Pride

Dartmouth snaps 17-game losing streak

"The Big Green snapped its 17-game losing streak in convincing fashion with a 28-6 win over Columbia at Memorial Field in a Homecoming matchup ... Dartmouth was hit with a 15-yard penalty for excessive celebration after the score."

The end of this mighty streak should not be celebrated; it should be mourned. Going so long without a win in the Ivy League is a singular achievement in football history. My middle school football team once scrimmaged against Brown and lost only in overtime. Your grandmother, during a bender in Morningside Heights, brawled with the defensive line of Columbia and left them bleeding.

Perhaps there will be a second coming of Jay Fiedler soon and the glory days of Dartmouth shall return.

The Fauna and Flora of Monteverde

Bug


Two monkeys


Bug


Bird


Dead bug


Cheese, and eventually beef


Plant


More plant


Plants, sunset


Plants, mud


Plants covered in plants


The continental divide covered in plants

More Playa Santo Domingo

Alas, I did not leave so quickly. Yes, I did nearly pass out on a hill. But there was also a proper beach vacation. The beach was black, the water was fresh and to either side there loomed a volcano. The hotel was empty and the waitress was sassy.



There were these big birds that the waiter called urakas.




The purple room.





Ginna read to me an abridged history of Nicaragua. There was a time when a man could establish his legacy as the bastard son of a nobleman, a Seventh-Day Adventist revolutionary leader of an armed uprising, and part time yoga master.

Playa

Hotel Ometepetl has an appealing exterior. Unfortunately its rooms are far less attractive. The woman who presumably owns the hotel wears a muumuu. Later we learn that she is an island mogul and owns another hotel in Playa Santo Domingo. I wonder about the set of pressures and incentives that leads to this lack of investment into the quality of the rooms.



It looks fake, particularly because it is standing on what appears to be a manmade platform. But it later flew away.



In the sand were some apparently aquatic plants that looked much like Venus flytraps.



Concepcion in the foreground, wearing some clouds. Biggest lake volcano in the world, son. Madera in the back. This is on the way to the island but for narrative flow let's say that we are leaving. Errol Morris, might you classify this as a manipulation?



We are driving out toward the Interamericana again. We are headed to the border. I have conveniently forgotten to mention the time when I almost pass out on my bicycle at eleven in the morning on a sun-baked hill.

Moyogalpa

They are curiously clever and exceedingly devoid of soul. They make a racket at inconvenient hours. They speak as much Spanish as I do but roll their R's with more authenticity. At least one is eager to grab a hold of you in its leathery talon. It is an uncomfortable offer and possibly a threat.



We walk up and down a darkening street and peek into one empty restaurant after another. A lone soldier cradling a well-worn shotgun stands sentry at an otherwise unremarkable intersection with a small bank office. In one restaurant the lack of business has resulted in a small group of idle townspeople gathered around the owner/cook lady in the dining room. I mistake this for a group of local diners and suggest we eat there.

A group of local diners is both the most trusted and the most misleading indicator of restaurant quality to the independent tourist. It assigns upon the local populace a level of discrimination that we mustn't assume, based upon some fantasy about folk taste and authenticity and blah blah. This is so even when the group of local diners are actually eating. Ours is a phantom group that disbands when we sit down and they lose their core, the owner/cook lady, to our table and then the kitchen. Fortunately she is nice, the food delicious, the dogs affectionate (and hungry for your food), the roof incomplete and constructed upon living trees, and the maybe-ten-years-old daughter of the lady all up in my face with a talk-to-the-hand response to my request for the bill.





I don't remember Moyogalpa as a particularly beautiful place, but it is beautiful at times.



We are out of focus, which is appropriate. We have just spent twelve hours going from San Jose, Costa Rica to Moyogalpa, Nicaragua on the bus and on this boat. The autofocus prefers the background, as it is stunning and less sweaty.

This would be the second of four full days on the road going from one place to another. The third will be a bus-to-ferry-to-taxi-to-foot-to-bus-to-taxi-to-bus-to-taxi tribute to mechanized transportation. Covering long distances in an unknown land is a fantastic thing. We are moving through space and time. In the morning we are in one place and in the evening we are in another. We have either further escaped from home or moved closer to its comfort; we can measure our progress precisely against a map.

Calzado

It is too early in the morning, but it is sunny and I am walking around the streets of San Jose near the Ticabus station with Ginna.

In between storefronts there are homes that share the same sagging structure and brightly colored paintwork. In the evening we could look into open doors and see living rooms lit by television screens.

We are thinking about breakfast. No; I am thinking about breakfast, and Ginna wants to prevent me from becoming cranky. Low blood sugar is the Achilles' heel in my otherwise Zen-infused temperament.

We have not yet discovered the cafe in the bus station.

Windmills

We have just sprung free into Nicaragua from the hot and dusty Costa Rican border, where I had nearly lost any and all faith in Central American bureaucracy. We are traveling through a field of wind turbines along the Interamerica highway. The kid across the aisle from us, the kid with the impossibly optimistic temperament, the kid who will ride a bus for days on end through hell and smile, is staring out the window at the modern windmills.

(A local source, possibly a cab driver, has it that these are owned by an American company that sells the generated power outside the region.)

Behind and to the left of the windmills, Volcán Concepción of Isla Ometepe rises from Lake Nicaragua. To the right, the kid's head obscures the lesser Volcán Madera, the menacing circumference of which we would later attempt to bike for a few sad miles, until the steep inclines, the leaden heft of our gearless/brakeless (though not out of fashion, as is the case for bicycles all over New York City) bicycles, the heat, the humidity and our general poor form conspire to leave us hyperventilating and pushing our leaden steeds right back to the hotel.

How to Disappear for a Week

At six in the morning of the 10th, following a heroic display of how not to pack that lasted until three in the morning, I went out to LaGuardia for a Costa Rica-by-way-of-Charlotte-bound flight. For the following week I traveled with Ginna to San Jose, Costa Rica; Isla Ometepe, Nicaragua; and Monteverde, Costa Rica.

I will leave its narration to more capable hands. Instead, here is a series of images, not necessarily in chronological order. It is a linear collage of sorts, which is how I remember the week.

The end of August

Today I saw a black plastic bag hovering high over the Atlantic and Clinton intersection. Pigeons flew circles around it. It was strange enough that I reached for my camera. Only afterward did I note the parallel to American Beauty.

I was looking out from my new observation post:



You are looking north into Clinton St. I am unpacking and making a mess of the apartment. I am also loving my new place. It is many things but not vertically challenged.



In the kitchen you can see a small window, which is in fact very tall and stretches far above the false ceiling. For days I wondered why the traffic on Atlantic Avenue sounded so close. It was as if I were in an urban adaptation of that funny Tempur-Pedic commercial in which a couple has their bed in a meadow and is totally about to get it on, except I am not about to get it on anytime soon and I am on the sidewalk at Atlantic and Clinton, where plastic bags hover overhead and Trader Joe's tractor trailors gun their gigantic diesels underneath to supply Brooklynites with frozen chana masala and white-bean hummus.

It turns out that the top of the kitchen window is stuck open about six inches. There is a sheet of wallboard separating my pillow from this opening. I am going to get this remedied somehow.

I have been missing from the blog for a while. I've been otherwise occupied. I was packing and moving and now unpacking. I was gonna put up something I had read about life and death, but the thing was pretty contrived. No one wants to read that kind of thing now, because we are in the last weeks of summer and we'd rather go outside and eat soft serve and try to catch a tan before we are again compelled to wear more clothing.

Even then, we are occasionally reminded of death. Last weekend, at the beach, this police rescue helicopter hovered, all plastic-bag-like, right over our stretch of the beach for quite some time, scanning for something in the breaking surf.



There was a clueless man playing in the waves who either could not care less or did not know that was that there was a rescue helicopter twenty feet above his head. To the right of the photo, two women sunbathed without their tops. Later a pair of beach patrol trucks came roaring across with sirens blazing and nearly ran over their legs.

Eventually the commotion died down. The chopper flew away. A man walked by in an orange swimsuit that needed more fabric. A hippie dude with dirty dreads and a big beard ran naked into the waves and frolicked. We were born naked; one day, we shall pass away naked. It was six thirty, it was time to go.

The Quaking of the Meats

Intuit

From dictionary.reference.com:

The use of intuit as a verb is well established in reputable writing, but some critics have objected to it. Only 34 percent of the Usage Panel accepts it in the sentence Claude often intuits my feelings about things long before I am really aware of them myself. This lack of acceptance is often attributed to the verb's status as a back-formation from intuition, but in fact the verb has existed as long as other back-formations, such as diagnose and donate, that are now wholly acceptable. The source of the objections most likely lies in the fact that the verb is often used in reference to more trivial sorts of insight than would be permitted by a full appreciation of the traditional meaning of intuition. In this connection, a greater percentage of the Panel, 46 percent, accepts intuit in the sentence Mathematicians sometimes intuit the truth of a theorem long before they are able to prove it. See Usage Note at enthuse.

The marginal cost of leisure

Leisure comes at a cost.

I have long intuited this cost; staring at the wall while listening to The Roots has occasionally felt unreasonably idle, even consumptive.

But a rare showing at my macro-econ class (I had to do a midterm, see) yielded a framework by which I can quantify this cost of leisure. Ahem. Let us consider a thought experiment.

I am a household at equilibrium between consumption and leisure, which is to say that the current amount of labor I exert fuels precisely the amount of spending that I consider optimum at my current wage. Presumably there are many such consumption/leisure pairs that make sense for me for a range of wages. Then the marginal cost of leisure is the amount by which I am willing to reduce my wage (approximated by consumption) for a unit of leisure. While I cannot begin to approximate the entire marginal cost function ...

... bear with me, please, I am boring even myself ...

... I can consider what I would give up for one hour of leisure, at my current equilibrium. This should be easy to imagine. It's 5PM. I have work to do, and my boss is still in the office. I should really stay till 6, because face time, goddammit, that is what matters in life. But I can deduct some amount from my paycheck for a guilt-free ticket out of the office. So: ten bucks? Twenty?

What am I doing with this hour? I am staring at the wall, listening to The Roots. Sometimes I am listening, without shame, to the Innocence Mission. Often I am staring not at the wall but the television. While surfing the Internet. Googling casual acquaintances. Thinking about lunch. Thinking about dinner. Seeing casual acquaintances in person. Talking, even. Walking to the river. Flipping through old pictures. Remembering things, trying to forget others. Stuck in the subway. Waiting for the train. Avoiding eye contact with the bright-eyed Athena wearing the garbage bag. Cleaning, if only because I do not want to study for the econ midterm. Waiting for emails, texts, hellos, a light brush of elbows, anything, goddammit. Waiting for nothing. Happy about something or another, maybe at another memory. Sad about nothing. Beating the crap out of pads, on prompt. Jab. Overhand. Hook, hook, uppercut, left knee, right roundhouse. Three sets of squat thrusts, clapping pushups until the bell rings. Sweating on the mat. Thinking donuts in my head. Tasting donuts in my mouth. Seeking cheap noodle soups in dingy Chinatown restaurants at nine P.M. Feeling fortunate for possessing a remarkable capacity for melancholy without depression. For being the sort of person whose idea of an evening well spent revolves around half-baked interpretations of modern economic theory, going on and on about nothing. Twenty bucks, forty bucks. Three thousand bucks. Keep the goddamn paycheck. No, give it to me. Give it to me, and I will turn labor into leisure. I am the ideal household, a labor market of one and consumer extraordinnaire, yes, yes, yes.

Summer

You are not usually awake for a Sunday morning, but you were then. The coffee tasted bitter. Secondhand sunlight crept into your room. The window was open and the world was your bed, the half-cinched and shimmering white curtain, a couple of sparrows in a roof puddle, the jangling chain on the lonely dog in the yard, and the faint suggestion of slowing cars around the corner.

Good/Bad

It is possible, apparently, for an insolvent financial institution to better its fortunes by carving out its diseased parts from the functioning ones. What remains, then, is an operational "good bank," the health of which is beyond reproach, and a "bad bank," the gangrenous stench of which we choose to ignore until it goes away (we hope).

Why stop there? I think we can apply the concept to our nation with success. California and Florida, the epicenters of the real estate collapse, should be packaged away into a "bad country." Add Michigan, obviously; the stench of the dying auto industry is more than we can bear. Louisiana, if only for the noxious fumes coming out of its governor's mouth. South Dakota and its Badlands. New Jersey? Fuck you; it should be the jewel of our "good country."

Alas, our current troubles are global. Let us restore the health of this world by creating a good world and a bad world. Let's be quite granular in our distinctions, and very eclectic in our criteria. Laughing old ladies making buckets of kimchi in a backyard in Seoul: good. Piles of poop revealed on the sidewalk in the Upper West Side after the snow melts away on a slightly warmer winter day: bad. The knowledge that, at any given moment in time, people are doing it somewhere, and doing it out of something that resembles love: good. The sudden and unexpected reflective side revealed in a formerly douchebag-like classmate after his recent layoff: unclear.

And I should perhaps compartmentalize the bad parts of myself. What is on display, then, walking in your midst, will be the good, smiling, cordial but confident me, clearly thoughtful but transparent in my intentions, shaking hands, building a career, hanging with friends, petting dogs, and being nice to my family. And, when no one's looking, I will tend to a brooding, vengeful, fraudulent and petty me, the indecent motives of whom threaten to destroy the whole self unless repressed and hidden away. I don't know if it's possible to cleanly extract these things, but doing so -- sorting out the mess into bins, and passing judgment on each -- might me a better person, or at least a less entropic, and therefore more human, person.

Weekend in San Francisco

It is worth the wait at the Shanghai House ... right?


Comrades Sullivan and Zhang, spearheading the redistribution of juice buns


Roli's porchetta (lunch #2) beats the hell out of Porchetta in the EV


Before the porchetta: lunch #1


Teapot incubating alien life form


Braised short ribs, ass


Unfortunately for these lobsters, Dungeness crabs were out of season


Pasta, paper towel


Two squabbling Asians


Either gross or beautiful, depending on your point of view