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I have a slight buzz from dinner, but that doesn't stop me from reading e-mail while Steve reads Jonah one last story. One message came from a neighborhood contact. It was an on-line petition to stop the routing of planes from Newark airport over our airspace. Don't tell me that the Internet isn't a major boon for participation. You gotta check out Petitions On-line.
Life this week has taken on an odd telegram-like quality this week. Events are happening that can be summed only in short, terse sentences:
- Today is our 10th year anniversary. (smooch, sweetie)
- Ian is getting closer to the goal of being mainstreamed in a regular Kindergarten.
- His teachers insist that he isn't autistic.
- The vageries of the academic employment have resulted in a great deal of gnashing of teeth and waving of fists.
- My student evaluations kicked serious hiney. Students said that I was fantastic, the best in the department, funny, nice. Now, if I could only get over my Catholic girl upbringing and do some much needed self-promotion.
- I finally bought an ironing board, because it costs $5.50 to dry clean my shirts, while Steve's shirts cost $1.50.
- I am not entirely sure how I feel about the baby-doll dress thing going on this summer.
Why should people vote?
That's a standard Introduction to Political Science question. You throw out that question and the students stare at you with their mouths open. They've been taught that voting is a good thing, though few have actually bothered to do it. Still, there aren't expecting a professor to make such a heretical statement. Then you go on and give all the reasons why they haven't bothered to show up on Election Day: it's a pain to drive to the voting booth, everybody's been working all day, you just want to watch TV or get a burger, you don't know any of the names on the ballot, it doesn't seem to make a difference who's in office, your one vote might not make a difference.
They say, yeah, yeah. Then you reign then back in and try to give some reasons why it might be rational to vote.
The next questions are always: who should vote? Should uninformed people vote? If most people can't identify the vice-president, should they vote?
Since the students are convinced that people are stupid (except for themselves) and should be barred from voting, I usually take the opposite approach and explain that voters, even dumb ones, make good choices. I'm going to have to think up some new arguments.
From Sunday's Times magazine:
Now Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random. When that’s the case, the thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make systematic mistakes about economic policy — and probably other policy issues too.
Interesting article with a reference to the debate in the blogosphere and a quote from Ezra Klein.
It was a three day weekend with a whole extra day with Steve and the kids. As usual, we packed in too much. Is it possible to have adult onset ADD?
Friday night, I had the extended family over for grilled chicken and hotdogs. Bean salad, salad salad, corn bread, mozzarella and tomatoes, and corn. The guys slipped out of work early, so by dinner time there were 14 of us gathered around our dining room table. The kids ran around the house engaged in a fierce water gun battle.
Not fully recovered from the Friday feast, we woke up at 6:30 to set up for our last minute garage sale. We posted signs at the corner and emptied out the basement. Ian rode his bike up and down the driveway past the rows of old toys and furniture. "It's Christmas time," he declared. It was more like a reverse Christmas time, but we didn't tell him that. He figured it out finally when some guy loaded his old rocking horse into the truck of his car. Yes, there were tears.
Oh, the characters who came to shop that morning. A lovely black lady, an aide in a nursing home, took a bag load of dish clothes and aprons -- gifts that missed their mark. A paunchy guy in a dirty undershirt dug through the stacks of Steve's old history books. He told me that he had to go the bank and then go to New York City. I didn't have to give him a bag for his books, but he came with his own. Later, I asked Steve if was at all concerned that he had the same taste in books as my new friend with Aspergers' Syndrome. Before leaving, the man gave me a VHS tape of the old Battlestar Galactica TV show. He thought Steve would like it. He kinda did.
People kept coming and anybody who seemed nice or interesting got our stuff for a quarter or two. One lady took Steve's old skis for the $3. Her husband was an ice fisherman and he would nail the skis to a crate to better haul his stuff on the ice. It was a fun people watching day.
We sold about half our stuff. The rest will end up by the trash can or dropped off at Good Will.
On Sunday, I ditched the family and met up with my friend Margie at the Met. We were curious about the new Greek and Roman rooms. Jonah and Steve are mad about ancient history and statues are a fine way to get kids used to art museums. They like three dimensional art better than paintings. The expansion was good, but with all the hype, I had expected more. And much of the new stuff were small coins, jewelry, glass fragments of pitchers. The kids don't dig that stuff.
We wandered around talking with the vague goal of ending up on the roof garden for drinks. We stumbled upon the Barcelona exhibit. I insisted on calling it the Bar-th-lona exhibit just to be very pompous and effete. It was a great exhibit whatever you call it. It featured some Picassos that I had never seen before, including some great sketches that he did when he was 19. The only art I made when I was 19 happened in the bathroom after drinking too many shots of tequila. Misspent youth.
I came across some wonderful paintings by Ramon Casas. I hadn't heard of him before, but he's a new favorite.
I particularly liked the picture of the couple have a leisurely coffee on the patio in their home. The guy is slouched in his chair, and the couple is quietly enjoying the cool morning air. I turned to Margie and said, "Steve would like to do more of that." Margie said, "it looks like Steve, too." We smiled and kept walking.
After the museum, we needed food and drink. Instead of getting a full meal, we had appetizers and wine in two different restaurants. There's that ADD problem again. At Orsay, there was cheese, tuna tartar, french fries, and half a bottle of Pinot Noir. At a Brazilian place down the block, more wine with flan and coffee for dessert. It was probably a good thing that I took the bus rather than the car into the city.
Monday was kid day. Jonah marched in the town parade. Afterwards, we played with the trains for several hours and then to the mall for a viewing of Shrek the Third.
It was really a spectacular weekend. The kids were in top form, and major projects were finished off. Though there wasn't enough quiet coffee drinking on the porch. Maybe next weekend. Now, it's back to work.
To call attention to insufficient funding of food stamps, Eric Gioia, a city councilman fro Queens concluded a Food Stamp Challenge, during which he ate only what a New Yorker could typically afford on a week’s worth of food stamps, or the equivalent of twenty-eight dollars. "President Bush has threatened to cut the program by hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years, even though food-stamp provisions have not been properly adjusted for inflation since 1996".
Here are the groceries that Gioia brought home from a Food Dynasty in Woodside: two loaves of white bread, six ears of corn, five oranges, six bananas, three cucumbers, three cans of tuna, four packets of ramen, five boxes of Ronzoni pasta, one jar of tomato sauce, one bag of carrots (organic), one stick of butter, processed-cheese slices, one tub of pre-mixed peanut butter and jelly (Smucker’s Goober). Total cost: $24.44.
He complains about feeling bloated and hungry from his carb-heavy diet.
For the record, food stamps are underfunded and are a necessary measure to keep families, especially children, from starvation.
However, I do like a challenge. As I have been sorting and minding Ian this afternoon, I've been thinking about what I could buy with $28. How could I stretch that dollar? A bag of rice. A bag of lentils for lentil soup. I could make enough soup for three days. Shoprite-brand frozen vegetables. Chopped beef on sale. No name cheerios or oatmeal. One loaf of brown bread.
I'm still in a mad domesticity mood. OK. OK. Poor Steve.
I've just sorted out the crap in the basement for an impromptu garage sale on Saturday. I don't need a nickel for an old pot holder and five bucks for an IKEA desk. The garage sale is just the means of getting stuff out of my house. By charging money for the pot holder and the desk, I will con people into thinking that the stuff has value and then they will take it off my hands. That's the theory anyway.
Some of this stuff is garbage that moved with us from New York City. We didn't know how to get rid of it there, so we just moved it with us to New Jersey. Smart, huh? The trouble is that it's hard to get rid of stuff in New Jersey, too. There are these mysterious garbage rules that after two years, we still don't really understand. Thursdays is household garbage day, which means you can leave slightly bigger, heavier stuff for the guys to haul away. What is the big and heavy limit? Those rules are rather vague. I believe that much of it depends on whether or not their wives were nice to garbage dudes the night before. Today, we dragged an old screen door to the curb with a prayer and they took it. Hurrah. The guys were serviced, and we were serviced.
I'm unsure about how well this garage sale is going to work out. I haven't advertised for it, but we'll make big signs for the busy road at our corner. Also, much of the stuff that we're hocking will the kids' old toys and stuffed animals. The kids will be here. I'm going to pull Winnie the Pooh out of a garage bag where it's been hiding for two years and tears will come to a small child's eyes. "Oh, there you are, Pooh!" It's all so predictable.
We're also trying to purge five boxes of stuffy old books from grad school. We really don't need two copies of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic, but I'm not sure that our neighbors want to bone up on the impact of Calvinism on capitalism.
Then there's just the unwieldy crap, like 5 old air conditioners. (Toni, these babies are way too heavy to carry up a city apartment. You really don't want them. They have new light ones for $100 at Lowe's.) I don't think the garbage dudes will take it even if they all received lap dances the night before.
The last problem is my husband who has that squirrelly storage instinct. The air conditioners still work, so he doesn't want to dispose of them, because ... I don't know why. I can't in good conscience even give them to a friend. So, he's going to be pouting and moping about when all the stuff that doesn't sell gets put in a dumpster.
Please take our stuff.
I really think the title says it all.
But here's more if you need more it.
Dan Drezner is guest blogging at Democracy In America this week. 'Ya all know that Jane Galt is the usual blogger there, right? It's on my bloglines list.
Last semester, one of my classes was a small upper level class mostly filled seniors. In the first few minutes of class, I would often grill them about their job prospects or offer interviewing tips. One kid, a smart, but slackery type, was unsure about his future after school. At first he thought he would be a cop; later, he switched to a lobbyist. One day he came into class with a big smile on his face. He had found his calling.
At the campus job fair, he was hired to inspect houses for towns doing tax reappraisals. He's going to make $58,000 per year to count bathrooms and porches. Which is a whole lot more than I'll make this year.
According to today's Times, my slackery friend could have made even more as a cop on Long Island. In Suffolk County, the starting salary is $57,811 and rises up to $97,737 after five years. And all the donuts you can eat.
What have I done with my life?
I woke up Saturday morning with a bad case of the Marthas. Every half done home improvement project and every pile of unsorted crap had driven me to the point of insanity. I had to paint, group, organize, rearrange, and it had to happen that minute. Yes, you can say, "poor Steve," because everybody else is.
We were at IKEA with my sister's mini-van at 9:30. We needed a storage system for the spare dishes. Nothing too pretty, since it was going in the basement, but it had to be sturdy. We found what we were looking for, as well as three or four other things that we didn't really need, but were cheap as hell.
A nice Swedish breakfast and the kids were dumped in SmallLand. When it was time to pick them up, Ian buried himself in the ball pit and refused to get out. He had done that last time we were there. I think he had to do it again, because it was a broken record moment for Ian. OCD. Much tears as the ice-cream reward was rescinded.
Shelves were taken home. Mini-van returned to Sis. While Steve watched Jonah's baseball game, I painted a dresser set that my mom used in the 50s. A little dusky Benjamin Moore covered my grandfather's faux finish.
When Steve came back, we vacuumed up the saw dust on the front door that we're refinishing and stained it a dark walnut.
Then we tackled the bedroom. It has been a dangling sentence in the house for way too long. We patched the holes and taped the windows back in January, but I've had school work for the past four months and the paint cans were never cracked open. Well, two coats of Pebble Beach were applied to the bedroom and that chore is now officially checked off the list. The dressers need to dragged up from the basement. Pictures will be tacked to the wall. We need a bed frame and a dark blue rug, but that's the easy stuff.
I'm sore as hell, but am rather pleased it all got done. These projects have nagged me for months and, though everything is not completely finished, the worst offenders have been dealt with.
I think that I've gotten the Marthas out of my system. It's nice to have a neat, funky home, but it's important to have priorities. I'm not sure what our priorities are, but I think that "neat, funky home" should be numbered four or five on the list.
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