We bought some furniture and kitchenware this weekend at Crate & Barrel. That place is pretty pricey. We had two gift cards from our wedding and we bought a single desk chair that exhausted all the money we had on both cards plus $100 -- not a desk and chair, just a chair that you use at a desk. When I saw the price tag I was thinking, "Yeah, right! We are not getting this," and then I sat in it. It was like the scene in Pulp Fiction when Vincent Vega samples the $5 milkshake (which seems like a reasonable price now). I justified it by telling myself that it's worth it to get a really good chair since I work from home sometimes, and you can't put a price on a healthy back (well, you can, but it's certainly worth more than two Crate & Barrel gift cards and a $100), and also that it would help the economy. It's my own personal stimulus package. You can call me a job creator.
Speaking facetiously of job creators, today Mitt Romney told CNN's Soledad O'Brien, "I'm not concerned about the very poor." This is the first thing I've heard Mitt say that I completely believe. Naturally, he and his defenders are going to say it was a poor choice of words, taken out of context, made into a soundbite by the liberal media, blah, blah, blah. To which my response is, by all means, look into the context, dig deeply, find out what the real content of Mitt's character is, that will be far more damaging than any stupid out-of-context quote could ever be.
On a completely different topic, I read a terrific article in The New Yorker about the suicide of Tyler Clementi. You probably remember the story -- a Rutgers student jumped off The George Washington bridge after being outed by his roommate who posted a video online of him fooling around with another dude. That's not quite what happened (he was already out and there was never a recorded video), but that's the story as most people know it.
The article focuses pretty equally on Clementi and his roommate Dhuran Ravi. Although Ravi sounds like a grade-A asshole, I do feel a shred of empathy toward him. He's not the reason Clementi killed himself (that comes from something way more deeply rooted) and the initial reporting of the story somehow got distorted in a way that makes him sound more hateful than he really was. You'll have to read the story to find out what I mean.
With all that said, Ravi definitely deserves to be punished, and he very well could be. He's going to trial in a few weeks after rejecting a plea deal in which he would've avoided jail time. (Although being raised most his life in the US, he's actually not an American citizen, and anything short of exoneration could lead to deportation, which is perhaps why he rejected the deal.) He will be tried on charges of invasion of privacy and something else (the legal name of which I can't remember) that's tantamount to bullying. My view is that for the invasion of privacy charge he should absolutely be convicted, and he should be given the harshest sentence this crime merits. On the second charge, I don't know, it seems like a lot tougher case to me. In the article he comes off more like an entitled, immature douche bag than a bully. I'm interested to see how it turns out.
And apropos of nothing, just because I heard it the other the other day, and like it, I leave with the song "Vehicle" by The Ides of March.
Until next time...
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