Dean Christakos« July 2006 | Main | July 2008 »
August 29, 2006
This is taking more work than I thought...
I'm moving this week and have to empty out my apartment by Thursday night. Expect blogging to be light while I deal with all of this.
Incidently, anyone want to buy some furniture?
Posted by Dean at 9:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 23, 2006
What Happened to Davis Square While I Was Gone?
So I was in Davis Square today and did some wandering around and suddenly I realized... lots of things changed. This was the first time I had spent a significant amount of time in Davis since June, not counting a brief stop at the end of July.
First I realized that the Someday Café was closed and padlocked:
It turns out that in late July, while I was still in Bulgaria, word came through that the Someday Café is closing down and being replaced by a "Mr. Crepe." It's awful to see the Someday Café go. It was a great place to lounge around and watch life go by in Davis Square while enjoying some good coffee.
Oh, but it wasn't over. Walking down the block, the Mini Mart was gone:
This was originally a Greek-owned market which was sold to an Indian family back in around 2000 or so, and now it's closed.
Then, the video store where I used to go when I lived in the area is closing up shop, as well. West Coast Video was plastered with going-out-of-business signs in the window:
It's all going away... <sniff>.
Posted by Dean at 12:44 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
August 22, 2006
My peers are becoming celebrities without me...
One of the side-effects of having spent so much time in graduate school is that I've seen a huge number of people pass in and out of Cambridge over the years. One of those people passing through whom I had the chance to meet was Harvard Law School student Allison Margolin who now markets herself as "LA's dopest attorney" and was profiled in the Los Angeles Times today.
Ah, and to think, I knew her when. Actually, she was pretty much the same back then, but I don't remember her talking "like a Valley girl," as claimed in the LA Times. Maybe that shtick was just for reporters.
Meanwhile, this reminds me that I've clearly fallen behind in the self-promotion department. On the other hand, I'm not really given to such things. After all, how do you identify an extroverted scientist?
He stares at your shoes when he's talking to you.
Posted by Dean at 4:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 21, 2006
It's All Connected, I tell you!
It's just like I Heart Huckabees:
We think everything is separate.Limited. I'm over here. You're over there. Which is true.
But it's not the whole truth because we're all connected.
Yes, it's the nexus of race-mocking Virginia Senator George Allen and late schizophrenic singer/performance artist Wesley Willis (whom I've seen live in concert):
Posted by Dean at 3:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 19, 2006
An Embarassing Revelation About Me
Ok, this isn't anything that's an actual embarassing fact about me. You all know I don't talk about anything personal here. However, I feel that as a young professional urban intellectual, I should come clean and make an admission:
- This is the sort of pop-culture trivialia I find endlessly entertaining.
Posted by Dean at 3:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 18, 2006
What the... ?
I leave for a week and stop obsessively reading the weblogs I usually check, and look what happens...
You may recognize Heather Havrilesky from Salon Magazine where she is on staff as their television columnist.
What made her famous, however, was when she was the woman behind Polly Esther, the author of the (now defunct) suck.com's feature Filler. suck.com, and Filler especially, was one of those pieces of writing that really expressed so clearly my snarky, sarcastic take on what I saw around me while at the same time directing some of the snide sarcasm right back at me. It's hard to forget her riff on "How to act all superior without acting all superior" (warning: late 90s hipster pop-culture references abound), her explanation of why 95% of people who claimed to be "unpopular" in high school are totally lying, the time she mocked my urban hipster mantras, and when she reminded us how to be pretentious ("You've heard of The Flaming Lips, right? They're My Favorite Band!™"). While I became a lot happier and a lot less cranky and cynical in my mid-20s*, I always determined to maintain my wry edginess, and the sucksters really maintained a lot of that in the pop-culture universe.
Later on, as the proprietor of the rabbitblog, she declared herself a childless whore and entreated her fans to embrace it (and sold t-shirts).
Yeah, well.
Polly Esther is pregnant. With a child. And getting married. And she just wrote a heartwarming story about rescuing a 2-week-old kitten and nursing it back to health and ends her essay with:
Well, being dumb and happy is definitely just as great as you've always imagined.
What the hell is going on? On the other hand, good for her. I'd like to complain that she's going to become boring, but then I was reminded with this conversation with someone I'll call LawyerFriend (details changed to protect identities, and dialog paraphrased, since I didn't record the conversation):
LawyerFriend: I mean, one of my friends here has become totally boring. She has a kid now, and she's become one of those boring people who has nothing interesting to talk about anymore.
Me: Well, yes, that does happen sometimes when you spend all your time with your kids. It reminds me of this essay by Steve Martin that was a set of lessons written to teenagers that said, "Your parents were not always as boring as they are now. They got that way because they spent all their time raising you."
LawyerFriend: She's become this total housefrau [or is it hausfrau?] !
Me: How did you know her?
LawyerFriend: We knew each other from New York [when LawyerFriend worked in investment banking]. She actually survived the World Trade Center attack.
Me: What?
LawyerFriend: Yes, she was on the ** floor.
Me [now somewhat agitated]: How did she get out?
LawyerFriend: I guess she escaped through a stairway that was still intact.
Me: Uh, honestly, I think that if you survive the attack on the World Trade Center, you earn the right to decide that being a hip urban professional isn't that important and concentrate on raising a family, without worrying about whether you become boring.
LawyerFriend: Good point.
And good for you, Polly.
* this sort of misplaced optimism back in 2000 caused me to say things like "well, even if Bush beats Gore, things won't be that bad." Events sure proved me wrong, there.
Posted by Dean at 10:15 PM
August 16, 2006
Things to like about DC
While my days are spent running around desperately trying to find an apartment around here, my evenings are spent enjoying the nightlife with friends. I had a good time last night at Tonic Restaurant in the rapidly-gentrifying Mt. Pleasant area, which has excellent bar and grill food. As this week is also Restaurant Week in DC, I got a chance to go to Taberna del Alabardero, which I wouldn't even think of going to under normal circumstances... but, hey, it was great.
Posted by Dean at 10:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 15, 2006
New Additions to the Blogroll
In anticipation of my imminent departure, the following weblogs are now featured on my blogroll:
DCeiver - Pop culture in DC
DCist - Happenings in the DC area
And, in recognition of the horrors I have experienced while apartment hunting in this city, I include this one:
why.i.hate.dc - I think that this entry on DC interns with spreadsheets listing happy hours is a good place to start.
Posted by Dean at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 13, 2006
Beginning to Move
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. - Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 - 1536)
I seem to have accumulated a lot of books over the years. These I dropped off at my parents' house. There are more up in Cambridge.
Posted by Dean at 6:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 12, 2006
Back to our Regular Scheduled Programming
It's not all political victory parties, polemics about big changes in America, and chatting up blog celebrities (blogebrities?) here on christakos.com, and for the near future we'll be returning to my amusing explorations of kitschy pop-culture on the web and elsewhere. In the recent past I've picked up on instances of live action Pac-Man games and rediscovered music albums based on 80s-era video games. Recently, I've found this hilarious prank involving a piece of our 80s cultural inheritance:
(also in Quicktime format)
Posted by Dean at 12:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 10, 2006
Surrounded by the "Famous for the Blogosphere"
The Ned Lamont victory party had its own "blogger room" where the blogosphere "celebrities" got to gather and... well, it seemed that they were given the opportunity to watch on a TV in the room what was going on in the ballroom next door and update their weblogs while the celebration was going on.
Ok, that's a little unfair. Really, it provided a safe place for people to put their laptops while bloggers got up to take pictures as well as a place where there were ample power outlets so their laptop batteries wouldn't run down. As my own laptop battery was running down while I checked the election returns online, I walked in to the "blogger room" with my laptop in hand, and even though I didn't have a press pass, it appeared as though I fit right in:
Sitting across from me was Cos, who is a local guy I know from the Boston area when we volunteered for the Howard Dean campaign, as well as Lindsay Beyerstein of majikthise, a blog I read and occasionally comment on:
Here, finally, is Duncan Black, aka atrios who also spent the day in Connecticut. This picture was taken right before he offered a sarcastic toast "to blogofascism," referring to the irate epithet directed at online activists who dared propose that a democratic election be contested in order to determine whether Lieberman should have the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat:
Posted by Dean at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 9, 2006
Nedrenaline and the Lieberdammerung
| I amar prestar aen... | The world has changed |
| han mathon ne nen, | I feel it in the water |
| han mathon ne chae | I feel it in the earth |
| a han nostan ned gwilith. | I smell it in the air |
This is the first campaign I volunteered for that actually won. From now on, politicians are going to know that supporting the war and turning a blind eye to official use of torture in favor of sucking up to the White House runs the risk of costing them their jobs.
There's a story about this that starts back in late December of 2003. On the website CTNow.com, there was a picture of the Lieberman campaign HQ in New Hampshire which, as you might remember, resulted in Lieberman scoring a "three-way split decision for third place" (or, as Jon Stewart put it, "winning the bronze for the bronze"). The campaign HQ featured a smiling volunteer in the office, and in the background, you could see a homemade poster with the words "HIPPIE DEANIES GO HOME." That picture is long since gone, but it was featured on atrios, and referred to in the comments of this Decembrist post. Apparently a bunch of people who had never got involved in poitics before who decided to come out and help a candidate who admitted in public that the White House was taking the country in the wrong direction was some kind of intrusion. This would become a pattern, actually. Lieberman wasn't shy about insulting people who would be willing to work for a campaign, people who criticized the president, or primary voters in Connecticut from his own party, who he seemed to regard as fringe interlopers interfering with his God-given Senate seat. The man was just as condescending to everyone in 2006 as he was to people like me back in '03.
I may have cut off my ponytail many years ago, traded in my round tortoise-shell glasses frames for a pair of oh-too-hip dark-framed glasses, and my tie-dyes are normally hidden under a button-down shirt (which, let's face it, were more part of a scruffy-engineer-aesthetic than anything else), but I never forgot that. I knew I was going to get Joe Lieberman for that. This hippie Deanie did go home, and he finished this thesis, and then he went down to Hartford to volunteer for Lamont. Who made up the staff of the Lamont offices there? A bunch of other people regarded as "hippie Deanies"-- Dean supporters from Connecticut and elsewhere from 2004 who cut their teeth on the primary campaign as their early campaign experience. We got Joe. We got him good.
Photos from my photo archive:
The Lamont Campaign
The Lamont Victory Celebration
Updates: Well, I suppose Lieberman fans are heading to the Connecticut for Lieberman website. Too bad someone other than the Lieberman campaign seems to have registered the domain.
Also, there's this open letter to Joe Lieberman written the day of the election, before the returns came in:
Look around you today. Look at the passionate activism, the voter engagement, the way people are willing to jump on planes and walk the streets and build floats and wave signs and sleep on other people's floors and couches all for the chance to participate in a democracy. Look at the national media, focused on the concerns of your very own constituents like they're the barometer for the rest of the nation. Look at all the attention being paid to the people you once cared about, Joe. Look at the spotlight on the job you used to love.That all could have been yours.
That could have been yours if you had stood up to the president when he dragged us into a war with no cause and no solution.
In 2003, Lieberman told me to go screw myself for supporting a candidate who was doing good things. Starting in mid-2004 and 2005, he told the rest of the Democrats who disagreed with Bush's policies on war and torture and warantless wiretapping to go screw themselves. Now he's spent most of 2006 telling Connecticut Democrats to go screw themselves. Gee, wouldn't you know it, they weren't too thrilled with that?
Posted by Dean at 12:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 8, 2006
D-Day
Greetings from West Hartford.
Posted by Dean at 3:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 5, 2006
Advice I Once Gave
From a conversation with an old friend and Ph.D. student visiting from out of town:
Friend: You certainly gave me good advice that got me through the first two years of graduate school.
Me: Really? What did I say?
Friend: That I should give up trying to maintain any sense of dignity.
Looking up some old e-mails, it turns out that this is what I wrote a few years ago:
> ... do I really want to stay here that long? Or should I try to retain some shred of dignity?once your desire to hold on to some dignity gets the better of you, grad school becomes that much more difficult to finish. The focus needs to be on "getting out", not finishing in a way you're proud of. The instant you accept that you can be satisfied with turning in a 3rd-rate thesis is the instant you can set your sight on graduation.
In the interests of full disclosure, I wrote that in December of 2002. It would be more than 3 years before I finished my Ph.D. That said, I did follow my own advice-- I didn't finish (or walk away) with my dignity intact, but I did finish, and I'll be starting a great job in the fall.
On the other hand, here's an alternate view: "Failure" is an option--
“Do something else with your life” is a hard choice for a phd student to make because they are immersed in and adopt a value system that does not value that choice. Remember here that the academic value system is not a universal value system. ... The world is big enough and diverse enough to support multiple value systems. Realizing this may be the key to making very good decisions in your life.
Truthfully, that latter piece of advice was pretty comforting to me towards the end of graduate school, when I had put so many years into it and was wondering how things were going to end.
Posted by Dean at 8:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 4, 2006
Things to do over the weekend
While I do not normally make political endorsements here, today I encourage those who live in Connecticut or neighboring states to help Ned Lamont. Head over to the nearest campaign office and volunteer to help with the campaign in its final days before the August 8th primary.
Posted by Dean at 9:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 1, 2006
Seeing More of Calgary
Since there weren't any talks at SummerSim I was interested in until later this afternoon, I grabbed the CTrain from the conference center into downtown Calgary and checked out what was going on.
So here we have Calgary, a city founded in 1875, with a monument that reminds me of Hadrian's Arch in Athens though this seems quite a bit out of place and disembodied. This arch is actually a Memorial Arch dedicated to the soldiers who died in World War I, II and the Korean War. The arch itself was salvaged from an older building of the city.
Joking aside, there's a small but nice downtown with lots of parks. The city is flanked by two rivers, the Elbow and the Bow, the latter of which I got a picture of here:
Calgary also has a few outlets of a franchise I remember fondly from my youth, the A&W restaurant:
I thought these were totally gone, and it's good to see them again! This used to be a fixture of the Short Hills Mall Mall at Short Hills near where I grew up in New Jersey until such establishments were considered too plebian for that mall.
Posted by Dean at 5:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack