Arabic again this morning (well, 4 days a week, so that’s hardly news). I’m rather slow to pick up names, but I think I’ve got a few now in my class. Except for the fact that I was advised to attend the later section instead (fewer people in it). More time to sleep and do homework before class is always nice of course, but I guess I’ll have to start all over again with this name thingy.

For the afternoon, I accomplished surprisingly little, except resurrecting my notes from earlier Arabic classes. Reviewing something about the nominative, accusative and genitive case endings seemed appropriate.

My Middle Eastern history class in the evening put me in a rather rotten mood. It’s an odd bit of students, but it seemed like we had a nice mix: the clueless ones, who don’t really know what they’re talking about, the inarticulate ones who may or may not know, but can’t express themselves coherently, and the rest of us. Lordy, I hope it isn’t like this all semester. The prof. seemed okay, but I’m really not sure how a split lecture seminar class is going to work out. Better to just do one or the other, I’d say.

Meanwhile, all the news sites and punditry are awash with prognostications about the Bush ‘surge’ proposal for Iraq. What really irks me is this idea that everytime Bush opens his mouth and says something about Iraq, people have to pay attention and talk about it for the next few weeks. Let’s face it: Bush will do whatever he wants on Iraq, and Congress is too lily-livered to do a damned thing about it. Heck, they can’t even get a higher minimum wage passed. More to the point, Bush could send the Messiah and the 4 Horseman of the Apocalypse to Iraq, and it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference, good or bad. WE DON’T CONTROL WHAT’S GOING ON IN IRAQ. At best, we’re making a modest contribution to that country’s misery. So please assorted newsfolk and pundits, save your breath for something that’s at least slightly consequential.

Good news all around. First, the baggage folks at Islip airport called around midnight last night. Sure enough, when I went down this morning, my bag had been left with the doorman. Second, right after my Arabic class, a package from Apple arrived. My new machine is here. Nail clippers and notebooks, where to begin?

Arabic class is indeed the main constant in my weekly schedule: four times a week for 75 minutes. The wrinkle is the placement test on Friday that I am less than thrilled to take. Somehow, my vocabulary seems to have a knack for shrinking when I’m not using it regularly.

After lunch came anthropology, a course whose content looks quite interesting, but whose general purpose I still can’t quite properly describe. The Anthropology of Intervention, yes. But somehow I always conceived of anthropology as oriented toward poorly understood cultures, not political/ideological moments. We shall see.

I did get a chance to play a bit with the new laptop. So far, refurbished is just as good as new, and the $400 off was certainly worth it. I am slightly concerned about some rather random “program blah unexpectedly quit” behavior. Hopefully there’s an easy explanation. I will say that the MBP feels like a real nice machine, but it also feels like it needs to be babied a bit. The case is just asking to get scratched. Since it’ll be acting as a desktop mostly, that’s not a huge problem. More difficult is that unlike the Compaq laptop, it doesn’t have a simple docking mechanism, which leaves me with 4 cables to unplug each time I want to move it. Finally, the screen quality isn’t that good. Mind you, it’ll do, but I’m glad I’m using an external monitor for most of my photo-related stuff.

I know it’s bad form to be irritable on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but I can’t help it. Every year, we get the same load of baloney about what a great hero MLK was and how his dream is finally becoming a reality and blah blah blah. But as any moron with half a brain would know by reading MLK’s speeches, post 1966, MLK was about more than simple racial harmony (which contrary to popular belief isn’t exactly thriving either). He had a lot to say about the poor, unjust wars, and so forth. He was hardly the safe namby pamby liberal we seem intent on turning him into.

That said, I spent the day predominantly on errands of no great importance. My Kanga (PowerBook G3 original) is now on eBay, as I came to the conclusion that less is more, and, well, I just ordered a new (refurbished actually) MacBook Pro. My rationalization is that I need a laptop and the Kanga wasn’t really going to work as a substitute for the non-functional Compaq. So there we are. I backed up files, took a few pictures, bought all manner of odds and ends in some way necessary to the apartment, and came up with a definite course list for the term. Worthy pursuits all, though I’m at a loss to say where the rest of the day disappeared.

It is still disturbingly warm for a New York winter. It is not, admittedly, in the 80s as it was a few days before Thanksgiving, but it’s still a good clip warmer than back in San Francisco. Meanwhile my checked luggage has conspicuously not arrived.

My thoughts were to return to my apartment ASAP, but as it was Sunday morning, breakfast couldn’t be avoided. I also allowed myself to be talked into (by my grandparents) a stop at Trader Joe’s to refill my refrigerator (currently in a slightly empty state), and to Home Depot to pick up lightbulbs (don’t ask). The good news: I now have 6 bulbs that will supposedly last 9 years. The bad news: I hate fluorescent lights.

Getting back downtown was surprisingly easy, and after dropping my stuff in the apartment, we went out to lunch at the usual Thai restaurant on W. 4th St. I returned, quite stuffed, to discover that my new roommate had arrived. Cheers!

The rest of the day was devoted to unpacking, rearranging, and feeling slightly glum about not having all manner of things (including books from the NYU library) that were of some importance. The airline, bless their heart, did not call. My bag is still AWOL.

I had the alarm all set for 6AM, so naturally I slept until almost 7. Oops. This was followed by some very frantic last minute packing and trying to squeeze things into my bags (most of them packed around 1AM last night). Then we were off in the general direction of the San Jose airport. Us being tight on time, this was the perfect moment for CalTrans to shut down the onramp from 92 to 101 south. Cue complaints and 5 minutes of trying to figure out how to get onto 92 West in Foster City.

Somehow though, I did arrived at the airport, got to the right terminal, and checked in my baggage. The interminable security line terminated after only 15 minutes, so I said goodbye to Dad, and flitted through, arriving at the gate just as boarding commenced. This being Southwest (first-come first-serve seating) I was afraid of getting stuck in a bad spot, but instead I had an aisle seat near the back. The 4 hour flight to Chicago was hard to measure as my only time-keeping device, my cell-phone, had to be kept off. The rather talkative couple next to me, from rural Wisconsin (though originally from near San Jose) kept me engaged when the iPod, the book or the Sudoku game on the back of the lunch packet failed.

My stopover in Chicago’s Midway airport was pretty short. I nearly managed to board a flight to Durham North Carolina by accident, which was slightly disturbing. The plane I was supposed to take actually ended up being a bit latish, so I had a nice long stand in the line, eating bits of the lunch I’d brought on the plane from home. On the less than two hour flight to Islip (Long Island), I almost fell asleep quite a number of times, and so arrived in New York around 7:30PM still a bit groggy.

Grandma and Grandpa were at the airport to pick me up, which was nice. My checked in baggage, however was not. Nor could the folks at the airport tell me where it was, or what had happened to it. Nonetheless, the fact that half-a-dozen other folks were having the same problem was encouraging.

Driving back to Westchester from Islip was lengthy, but pretty quick. The Cross Island Parkway, notorious for its miserable traffic, was moving nicely in the 75-80 mph range. Back at my grandparent’s place, we had dinner before, with no difficulty whatsoever, I went to sleep around midnight local time.

Vacations always pick up steam toward the end. Too much to do, not enough time to do it in, so things get smushed.

X- and I planned to go to the MacWorld Expo some time back. Well now X- has time (it’s his birthday, so he’s off work) and it’s the last day of MacWorld. We met up in San Mateo, and thanks to a miracle got tickets and parking permits mere seconds before the train arrived. Arrived in a very cold and windy San Francisco just before 10AM. The Expo was in the Moscone center. For the next 3 hours, we looked at booths, quibbled about tech products, and very occasionally chatted up company reps. Compared to LinuxWorld, the event seemed bigger and much better attended, but the actual booths were more consumer-grade and hence less interesting to us. Sure, there was plenty of cool stuff, but I came away overall disappointed: nothing really new was seen or learned. About the fanciest thing we saw was the iPhone demo, and let’s be serious: neither me nor X- is going to spend $500 on a cool phone.

Returning via train to San Mateo, we had lunch in a Mexican restaurant before I rushed off to Palo Alto in search of Fry’s and S- to whom I entrusted my older Canon camera (it being retired since Dad now has a Nikon D80, replacing the D70 I got from him. It was slightly humiliating getting lost on the way to the alumni center (and almost losing my car in the parking lot behind the new gym at Stanford), but it really wasn’t a part of campus I ever saw much of.

I had an early dinner with my parents and an old friend who was once our neighbor when I was young and we were renting a home in the hills behind Los Altos. Plenty of memories, and doings of former neighbors to catch up on. Amazing to see all the different directions people ended up going in.

From this, I drove directly back to X-‘s house for the birthday. Y- and L- were already there, as were all three cats and a very large and occasionally overexcited dog. We had fun playing around with cameras (X-‘s new Canon Digital Rebel is getting some use), putting ridiculous amounts of wood on the fire (that still only got the room to about 65 degrees), watching Y- frag away as cats crawled across his keyboard, and eventually eating for dinner (in my case a second one) steak as specially prepared by L-. Tomorrow morning’s flight cut the festivities short for me though. Bye folks, hope to see you again before the summer!

I had a novel thought this morning: why not go out and photograph all those nice beaches I’ve been planning on seeing for the last few weeks. Time’s running low after all (going back to New York on Saturday).

I started with Cowell state beach. It’s just a bit south of Half Moon Bay, and I figured it would have a good view north of the coast (including the hideous Ritz Carlton hotel). The last time I was there was senior year of high school. On the way there, you actually get a good look at the fields of asparagus and broccoli and whatnot that dot the Coastside. At the beach itself, I had fun scrambling up onto a rock that jutted out into the water, and trying to shoot photos of the waves breaking the rock (while not getting wet). Next I worked my way south, along Verde road, where I paused for a wider view of the coast from the inside (including a large egret).

My next stop, meant to capture the miles upon miles of vertical cliffs south of HMB, was at the top of the last hill before San Gregorio (coincidentally, not so far from where Y-‘s car expired during our last year of high school, leaving me some excellent B&W pictures of Y-, U-, Y-‘s car, and a calla lilly). As usual, the road doesn’t quite give an unobstructed view, so I went up a hillside, and trespassed through a fence to finally achieve a vantage point where I could see all the way to Pillar Point. If one is not averse to a little off-trail walking, it is well worth the visit. On my return, I found the same calla lilly plant, plus a few unidentifiable bones.

Returning, I rather spontaneously made a detour to Martin’s Beach. This rather funky community of perhaps 50 houses may have at one point been a fishing village, but at this point, it was a rather unique blend of bohemian refugee and yuppie getaway. The road ends right on the beach, and so after paying the parking fee (I was impressed anybody was around to collect it), I went the length of the beach in both directions. The only other folks about were some surfers, who launched themselves around the rather neat rock formation that dominates the bay (kinda like a big shark’s tooth). Also had a short walk through the town itself. Perhaps if this academia gig doesn’t work out, I can aspire to being the next parking attendant there?

Spent the afternoon on a mixture of website design (fiddling with WordPress’s K2 theme), packing and organizing the day’s photos. Owing to the fact that I’ll be in New York for my birthday, we had a little pre-birthday celebration in the evening too with pie, candles (thankfully not the relighting kind) and presents. I am now officially almost 23.

Politics and breakfast don’t mix. At least this is my running theory. A very pleasant breakfast with a teacher I’d had in high school somehow morphed into an extended political slugfest. This was doubly peculiar in light of the fact that said teacher is somewhat short on time. It is interesting how one can agree completely with someone on local issues, have great respect for them, and find their general politics… hard to stomach. And as my conservative friends will hopefully agree, I’m generally not too bad at finding some form of common ground (which explains, I think, why I was invited some time ago to write an article for the Stanford Review, the campus’s conservative paper).

So when I got home, I was in a political frame of mind, and in lieu of lunch, did more than the usual complement of moping about the state of the world. If, after all, people I deem reasonable, have views at such great variance to mine, it does leave me a bit concerned as to the validity of my own philosophy. And to be frank, I’m still not sure what that is. I vacillate. My pedigree is clearly of the left. My heroes are peasants, factory workers and revolutionaries, not industrialists, militarists or reactionaries. I believe people deserve a fair shake, and that given circumstances, a fair shake means the guarantee of a certain minimum existence.

And yet… And yet if the last 6 years have shown anything, it is the threat posed by consolidated power. A welfare state demands an intrusive state, yet how far is it from a welfare state to a nanny state (see Britain) or national security state (hi America). I am distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of people in far off places determining the lives of thousands or millions. If you’re the one facing the executioner, does it matter if it was Stalin or Hitler that put you there? The American claim has always been to have found a middle path: liberal democracy as a way to ensure both freedom and stability. Yet this is certainly not a stable equilibrium.

So I pondered. And pondered some more. And went back to working against Apache redirects. Yay. Gallery is now successfully embedded in WordPress. Time to start uploading photo albums.

I had this rather silly idea that it would be fun to see the first day of winter quarter classes at Stanford, now that I’ve definitely graduated (and left for greener pastures?). I shoehorned in lunch with a friend on California St. where we had a chance to discuss the state of entrepreneurship in the valley over kebabs and baklava. The Turkish Delight that I add to the desert probably shortened my life-expectancy a fair bit, but at least I have a good feeling of why Edmund was willing to betray his brother and sisters to the White Witch (in Narnialand).

To my amazement, I actually did manage to find a parking on campus that wasn’t ridiculously far from the class I hoped to pop in on. I don’t know why, but I got a kick out of sitting through the first lecture of U.S. History since 1945. It wasn’t that the material was new, but the professor’s manner of lecturing was oddly appealing. He combined digressions so seemlessly into the narrative, that it was hard to see where the actual substance let off, and the random bits began. It contained, in particular, a very articulate description of the means and purpose of higher education. In short, the sort of lecture I wish I’d had at the beginning of freshman year there, as opposed to the standard banalities traded about by administrators and fellow classmates.

My other attempts to find professors I’d had was less successful. One of my advisers left for MIT over the summer. The other one was back (briefly) from Egypt, but I didn’t manage to find him either. Just as in high school, my circle of acquaintances and teachers is disappearing rapidly. Instead, I rather aimlessly toured the campus, took some pictures of notable things (Memorial Church, Hoover Tower, the Rodin sculptures playing ultimate frisbee) before joining S- and T- (yet again) for some tea at a Peet’s that I didn’t know existed.

For the evening, I began the less-than-wise project of redesigning the website. Motivated by laziness, and the hope that a slicker setup will motivate better (and more) content, I spent some very quality time with WordPress, Gallery and my server. Apache redirects are being uncooperative right now though.

The most irritating thing about jury duty isn’t what you do, but what you don’t do. Consider that you’ve been told to appear at a place a good 45 minutes distant from where you are. Consider that you are to appear there by 8:30AM, having driven that distance, personally met a large portion of the morning rush hour commute, failed repeatedly to find parking in the assigned lot, and had your miniature pocketknife confiscated by security after passing through a metal detector. Consider that you then sit for nearly two hours, doing nothing, and are subsequently told that your presence is not needed, and you can go home, having had no more interaction with the ‘justice’ system than checking your name off a list at arrival.

The jury waiting room was packed with at least 300 people, presumably there for the same reasons. I had the benefit of a nice book to read, but this was offset by a disturbingly loud TV positioned directly at the front of the hall. Thus try as I did, Orhan Pamuk and Istanbul (thanks, Dad) did not receive their due attention. Initially, we were to be sent off to the court at 9AM, but that was postponed several times. Finally, after the third or fourth postponement, we were informed that due to an unavoidable delay, the case we had been brought for would be starting in a few weeks, and we could pack up and head home. I guess I missed out on some manner of murder trial.

Still, that left me a nice, uncluttered afternoon, so what with the continuing clear weather, I made another go at Montara mountain. Let it be said that hiking alone is a particularly bad idea for me. I have no sense of pacing. I set unrealistic goals. I don’t rest. Thus my first (solo) Pyrenees trip in 2005, for example, saw me start by hiking nearly 8 hours straight, with virtually no rest, up 1700 meters, more than 300 meters of it through deep snow. I wasn’t exactly in top shape beforehand either. Montara mountain, to its credit, is only 2 miles each way (and 550 meters elevation gain), but what with trying to get up and down each in under an hour, and contending with blisters from yesterday, it still took some doing.

So I broke my personal record, got really sore feet, and basically jogged back down (which proved both faster and easier than standard walking). The rest of the afternoon was comparatively unexciting, as I continued to negotiate with virtual machine oddities and the fact that Lightroom (which I organize my photos with) is a RAM pig under Windows.

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In only marginally related news, I should mention that my two all-time favorite bloggers have both quit blogging. The inestimable Billmon, at whose virtual Whiskey Bar I was constantly astounded to find clear, cogent, and frequently wickedly funny analysis of the worlds events, has apparently deserted us. His disappearance is a reminder of just how stupid and banal much of the politically-oriented blogosphere is. Sorry Markos Moulitas (Daily Kos) but you’re no Billmon. Simultaneously, Michael Bérube, the Penn State Lit. Professor whose sumptuous prose and show trials have undoubtedly encouraged the admiration of many, is closing up the blog for better things.

Billmon and Michael, your words (and, indeed, even thoughts) shall be missed.