I'm really happy right now. Not right now, like this single moment, I mean, you know, generally. I have sentences half-written about the specifics: random thoughts related to unseasonably warm weather, a big trip coming up, writing on the last few pages of a notebook that was blank a few months ago, a particularly good issue of the New Yorker, or the tiny stings of nostalgia provoked by a line or two in a facebook feed. But they're the surface, and though they would always be things that are good, they aren't things that would make me happy if I was sad.

So, happy. I should make note of it because I know right now I'm intensely grateful to feel this way, and I might forget. I don't want to forget.

The term that tends to be used at work is "heads down."

The image this evokes for me is elementary school classrooms, late in the school year when there's more time for games, and the refrain: "Heads down, thumbs up!" At this declaration, you dutifully put your head down, ostentatiously hiding your eyes with one arm and ostentatiously thumping a thumbs-up fist on the corner of your desk. Then you wait, listening for footsteps, waiting for the feel of someone else's hand covering yours, pressing your thumb down, marking you as chosen. When you open your eyes, you pick. Who touched you? Your best friend, the obvious person? Sometimes. Somebody being sneaky, marking a person they'd otherwise ignore? It happened. I remember being bad at guessing, too overwhelmed by the possible strategies at play and too often second-guessing myself out of the right choice. When I made it to the front of the room, given the ability to choose others, I was better, predictably choosing neither my closest allies or worst enemies and rarely giving anything away with eye contact or the twitch of a smile when it was time for my chosen player to guess who blessed her.

At work it doesn't mean covering each other's hands in gestures of friendship or playfulness or trickery. It doesn't mean late spring leisure and turning to the last few pages of a textbook. It doesn't mean play, it means work, and I've been alarmingly heads down lately. Working-on-the-weekends heads down, hard-to-leave-the-office-at-night heads down, uninterested-in-subtitled-movies-at-night heads down. So heads down, in fact, that I can't get away with my lifelong strategy of crisis-making procrastination-as-motivation. Not so much a matter of volume as effort: Too many things to think about, so many in fact that I eagerly offered yesterday to help out an admin with some meeting invites just to spend some time on a simple task. It's strange, and I hope it lasts, because the best thing about doing something hard is feeling yourself get stronger. Next week is my second go-round with a periodic week-long intensive meeting in Indianapolis. Last time it was exhausting and confusing, and I expect it to be so again. But last time I struggled to keep notes in the daily breakout sessions, and this time I'm leading them.

Which is to say: Not much time, or energy, frankly, for writing. But I hope you'll forgive my heads down-ness and wish me luck next week anyway.

The awful thing about this (humor) piece in which Bill Maher suggests that offering the gay civil rights agenda as a distraction-cum-sacrificial scapegoat to the WE WANT SOMETHING TO BE OUTRAGED OVER faction of the right wing is that he's totally right when he says it would work like a goddamn charm.

Unrelated: Can I just walk into my bank's branch and say "I want to do a wire transfer!" and probably give them some money, probably too much, and all the bank info for the receiving bank and actually have it happen? Or do I have to go to that scuzzy check-cashing place and try to figure out how Western Union works? Need to send some money to Vietnam, and although they'll kindly allow me to fax them every bit of identifying information about myself, plus photocopies of a credit card (both sides!) to them, I'd rather not, thanks. And not just because I never actually learned how to use a fax machine.

Who do I hate the most?
(A) Homeless Panhandling Guy outside 7-11 who yelled "Nigger!" at a passing guy and asked me if I wanted to "make love" as I walked into the sub place.
(B) Fratty Guy angrily threatening to "fucking kill" Homeless Panhandling Guy for what appeared to be no good reason as I left the sub place.
(C) Woman walking behind me all the way home from the sub place, explaining to someone over a cell phone how hard it was to find a place to study on a Sunday night and fast at the same time, and how the fast was absolutely necessary in order to get her diet back on track.

Please recommend some travel reading for me. This might be a bit difficult.

I'm looking for suggestions of long literary-ish novels or very narrative nonfiction that are highly readable, either for galloping plots or uncomplicated prose. Books that I won't be embarrassed to carry that will make long flights on restless sleep more enjoyable. Something that's unputdownable but not such a quick read I'll be done with it so soon I'll worry about having nothing left to read. Some reading will be done on a beach, some in character-free business class hotel rooms, lots on various forms of transit including but not limited to long flights and overnight trains.

Things I've already read that fit the bill include:
Freddy and Fredericka and A Soldier of the Great War Mark Helprin (Winter's Tale is coming with me to Vietham)
Most John Irving novels. I'd go back to this well, but I've read all of the long ones already.
The Historian Elizabeth Kostova (the 'literary potboiler' micro-genre has been particularly good to me).
Devil in the White City Erik Larson
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2666 by Roberto Bolano would probably be on this list if I had finished it, or on my packing list if I hadn't gotten so far into it before needing to return it to the library.
Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane have become my go-to choices when I'm looking lowbrow, which should indicate where my floor is. Richard Price might make it into that gang, but I sort of hated Ladies Man, the one book of his I read.

A number of the books on the Modern Library 100 list would have been good choices as well - The Magnificent Ambersons and Deliverance come to mind, and I've got an unread copy of Sister Carrie that I vacillate on. I'm also toying with picking up one of the longer Dickens serials I haven't read - anybody care to weigh in on Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield  or Little Dorrit?

Titles I've definitely ruled out inclide Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses. A lot of people seem to love Murakami and Neal Stephenson, but I'm not one of them. I dislike most fantasy, and the majority of science fiction. Somewhat more friendly to crime/thriller/mystery stories, but the ones I like tend to be shelved with fiction rather than in the genre ghetto.

Suggestions from people familiar with my reading habits will be particularly appreciated. Bonus points if mass market editions exist, or super-cheap used or remaindered copies are easy to find.

I apologize in advance for having such fussy taste.

Several drivers were downright gracious to me on my bike ride home tonight. I shared a moment with one when an obviously-troubled woman jogging the wrong way in the street on Berkeley repeated "I AM PISSED" as she ignored a red light and wove between cars. We agreed that if she was no more than pissed, she probably got off lucky. Three others paused for me at intersections or held off on making turns across my lane to wave me forward. It's almost like people read all of those recent deliberate provocations about bikes versus cars in the Globe and decided to react by being nicer. More likely it's because the recent humidity seems to have broken a little.

And I've been meaning for a while to apologize for talking shit about Jim Webb. I've watched his Senate career off and on, for no real reason other than I think he's sort of interesting as a human, rather than a Senator. He's been pretty faithful to his publicly stated positions, and particularly principled in his support of working class and poor people. He has not proven to be a pseudo-Democrat, and I totally take that part back. The weird sexual metaphor talk about national monuments thing is still...weird, but he's also got a spotless voting record on reproductive rights (NARAL gives him a 100! National Right to Life gives him a 0!) which probably should count more in the long run. So, golf clap to ya, Jim. My boss votes in VA now, and I will totally tell him that you have my endorsement. My endorsement is worth a lot!

I've told this story like three times since it happened, and I'm not telling it right, because the moral or the punchline or whatever you want to call it is "I love my grandma so much," and I haven't figured a way to make sense of it for anyone who doesn't know my grandma. Still, just like the strawberries a few years back, it's a memory I'll keep and revisit and laugh over and share again and again.

Friday, after a long day of travel-and-waiting-for-travel for me, my mom volunteered the two of us to cook dinner that night. It started as a team project, but ended up being my recipe* and my directions for prep, which was split between me and mom, and, basically, my show, augmented by some carry-out ribs from the local grocery store's BBQ tent. Though grandkids are expected, indeed obligated to help out in the kitchen, there's a general unspoken rule that we take the low-stakes, low-visibility work. Side dishes. Salads. Table-setting and cleanup. This may not be by design, but it seems like it. It ensures the grandkids get the everybody-helps-around-here lesson without getting exposed to much of my grandmother's territorial sniping. The kitchen is hers, and though she insists she doesn't want to cook at all anymore, she'll still defend her turf and watches things closely enough to give me a bit of performance anxiety over things like grilled cheese sandwiches. I went looking for soy sauce, unsuccessfully, at one point, and didn't fail to catch the triumphant note in her fridge-door rattling before she handed me a bottle I'd failed to find on my own. This is all, in the final calculus, part of what I find endearing about her. 'Cause I do. I love my grandma so much.

So my mom and I are prepping bunches of chard to cook up in garlic and butter and toss with pasta and goat cheese for dinner. It's one of the very few recipes I've got memorized, and the first thing that came to mind in the grocery store when my mom suggested we do the cooking that night. I'm directing mom to stem the leaves and chop them, and grandma hovers, pointing out that the stems don't have to be thrown away,** that they can be cooked too, they just have to go into the pan before the leaves. Mom waves her off, saying that we're doing things the way I say, because this is my recipe, this is my dinner. This was, in retrospect, probably a miscalculation. I faced the microwave, focused on my chopping, while this exchange took place, and then heard, in a dark tone, "Well. I'm not going to learn anything from her." and the by-then-familiar sound of her light footsteps and rubber-tipped cane as she left the room. Though sometimes I'll give it back to her a bit, I didn't bother this time. First, she's not doing so well these days - it feels a little unkind to mouth off and that didn't used to be true. But second, and more important, she was right. I'd only ever cooked chard this one way, for this one recipe, which I got from a newspaper and followed blindly. I can do a lot of stuff she can't, I've seen a lot of places she won't, but I won't ever teach her a thing about cooking. I love that. I love her. Her analysis of the final dish: Not enough garlic, can't taste the goat cheese. The pasta is cooked perfectly. My mom cooked the pasta. I love my grandma so much, and I'm sort of sad today that I'll probably never be able to cook something exactly the way she would have done it. But the next time I make that recipe, I'll chop up the stems and toss them in to cook before the leaves, and I'll think about my grandmother, who you have to hug carefully now.

Mom told me that their newest home aide doesn't know her way around a kitchen, so she lets my grandmother stand in the kitchen and direct her every move. If this is the truth, if the woman is indeed totally unable to cook, and not just performing a dance with my grandmother, it's as elegant an arrangement as evolution. If it is a dance, it's a work of art.

* By which I mean I found the recipe. I didn't invent the dish or anything.
** She was, of course, a Depression kid. Throughout the weekend my mom works hard to convince her to toss less-than-fresh food and we conspire in whispers over throwing out maybe half a cup of leftover ground beef.

On the steps of the Boston Public Library, a girl stands with her friends, talking. She's eating a roma tomato whole, taking bites out of it the way you would an apple and I watch her, wondering why I've never tried that. She takes a bite and I hold my breath, waiting for the inevitable mess, but it doesn't happen. She goes back to talking with her friends, and I walk around them to get inside the library.

Two conversations in the library:
A very polite guard very politely explains to a very impolite possibly-intoxicated man about indoor voices.
A guy with an accent I can't place asks me where the DVDs are.

Dear dreadlocked shirtless guy riding a bike on the sidewalk too fast and braking to take the corner by dragging heels on pavement rather than using the damn brakes on the damn bicycle while making absolutely no effort to avoid people who are walking in the place where walking is supposed to happen,
YOU ARE THE BIGGEST DOUCHE ALIVE AND YOU ARE GODDAMN LUCKY I DIDN'T CLOTHESLINE YOU BECAUSE I AM IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD THIS WEEK.
Love,
ann

I.
From half a mile away
In Central Square
Where police still hang
After headquarters moved
Because they are called here eventually
And they like that Italian place I go to.

II.
The unused tricycle.
And the occupied holding cell.

III.
If he really said
"I'll speak to you your momma outside,"
That would be the best part.

IV.
On top of a hill called "Class"
Looking at another hill called "Race"
Or the other way around.
It is hard to tell which hill is higher.

V.
Chapter 272, Section 53
Once applied
To "rogues and vagabonds."
It now merely threatens
"Common railers and brawlers."

VI.
Everyone should be afraid of the police.
Even though no one should have to.

VII.
Amy lived on Ware St.
She sat in my living room
Describing how well Skip dresses
How he smiles at strangers.
That southern thing.

VIII.
Andy had never heard of Gates.
But knows one of the cops
Who showed up in a news photo.

IX.
A Cambridge cop once yelled
Because I came too close
To an exploded manhole.
Then, deferentially,
"I'm sorry. I don't want you to get hurt."

X.
Melissa Harris Lacewell
thought you should know
#SkipGates...likes white folks.

XI.
If you yell at a cop in my part of Cambridge
It is usually okay.
As long as you are homeless
And intoxicated.
Or crazy.

XII.
Malcolm X. asked
What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?
In Cambridge, you call him a rock star.
Some people do, anyway.

XIII.
I too have had
Just-got-back-from-Asia jet lag.
It makes you crazy.

With all due apologies.

I'm pretty good at mental arithematic: quick sums, figuring tips, dividing up a tab, converting city blocks to miles, that sort of thing. Last year I finally memorized the formula for converting between fahrenheit and celsius temperatures, and now I do it semi-consciously and always scrupulously (multiply by 1.8, not 2 - that's lazy). This is particularly useful when I'm in another country, mentally converting prices back to dollars dozens of times a day. I usually land in a place already comfortable with the dollars:whatever ratio thanks to months of sporadic xe.com checks and message board posts quoting prices in local currency. It matters to me that I be able to do this - translate numbers back to a scale that's familiar to me, and I've never spent long enough somewhere else to be able to think in a new price, even as I start, after only a day or two, to internalize a few words in a new language or learn how to match foot traffic patterns or use a new subway system. Moreover, it matters that I do it precisely. The last few trips I've taken have involved 1, 2, and 3-digit values in local currency that lined up roughly with one dollar. Make the local currency-to-dollars, then figure a quick 15 or 20 % to add or subtract to get at the final number. I have to do this, it makes me uncomfortable not to.

Vietnam's* currency, jockeying for the last couple of years with Zimbabwe's for the least-valued in the world, is currently hovering at around 17,800:1 versus the US dollar. My awesome mental math skills aren't so hot when you get up to 5 and 6 digit calculations, and I've kept butting my head against the difficulty of the dollars-to-dong conversion, which involves the kind of multiplication that I really need to write down. 1 dollar is 17,800 dong, right, so what's 3 dollars in dong? 53,400! I can do that in my head, but it takes a few seconds, and the problem gets worse as the numbers get bigger. Shorthanding it? Rounding up all the way to 20,000 dong:dollar. Can't do it. In Marrakech every time I paid 1 dirhan for a macaroon from one of the ladies in Djemaa el Fna, I thought that's eleven cents. Not ten, eleven. Those were such excellent macaroons. Anyway.

Haggling is apparently common in Vietnam, so I won't often be able to look at a price tag and do some quick figuring. Worth keeping in mind as well are people who might take advantage of a foreigner's confusion over costs quoted in large numbers and currency involving lots of zeroes. 1, 10 and 100 look very different to me as numbers. I have to look a little longer at 10,000 and 100,000, and that fraction of a second is going to be enough to throw me off.

What I didn't realize until today, though, is that the mental math I'll be doing on the ground is in the opposite direction - dividing large numbers in dong into smaller numbers in dollars. That's the peg, and I didn't even realize it until I saw a table that helpfully noted the dollar value of 10,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000 dong. Somehow that's didn't register when I saw the tiny backwards calculations at the bottom of dollar:dong currency quotes and saw figures like "0.00005 dollars." It just made me a little more flustered - decimals aren't quite in my wheelhouse. There's a whole going-up-to-the-chalkboard-in-elementary-school aspect to all of this, obviously, that helps explain why I'm actually better at calculating the tip when I've been drinking. Of course, when I figure the tip after drinking I tend to do it out loud, and that always comes off a little Rain Man. ("Seventy-four dollars, seven forty, fourteen eighty for twenty, three fifty, three seventy ten-no, eleven...ten. That's fifteen. Two twenty five each for five. At least  two twenty five. At least.")

So, Vietnamese dong. I will figure your shit out. Luckily I have four months to do it. Maybe by then I'll have gotten the tones down right to also say all those numbers in Vietnamese, too. It could happen.

* I'M GOING TO VIETNAM, YOU GUYS. I bet I'll be able to find a bike for rent there that's short enough for me. Maybe.

Hey, Meghan, could you make up your goddamn mind?

"'Homophobia is the last socially accepted prejudice,' McCain says, repeating it for emphasis."

I'm sure Sonia Sotomayor totally agrees with you.

I really enjoyed this essay in the New York Times Books section about The Ugly American, not least because it makes some of the same arguments that I did after reading it a few years ago.

This slacktivist post about a possible new head of the Texas Board of Education should be a jaw-dropper, but it kind of isn't, at least for me. Rick "If you don't behave, federal government, Texas will take its toys and go home!" Perry is clearly a guy who cares more for grand rhetorical gestures than productive functional governance. Promoting an opt-out homeschooling honest-to-god-whatever theocrat to make decisions on behalf of all students who aren't lucky enough to have parents willing or able to sit around with them all day doing long division is just the sort of Fuck You gesture I'd expect from him.

And don't think that just because you don't live in Texas or have kids in public schools that this sort of dumbassery won't affect you or your little muffins.

The story reminded me that I'd been meaning to post a republished article about the textbook industry by Tamim Ansary.* It's a few years out of date, but still the best summary I've ever found for the way school publishing works, and the big takeaway from it is that Texas (and, to a lesser extent, California and Florida) is the tail that wags the dog for every school in the nation. The decisions made by the Texas Board of Education quite literally determine what textbooks are going to look like in most classrooms across the country, and Texas, just for example, considers "the importance of patriotism" to be the single most important takeaway from a Social Studies curriculum. [How to] "function in a free enterprise society" is second, and last but probably least is the ability to "appreciate the basic democratic values of our state and nations." Digging into the TEKS state standards, the line-by-line ("summarize the major political and cultural developments of the civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa;") is less eyebrow-raising, but the high-level goals are no accident. Just for fun, check out what the Health Education standards say about what students need to learn about contraceptives. Hint: It's not "How to use them."

I work in the textbook industry, so none of this is news to me. And I suppose I'm not surprised that the inner workings of relative bureacracies and market segments isn't something a lot of parents spare time for. But man, I wish they did, because Mel and Norma Gabler, who got this whole party started way-back-when, decided what kids would learn in school for pretty much the entire country and I don't think that's right.

* You may recall reading something he wrote in September 2001 about his home, Afghanistan, that is probably more upsetting now than it was almost eight years ago. Ansary totally has a seat reserved for him at my Perfect Imaginary Dinner Party.

I've been thinking so much this week about the Iranians I met in Turkey - it wasn't any big thing, really, but it stuck out to me at the time and has stayed with me since. We had stopped at a scenic turnout for some water and to admire the view, and a busload of tourists were there at the same time. Sarah, Nate and I were on bikes, and struggled to explain that no, we weren't riding across all of Turkey, just taking a day trip around Cappadocia. I remember feeling bad for disappointing their expectations and self-conscious about wearing a sleeveless shirt. I remember being surprised by how friendly they were, so interested in talking to three Americans. I remember the young woman who took point on translation, her short hair, her glasses. I remember the man with beautiful eyes that shaded from green to brown. I remember that he approached us, not the other way around.

I assumed, because they were riding a well-appointed bus around Turkey dressed in very Western clothes and they spoke passable English, that they were fairly wealthy, probably urbane people. Building out from that assumption, I'm inclined to wonder if they've been on the streets this past week. Perhaps they've shouted in the dark from rooftops or translated blog posts for the benefit of English speakers or left the doors to their homes unlocked for fleeing protestors. I don't look for them, exactly, in the wide shots of massive crowds, or in the shape of word clouds, but I see them there, even if every single one of them is a hardliner who voted proudly for Ahmadinejad. I hope they are okay.

Sarah took some photos at that turnout. I've been looking at them again today, wondering, worrying.

There are so many things to love about this 1986 episode of Crossfire featuring Frank Zappa arguing with a guy who sort of looks like a turtle. Like: Crossfire was on the air for that long? And: Bob "A lot of people love me" Novak used to be one of the hosts? Most importantly: Remember that article in the Weekly Reader about Zappa's congressional testimony regarding the PMRC? That was a very good article. I read it instead of paying attention one day in (irony alert!) music class.
It's really cute when the turtle guy has to refer over and over again to his notes for talking points on suicidal teens and the "Hot for Teacher" video while Zappa looks straight into the camera and destroys him. Dude knew his stuff.

I'm really long past the age where it's acceptable for me to spend a lot of time thinking about how cool I am, or am not, particularly as it orients me relative to other people and especially when relative coolness is determined by scrutinizing the things I or other people enjoy spending time or money or thought on. But I totally do it anyway, and I think I've figured something out that makes sense of at least some of that navel gazing.* I'm not fond of the verb 'unpack' as in 'talk at length about using all my big words,' but that's totally what I'm about to do. Stand back, y'all!

It's been years now since the first pass at a Geek Hierarchy started making the rounds, and even longer since the rehabilitation and semantic relaxation of the word 'Geek' itself began in earnest but there's still no true consensus on the relative geekiness of any particular interest relative to another, and geek pride proclamations still come off a bit sweaty and overeager. Because people are people and people like to categorize. Preferably into hierarchies. I do it too, but never very successfully. Part of this surely has to do with the scattershot nature of my own interests. In addition to the usual self-consciously highbrow stuff you could guess I like just looking at me, I get a lot of genuine unaffected enjoyment out of what could be considered junk culture. I'm game for nearly any film movie or TV show if it's set in a high school, and, I'll keep saying it, I really liked that Paris Hilton album.** I like genre stuff, sometimes enough to do follow-up reading that involves comic books, and one afternoon a few months ago I actually killed a couple of hours on a weekend watching Battlestar Galactica fan edit clips on YouTube. So while I do consider myself "better" (meaning "in posession of more refined aesthetic sensibilities") than people who love the crap out of "Heroes" I regard that as a knee-jerk and rhetorically indefensible position. At best I'll argue that "Heroes" is not a very good TV show, but even that isn't as fun as it was when I was younger and meaner.

But even as I got more and more comfortable with the idea that it's not that cool (Shit! There I go again!) to give people a hard time about the things that they enjoy, especially when the whole pseudo-objective aesthetic criticism doesn't hold together, I still knew that my I-can't-help-it hierarchy still existed. I just no longer had any clue how I was doing the sorting. I only realized what it was like a week ago, and now, no joke, it's like seeing the world in a whole new dimension. Or, more to the point, along a whole new axis. See, the problem with most of these hierarchies is that they only operate along a single scale of variability. What you like matters, yes, but how much you like it matters just as much, if not more. I don't think I'm "better" than people who love "Heroes," I think I'm better than people who love "Heroes" so much that it matters to them in a very personal way what I think about "Heroes." I feel the same way about people who love "Lost" so much that it matters to them in a very personal way what I think about "Lost." And I watch "Lost!" I love it! I read epic close-reading academic analysis of each episode (sometimes)! I don't dislike tween Jonas Brothers fans because they like the Jonas Brothers, I dislike them because the degree to which they are into the Jonas Brothers sort of horrifies me. I'm not contemptuous of people whose opinions on abortion differ from mine, I'm contemptuous of people whose opinions on abortion are so strongly held they feel entitled to commit acts of intimidation, vandalism and murder on the basis of those opinions. And here all this time I thought I'd been making progress toward being open-minded!

Someday I'm gonna get to the point where I can be totally cool with anybody in the world and genuinely respect their humanity and not look for reasons to write them off for lapses in judgment, taste, hygeine standards, whatever. I'll probably die of old age the very next day. But in the meantime, if the best I can do is be slightly less of a reflexive judgmental asshole each day, I suppose I'll take it.

* You know what? No, it doesn't.
** Liking it does not mean I don't hate Paris Hilton the person, or, more precisely, Paris Hilton the cultural construct. Except for that cameo she did in that one O.C. episode. I thought that was kinda funny, albeit totally unconvincing.

It was fun (by which I mean infuriating) to watch credit card companies try to protect their (plenty comfy) profit margins in the face of the legislation that still managed to sail through congress this week, though not before I got a "HEY BY THE WAY, WE ARE JACKING YOUR RATE JUST BECAUSE WE CAN!" letter from one of my credit card companies.

I really enjoyed my time working at a cash-only establishment because in addition to giving me a totally legitimate reason to say "no" to customers, it gave me the chance to school more than a few people on the business model of credit card providers. A lot of people had absolutely no idea that merchants pay credit card companies for the privilege of accepting plastic,* and merchant fees are more than enough to make credit cards a profitable venture, even if every single customer turned into what is charmingly known in the industry as a 'freeloader' or 'deadbeat' - ie someone who doesn't carry a balance and essentially uses credit cards as rewards-gathering devices and 30-day interest-free loans. For all the hand-wringing about average credit card debt amounts, one in three cardholders fits into this category.

All this grandstanding about being forced to do things like cut back on rewards plans or eliminate grace periods isn't just posturing, it's outright bullshit, and the credit card companies know it. They're just hoping to capitalize on people's ignorance. The thing about freeloaders is that they don't need credit cards. If I began to accrue interest the moment a charge went through on one of my credit cards, I'd stop using it altogether. Ditto if I stopped getting that measly 1% back on all my purchases or started having to pay an annual fee for the privilege. If I (and all the other freeloaders) did that, a shit-ton of merchant fees would go uncollected, credit card companies wouldn't make any money off of us, and they'd still be stuck with the default risk of the cardholders who do carry balances and pay interest rates and late fees and over-limit fees. Only difference is that the average cardholder would be a bigger risk and a smaller revenue target than he was before, and we all know what happened to the subprime mortgage lenders. The legislation actually makes freeloaders more attractive as customers, since they're such a known quantity and a stable, predictable source of revenue. If you're going to make less money on the risky customers, you want your customer base to be less risky. That means not alienating the customers who can afford to walk away.

But hey, if I'm wrong, and suddenly I do have to pay for the privilege of using a credit card, I'll stop doing it. It's nice for me that I don't have any debt and can do that really easily. It's nice for me that my dad, also a freeloader, made sure I knew just how stupid it would be to carry a balance on a credit card when I got my first one at 18. It's nice for me that I have a healthy economic safety net that means I don't have to charge emergency purchases. If the cost of making things a little less crappy for people who don't have those nice things is that I don't get airline miles or Amazon gift certificates, I can live with it.

I'm not wrong, though, those execs are just liars. Fuck 'em.

* This, by the way, is why, if you're an earnest shop-local-shop-indie sort of person, it's a good idea to pay cash at mom-and-pop-type place. Because merchant fees are a volume business, the fee on your latte paid by the locally-owned coffee place, which does $1,000 a day, is likely to be higher than the fee paid by Starbucks, which does lord-knows-how-much a day. Merchant fee structures also sometimes involve an automatic charge per transaction - 75¢ say - on top of the percentage-of-transaction cost. This means that it may actually cost a business money to sell you a muffin for $1.50 if you pay for it with a credit card. Obviously as a customer you've got no obligation to a business beyond paying for what you buy, but I know some people think about their buying habits in terms of expressing support for a particular business or business model, and if you're one of those people, it's probably worth knowing this stuff.

Some tiny part of why I read the New York Times has go to be my dislike of the people who hate it. Enemy of my enemy and all that. It's like my mom finding common cause with Catholics on death penalty issues: Sensible and uncomfortable. Like, I dunno, wool pants. My problems with the paper are usually to do with the ideas and values behind the articles, but sometimes the writing sucks too.

Does anyone have any idea what this sentence* means?

(That Rodriguez helped destroy his marriage by cavorting with strippers and Madonna long provided regularly cycled doses of front-page bulk and energy to a different kind of “oid.”)

Is it a too-clever boast by Nicholas Dawidoff that he knows how to pronounce the word "schadenfreude?" Because otherwise, I'm lost. Either way I'm really annoyed.

* From a review of a book about a baseball player, yes, haters.