Areas of Unrest

29 July 2001 - A Patchwork of Peeves

QOTD: "You meet the damndest people in hell." - Roger Zelazny

Reading: Laurell K. Hamilton, Nightseer

Listening to: Uncle Bonsai, Apology

I feel like I should apologize for yet another hodge podge entry. I have good intentions about writing during the week, but I usually run out of steam too soon after getting home. Maybe this week.

First off, I'm mildly irritated at all of the people referring to the "tax rebates" we will be getting. The check is not really a rebate, but a reflection of the lower tax rates for this year. If it were a true rebate, it would be a reduction in last year's taxes. I still think the whole deal is short-sighted, but that's another matter. What we really need to do to guarantee future prosperity is to provide incentives for savings. One way to do that would be to exclude a percentage of interest and dividends from tax, so that you aren't taxed on inflation. The question I still have is how the tax reduction checks get accounted for when we do this year's taxes next year, but I suppose that will all get sorted out in the instructions.

While I'm on news-related subjects, this week's celebrity death is Phoolan Devi, India's "Bandit Queen." I'm not entirely sure what to think of her life. She certainly survived some dreadful conditions (general stories of abuse, including rape, at the hands of wealthy landowners) but I can't approve of the violence of the revenge she took. On the other hand, it seems like she did turn her life around after serving jail time and did a lot of political good for lower caste people. And she certainly didn't deserve assassination.

On an entirely different subject, I finished Sarah Flannery's book and was somewhat disappointed in it. When she does discuss the math behind cryptography, she does so nicely, but she has a tendency to assume that nobody would be interested in the math and gloss over a lot of it. I'm not really much of one for proofs, but the ones she alludes to and doesn't provide are actually fairly easy to explain (the infinite number of primes, for example, and the irrational nature of the square root of two). I did find the personal story aspects to be interesting and it is good to see a woman getting a lot of attention for mathematical work.

My biggest annoyance of the week involves business travel, as usual. I had a trip that was supposed to involve meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday in Sunnvyvale. Last week, the Tuesday part got cancelled and I changed the arrangements. By Monday afternoon, the Wednesday meeting was cancelled, too. On Thursday morning, I gave my secretary five travel requests. By the time I left on Friday, two of the trips are definitely changed and another two are probably going to change. There are legitimate reasons for some of it, but the one that annoyed me is the meeting that is getting pushed a day later because it conflicts with a golf tournament. I told the guy who is mostly the one shuffling meetings that if my secretary ever cracks and murders him, I will testify on her behalf.

Then there are the two things I found out about too late. I missed the last day of the Museum of Death. Apparently, they've been having a dispute with their landlord, so need to relocate. They say they'll be reopening, but who knows? And I read the Calendar section of the Times too late to get to the first theatrical production by El Vez, the Mexican Elvis. Silly me for reading the Sunday paper on Sunday night.

I spent much of the weekend doing housework. My bathroom is somewhat less disgusting, though still imperfect. I also still really need to dust and vacuum. But I have made a fair amount of decluttering progress and the assorted papers are getting sorted out, so I have some sense of accomplishment. Which justified going out to a movie today. I'd seen a preview of "Greenfingers" and knew I'd enjoy it. The L.A. Times reviewer called it smarmy, but I thought the story of prisoners winning garden competitions was very well presented, with lots of humor. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Clive Owens makes nice eye candy. And, really, how could one not like a movie that opens with the lead character writing a note that says "Roses are red / Violets are blue / I'm about to fuck up / So what else is new?"

After I left the movie, I was walking around the food court at the Westside Pavilion, deciding whether to eat there or just run a few errands and have a later lunch at home. And I saw someone I used to work with who had retired ages ago. We chatted a bit and decided to get lunch and catch up. It was really quite a pleasant surprise. It had probably been four years since I'd seen him and I have to admit I wasn't even sure he was still alive (though I didn't say that, of course).

In another positive bit of news, the Bards meeting on Thursday was very productive. I had an idea I've been playing with and I've been wrestling with how to turn it into a story. Talking about it with them helped a lot and I think I have a workable approach. There's a certain sort of personal story that doesn't really have much of a plot but takes a number of anecdotes around a theme. It can work, but it needs some sort of frame to pull it into something satisfying. I still need to do a lot of work, but at least I came away with some ideas. And I came away with a rather good line I absolutely have to find a way to keep. The general gist of the story has to do with the differences between shopping experiences when I was growing up and the agony of shopping now. I was describing the general store in North Sutton, New Hampshire (a tiny town where I spent a summer) and said, "you couldn't really buy much of anything there, but you could spend all day buying it." It's the perfect contrast to the frustration I feel every time I go shopping here.

Other bit of good news: Nomar's back! Of course, the Source of All Evil in the Universe is on a bloody winning streak, but still... Nomar's back!