keys? It's mindboggling, really. I recently read about what a micromanager Steve Jobs was. How he held up production of early Apple home computers because he didn't like the way the cursor looked. How then does the iPhone not have arrow keys? I mean, I know that Steve Jobs recently passed away, which is very sad, but I'm still not giving him a pass for this. I feel like even if I was dying of cancer, I wouldn't have let the iPhone be released without arrow keys. (C'mon, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, we all go at some point, lighten up.)
Anyway, in other news, S and I went to an Indian wedding this past weekend (in Virginia, not India), and at the mehndi party, some kids were running around and I thought it was cute, so I surreptiously started filming them. Watch the clip below before you read the rest of the entry. It's not very long. Pay attention to the really little girl in the white top and dark pants.
It's OK to laugh, the girl was completely fine. Little kids have some sort of super resilient plastic bones. My favorite part of this clip is the other little girls. They stop, watch the commotion for a few beats, and then start playing again. They're like, "Screw it. I'm just gonna go right back to jumping around and twirling my pompom."
Well, that just about wraps things up for this week. Join me next week, when I lay out just how better a place our country would be if everybody would just learn to think like me. No, I'm not being egotistical as a joke. I'm being egotistical and serious.
