I was listening to PBS NewsHour yesterday and was struck by some of the messages from corporate sponsors. For example:

…solving climate change is going to require energy. What if that energy came from an energy company? Chevron. Harnessing the power of human energy.

And then:

Bank of America. Helping America out of the financial crisis.

Apparently it was “corporations pretending to solve the problems they helped create” night for NewsHour sponsors.

When I was in the crunch of finishing several projects before my fellowship ended, I had all kinds of fantasies about the many things I would do during my partly-hoped-for, partly-fated break in employment. One of those things was a return to blogging, which I entirely neglected in said crunch.

Desire to be online as a function of time online

One thing that has surprised me about unemployment so far: some things that used to seem hopelessly tedious are somewhat satisfying, such as practicing scales and reading bottom-of-the-stack, good-for-you books like “People’s History of the United States” and a macroeconomics textbook (after the financial crisis, I figured I should understand macro econ better).

Well, back to not working…

International tourists are common near my office. This afternoon I was passing a group Spanish-speaking tourists taking a group photo. The woman holding the camera intoned “Uno, dos, tres … queso!” Now, I always thought the tradition of saying “cheeeeeese” while one’s picture is being taken stems from the approximation of a smile one’s mouth forms when making the “ee” sound. But could it be that cheese is simply a cross-cultural symbol of happiness? Or was the woman making an ironic cultural reference? Or is saying “cheese” for a picture something spanish-speakers have adopted from English in contradiction with the original motivation? Any of those explanations is kind of hilarious.

Classical strategy: “Buy low, sell high.”

Enron executive strategy: “Buy high, hide your losses with phony accounting, collect your bonus and get out.”

Lehman Brothers executive strategy: “Buy high, hide your risk with complex financial instruments, collect your bonus and declare bankruptcy.”

Other large investment bank’s executive strategy: “Get ‘too big to fail’. Buy high, sell low. Make up the difference with government bailout money. Continue collecting bonuses.”

A sign on a small patch of lawn outside my workplace reads “Keep off the grass. Motion-activated sprinklers in use.” Is this to keep people from walking on the grass? I think we can put this in the category of things we somehow allow machines to do, even though it would never be acceptable for people to do the same. Could you imagine a guy standing on the edge of the lawn with a hose, spraying anyone who stepped onto it? Also in this category: someone reading your personal email and then trying to sell you things based on the contents.

I was thinking today about how I often find nonsensical hyberbole really funny, like “Christ on a stick! You are going to hurt your hand if you keep using your iPhone that way.” Or “That woman is dumber than a box of hair.” I appreciate this humor, but I would never use it myself. Somehow I don’t feel qualified to say something like, “Sweet barrels of oil, take a right turn already!” It’s best, of course, with confidant, over-the-top delivery. Perhaps I don’t feel I can pull that off. But, whatever the reason, it makes me wonder how much the humor we appreciate diverges from the humor we use.

Especially, I love being able to take things out and put things in my pockets without breaking stride. Like sunglasses or a hat. Or a cellphone, sometimes. If it is a text message, then taking the cellphone out, quickly checking the message, and slipping the phone back into a pocket is quite satisfying. Receiving a call or having to reply to a text while walking is too awkward, however, sapping all the pocket-satisfaction from the experience. Clothing without pockets, or without usable pockets, saddens me (in fact, fake pockets might be even sadder than no pockets). I would go so far as to say that the feminist critique of women’s clothing hasn’t given enough attention to the fact that women are so often deprived of the joys and utilities of pockets.

Since I’m on the topic of pockets, let me mention one other issue: boarding passes. Why aren’t they pocket-sized? Or at least one fold from pocket-sized (for instance, by creasing the standard ones in the middle instead of near the end)? You have to “hold on” to the damn things while you go through airport security. How many hands do they think we have that we can take off our shoes, empty our pockets, take off our coat, remove the liquids from our luggage, take the laptop out and put it in a separate bin, and load everything onto the conveyor belt while holding on to the boarding pass? And hurry up while you’re at it. Even if you have a pocket after taking off your jacket, the boarding pass will not fit in it. The breast pocket of a button-up shirt is a possible exception, depending on the width of the pocket and of the boarding pass. When it works out, having the pocket for the boarding pass makes the whole process significantly easier.

In conclusions, clothing makers, airline companies, you must respect the pocket.

A note on the office refrigerator states that during the last fridge cleaning, “We can’t say for sure, but we know some items date from as far back as March, 2006. And while we realize this is EPA and we do believe in sounds science, this refrigerator is probably not the place to conduct experiments.”

I love Aimee Mann, but I can’t say her music has much emotional range. I feel like 90% of her songs convey the same dispirited sadness — quiet tragedy viewed through a lens of “oh well” nihilism. (I formulated this before realizing, via google search to determine if anyone else has had this thought, that she played a nihilist in The Big Lebowski. Coincidence?)

My messenger bag was stolen recently, including my wallet and phone. The details are not really interesting, but more on that later. For now, a few observations:

1. When you call a bank and say your card was stolen, the first thing they will ask for is your card number. At the end of the call, knowing it happened that night, they well tell you to “have a great night!”
2. Cell phones are way more expensive than you think if you’ve only ever gotten one with a service plan (for example, $220 to replace the basic phone I got for $20). Phone companies are also heartless about stolen/broken/lost phones, probably in order to compel you to buy supplementary insurance. Therefore, it is a good idea to keep your old phone around. Thankfully I’ve been too lazy to recycle my old cell phone for the last year. I’m getting by with that now (not sure if I’ll make it 10 months though).
3. Passports are good for more than just leaving the country. Having a second ID helps with a lot of things, like getting money from the bank when you have no cards, and buying liquor to drown your sorrow over losing your cards.

I always felt there was something morally suspect about air conditioning. And yet here in the former swamp of the District, I submit. Check this half-serious Salon article: Does air conditioning make people vote Republican?.

After a long period of blissful ignorance of my Facebook profile and other social networking sites (and, well, let’s face it, my blog as well), I checked in again today, giving in to Moira’s months of gentle nagging. I accepted a long list of friend requests, made a few trifling profile edits, and Facebook-chatted with my sister who told me Facebook is evil and I should turn back while I still can (it’s too late for her).

Anyone who uses social networking sites should read the Stuff White People Like entry on Facebook which chronicles my personal migration accurately and with clever metaphors. It unfortunately doesn’t describe where LinkIn lies in the digital landscape. I will venture something like a downtown financial district where everything closes up at 5:00.

I have to say, if people fled the cluttered MySpace for the clean design of Facebook, then Facebook is setting itself up to be the next last thing. It is way more cluttered and confusing than it was when last I used it. Especially with all the third-party apps, I get the feeling that if I leave the wrong box checked I’m going to give away my privacy, money, freedom, and probably a piece of my soul. Also pop-up dancing smiley faces will follow me everywhere I go on the web.

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Ugly hunks of garishly-colored plastic. To put on your feet. Really?

In another court victory for California’s effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, a federal judge in Fresno threw out a lawsuit filed by the big automakers. (See story in the Sacramento Bee or LA Times.) The best quote on the matter comes from David Bookbinder of the Sierra club, after noting that the automakers keep losing in court, but will probably still file an appeal:

Sooner or later they’re going to have to stop throwing lawyers at the problem and start hiring engineers.

Damn straight.

I have to share this bit of wisdom from my Good Earth tea bag:

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

-Voltaire

It reminds of the times I’ve tried to write lyrics of my own. I always get stuck because I don’t want to write something too cheesy. But when I read the lyrics of many songs I like without listening to the music, I tend to think, “this is so cheesy”, or “this doesn’t make any sense”.

I can say this much about government work: there are a lot of meetings. My supervisor, for instance, spends probably 80% of his time in meetings. So far I’ve spent about 30% of my time in meetings. If I consider the time preparing for and traveling to meetings, responding to meeting-scheduling requests and follow-up emails, sometimes I’m surprised anything else gets done. And here’s the rub: most of these meetings are necessary. At least at the EPA, and probably at other government agencies and large organizations, there are so many arms doing different but related things, that if they don’t meet all the time, it leads to a lot of repeated work and unshared, useful knowledge.

But the sharing of work and knowledge makes up only a fraction of meeting time, of course. There are requisite digressions of a personal nature — usually about kids. There are digressions of a technical nature, my personal favorite and the type most common in academic meetings, but disappointingly rare in my meetings at the EPA. There is philosophical debate about big-picture issues, and philosophical debate about minutiae.

And so every meeting is supposed to have and Agenda and “Action Items” — the things that we will actually do as a result of the meeting. Different meeting-personality types will push different types of digression, and if you get too many of the same type dominating the meeting, you can expect the meeting to go very long. Thank goodness for the personalities who push the Agenda and harp on Action Items. I’m convinced that if it weren’t for these rare type-A meeting-personalities, the administrative end of the government would grind to a halt, gummed up by endless meetings running later and later with no Action Items in sight.

Although, interestingly, sometimes the digressions are the point. As in, by chit-chatting with a few staff members from office X, we are building rapport, so when our office criticizes the report from office X, we have support from the inside to temper the anger of the director. Or, by reminiscing about the good old days when we worked together in Region 8, I’ll find out who has moved in since, and what the new agendas and projects are. And let’s not forget this motivation: often, being in a meeting is easier than working.

Though I have thought about the corrupting potential of politics, I haven’t been really afraid of becoming corrupt myself (family members have expressed concern about this, however). I feel I am secure enough in my sense of self, and not particularly motivated by money or power, so I am at a pretty low risk for getting caught up in ethically questionable doings. And so the quote of the day from Friday (yes, posted a little late) gives me pause.

The quote comes from Raynard Kington, Deputy Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a man with a fascinating and variegated career, who happened to become the chief ethics officer at NIH during a serious scandal a few years back. He says,

The hardest part of Washington is knowing where you ethical line, your bright line is. Because it’s not so bright when you cross it. When you get up close to it, it looks rather gray.

He suggested we decide where our line is in advance (of coming to Washington, presumably). He explained that knowing your bright line is the “most difficult thing to prepare for” and that “it’ll stay with you for the rest of your life if you cross it.” Even if no one knows, “because you probably won’t get caught. But you’ll know.”

And yet, it’s hard for me to even imagine what ethically-challenging situation I’d be faced with, let alone plan my choices. I may just have to wing it.

One of my housemates has a pug. The biggest, fattest pug I’ve ever seen, and possibly ever. This animal is endearing in the way that, immediately upon looking at him, one can’t help but feel sympathy for his plight, and be simultaneously amused by the sheer absurdity of his existence. His proportions are all wrong, his movements are labored and awkward, and he shows excitement by snorting wildly. And yet, in that snort, you can sense a pure and simple happiness that someone is there to pet or entertain him. He seems to have no agenda of his own but follow around people and observe their doings, and with his bulging eyes makes a silent, persistent case to be petted.

And the corollary is, I’ve never seen a creature frown so distinctly as he does when he is watching you go out the front door, knowing you are leaving him alone to hours of destitute boredom, belly laid against the floor in an attempt to stay cool, too-short legs splayed in every odd direction, snoring through his inadequate breathing passageways. Because as far as I can tell, this is precisely all he does when no one is around (and often even when they are around).

My house had a goodbye get-together for a pair of departing housemates, a German couple who are heading back to Germany. It might as well have been a farewell for everyone, since all 5 of my co-habitants for the last month are leaving today, except for the Germans who left yesterday. And so this Coronas-on-the-porch get-together became, at times, a venting session, executed with I’m-never-going-to-see-you-again-so-I-don’t-care honesty. I learned that one couple went on an unannounced chore strike, apparently in response to the unannounced chore strike undertaken by another housemate, who we’ll call George. This let the trash pile up to absurd heights, leaving the sweet and responsible German girl to pick up the slack.

George openly admitted to not taking out the trash (his assigned chore) “because [he doesn't] use the kitchen that much”, leaving old food in the fridge, and never cleaning the bathroom that he shares with one other guy (“I let [the other guy] do it. If he had a problem with that, he should have told me.”). Jake took a break from the party to walk down to the corner store and buy himself a forty. He swears a lot. He tried, in front of us all, to argue with the house manager to get out of paying his last month’s utilities. Though I have to give him credit for being funny and saying what he thinks, George is an unrepentant jerk, one of a class of abrasive people who always demand special treatment and, frustratingly, by force of will, often seem to get it. I always wonder if there will be a day of reckoning for people like that.

The Germans, by contrast, seemed pleasant and responsible, and are probably now surrounded by like-minded people in their homeland. Another housemate is off to sociology grad school. He seemed cool enough. The other couple struck me as too easily caught up in house dramas. Everybody is in the 23-25 age range, and I felt like I could detect a strain of immaturity compared to my ripe old age of 27, but maybe I’m just reading that in. My new housemates, supposedly all moving in today and tomorrow (I’m skeptical that the current ones will be completely moved out, judging by the current state of things, but we’ll see) are somewhat older and hopefully less drama-prone and more responsible. I’ve not really met any of them, so all I can do is cross my fingers that it will be a good bunch.