Tax Cuts

Posted on by

Someone from the Democratic Party called me last night asking for money, and I said no.

That’s only partly because I’d been receiving a slew of “Blocked” calls on my cell phone over the last few weeks from someone who had refused to leave a message, and when I finally decided to answer one of those blocked calls last night, it turned out to be the Democratic Party asking for money to fund a recount of the U.S. House race on Long Island. The main reason I wasn’t giving the Democrats any money, I explained to the guy on the phone politely, was that they don’t deserve it. A party that keeps ceding the initiative to the opposition isn’t getting my cash.

Which brings me to this: I am so tired of the debate over what to do about the Bush tax cuts.

First of all, the reason the 2001 Bush tax cuts were supposed to expire after 10 years was to get around the Byrd Rule, which allows any senator to block a piece of legislation if it will significantly increase the deficit beyond 10 years. Cap the tax cuts at 10 years (and hey, we’ll revisit the issue in 10 years, *wink wink*) and apparently there would magically be no deficit problem.

And now look at how the goalposts have moved. During the 2008 campaign, Obama wasn’t talking about letting the Bush tax cuts expire. He and the Democrats were talking about ending them early! Extending any of the Bush tax cuts wasn’t even being discussed. Thank you, Overton window.

Now everyone is saying, oh no, we can’t return to the Clinton-era tax rates, not in the middle of a recession! That will hurt everyone!

I would like to think this isn’t true. First of all: unemployed people don’t pay income taxes, so expiration of the tax cuts will not affect them. Second of all, if you have a job, there is no reason to spend less in a recession than you would spend in a good economy; you still have a job. Why should the general economy affect how much you spend? I know things don’t work that way — people spend less because they are afraid they will lose their jobs. Economics are subject to human psychology as much as anything else.

I am mixed on whether to let the tax cuts expire on income below $250,000, to be honest. But more tax cuts for rich people? No way.

To argue as the Republicans would, let’s talk about personal responsibility. Americans always knew the Bush tax cuts would expire after 10 years. They should have been planning for it all along. Tax rates were always going to go back up in 2011. If this tax increase takes you by surprise, that’s your own damn fault.

Not that the Republicans are arguing this, of course. All they really care about are protecting rich people, because tax cuts are always good, because tax cuts are the new religion and you’re not supposed to think rationally about religion, you’re just supposed to have faith that’s it’s true, and if you believe in it hard enough then it is true, and anyway that’s what their team believes and they’re always a part of their team.

And I certainly don’t expect the Democrats to do what’s right and let the tax cuts expire, or to even form a coherent message, one that couldn’t be easier to understand: Republicans are holding middle-class tax cuts hostage to their rich friends. Coherency? Hell — the Bush tax cuts passed in a Democrat-controlled Senate in 2001, and twelve Democratic senators wound up voting for them.

Early this year I decided to become less emotionally invested in politics. The turning point was when it looked like Scott Brown was going to beat Martha Coakley and the poor Democrats responded by quaking in their boots, promising to cave in on health care reform, because, oh noes, we can’t do anything with only 59 seats.

Health care reform eventually passed, but I had already given up. It was their attitude that did it for me. Even Barney Frank had talked about giving in. At that point I decided it wasn’t worth personally investing myself in the Democratic Party, emotionally or otherwise. I stopped thinking of the Democrats as “my team.” I would keep rooting for them, but I wasn’t going to feel personally hurt or embarrassed if they lost. I washed my hands of them.

I’ve felt a lot better since then.

Kindle Follow-Up

Posted on by

I’ve had a Kindle for just over two weeks now. I was unsure whether I’d like it, but over the past two weeks I’ve decided that I like it a lot. I’ve gotten used to reading on it — although I keep going to Amazon.com’s “Look Inside” feature and doing a search so I can see how many pages I’ve “really” read. The Kindle’s progress bar isn’t really accurate with the book I’m reading, because it’s a history book, and all the footnotes, bibliography, etc. are at the end. The Kindle considers this end matter to be part of the book, so it includes it when calculating what percentage of the book I’ve read. It says I’ve read about 46 percent, but excluding the end matter, I’ve really read about 64 percent.

Last week we visited Matt’s parents, and it was great to have the Kindle with me. The only problem was that I couldn’t read it on the airplane during takeoff or landing. I’m not convinced that the Kindle can mess with a plane’s flying instruments, especially if you have the wireless turned off — the Kindle only draws power when you press a button to change what’s on the screen, so when you’re reading a page, it draws no power at all. But I didn’t want to disobey the flight attendants.

I should point out that I’m actually on my second Kindle. I returned the first one to Amazon because of a cosmetic issue — a slight dimple in one corner of the plastic casing that was noticeable in certain light and kept distracting me while I was reading. The return was pretty simple; I called Amazon and explained the problem, and a new Kindle arrived the very next day; all I had to do was put the old one in the box, print out and attach a shipping label, and take it to UPS.

My new Kindle has not been problem-free; a few times I haven’t been able to wake it up from sleep without rebooting the whole thing, and when I wake it up, the Kindle thinks the time is 4:00 and the list of recently-opened books is in the wrong order. It’s been a few days since this last happened, so maybe it was just a glitch and it won’t happen again.

Anyway — the Kindle’s great, and I’m glad I bought it.

Cranberry

Posted on by

[from the OED’s word of the day]

cranberry

SECOND EDITION 1989
(krænbr) Also 8 craneberry. [A name of comparatively recent appearance in English; entirely unknown to the herbalists of 16-17th c., who knew the plant and fruit as marsh-whorts, fen-whorts, fen-berries, marsh-berries, moss-berries. Several varieties of the name occur in continental languages, as G. kranichbeere, kranbeere, LG. krônbere, krones- or kronsbere, krônsbär, kranebere (all meaning crane-berry); cf. also Sw. tranbär, Da. tranebær, f. trana, trane, crane. As to its introduction into England, see sense 1.]

1. The fruit of a dwarf shrub, Vaccinium Oxycoccos, a native of Britain, Northern Europe, Siberia, and N. America, growing in turfy bogs: a small, roundish, dark red, very acid berry. Also the similar but larger fruit of V. macrocarpon, a native of N. America (large or American cranberry). Both are used for tarts, preserves, etc. The name is also given to the shrubs themselves.
The name appears to have been adopted by the North American colonists from some LG. source, and brought to England with the American cranberries (V. macrocarpon), imported already in 1686, when Ray (Hist. Pl. 685) says of them ‘hujus baccas a Nova Anglia usque missas Londini vidimus et gustavimus. Scriblitis seu ortis (Tarts nostrates vocant) eas inferciunt’. Thence it began to be applied in the 18th c. to the British species (V. Oxycoccos). In some parts, where the latter is unknown, the name is erroneously given to the cowberry (V. Vitis Idæa).

UNiTE to End Violence Against Women

Posted on by

This morning I got to shake hands with the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon. That was kind of cool.

My chorus, the Empire City Men’s Chorus, was invited to sing at an event at the United Nations honoring the Secretary-General’s UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign. The piece we sang was called “You Shall Not Go Down,” written by Dorothy Hindman, using text from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Our piece led off the morning’s events. It’s not every day you get to sing for an audience that includes the UN Secretary-General.

After we sang, we took our seats, and then there was a series of speeches hosted by Good Morning America’s Juju Chang. the Secretary-General spoke, followed by the representative from Barbados, Joseph Goddard; former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet; and Debi Nova, a Costa Rican singer-songwriter.

After the speeches, the Secretary-General had to leave for another event, so he walked down the center aisle of the room toward the exit. I happened to be sitting on the aisle, so I got to shake his hand as he walked past.

Our chorus has also been invited to become part of the Network of Men Leaders, which means that we will officially support the efforts to end violence against women worldwide. Violence against women won’t end unless men commit to ending it.

It was an interesting event and I’m glad we were able to take part.

If you’d like to hear our chorus sing in person, please come to one of our two concerts next month, on Friday, December 10 or Tuesday, December 14. We’ll be singing a slew of gospel and spiritual songs. It should be fun.

Kindle

Posted on by

I bought a Kindle yesterday, and I’m still trying to decide whether or not I like it.

I had resisted buying a Kindle, or any sort of e-reader, for a long time. See, I am a book fetishist. Books for me are not just knowledge transmittal devices; when I’m reading a history book, I like to browse the index to see whether an expected topic or person will be discussed, and where, and how much. I like to look at the table of contents and know generally how long the chapters are. I like to be able to glance up at the running heads at the top of the page to remind myself what chapter I’m in, and I like to be able to flip ahead and see how many pages are left in the chapter I’m reading. I like to be able to flip back and refer to something I read earlier, which is not so hard to do when you remember vaguely where on a particular page it was.

But I do much of my reading on my commute to and from work, and I have to lug my laptop with me, which weighs 3.3 pounds. And many of the books I like to read — again, mostly history — are big, at 500 pages or more. A moderate-sized book along with the laptop can really weigh me down.

Last year I decided I wanted to read Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, a humongous, 5.6-pound book about the Kennedy assassination, and because the physical book would have been impossible to take anywhere, I decided to buy the Kindle version to read on my iPhone. It was an okay experience — the screen was a little too small. But it did give me some e-book-reading experience.

My parents got a Kindle a few months ago and they think it’s great. And I had drinks with Dan the other night and he has one and seems to like it. The new Kindle that came out in August costs less than $200 — not too bad. So I decided to take a closer look. Staples, Target, and Best Buy now sell Kindles in their stores, so after a trip to Barnes & Noble yesterday afternoon, I walked a few blocks to the nearest Staples and tested out the Kindle on display, and I wound up buying one. I bought one with WiFi and 3G.

I’ve downloaded several book samples so far, and… I don’t know. The Kindle is incredibly light and I can hold it with one hand, which is great. But there’s just something missing. Because the screen is just six inches, there are fewer words on the screen than on two pages of an open book, and I feel like that matters. I always like being able to see more than one paragraph at a time when I’m reading — it gives me more spatial context. With an e-reader, I don’t really know what’s ahead of me or behind me. Something about the small six-inch screen feels cramped.

I wonder if this has to do with reading a dense, information-heavy history book as opposed to a novel?

Then there’s the fact that I won’t actually have the book on my bookshelves to look at when I’m done reading it.

I have two weeks to return it to Staples if I want, although I’m really not sure whether they’ll actually take it back, because to open the Kindle box, you have to pull a cardboard tab that rips the box open. They said they’d take it back even if I’d used it, but I don’t know if they realize that there is no way to “un-open” the box. If I decide I want to return it and they don’t accept it, I guess I can buy one from Amazon directly and return the opened one to Amazon (since their Kindle return policy is pretty liberal) and the closed one to Staples.

Those of you who own a Kindle or another e-reader: have you gotten used to it?

I Don’t Like Tumblr

Posted on by

Can I rant about something? I don’t like Tumblr blogs.

Why not?

Because there’s no way to leave comments on someone’s Tumblr blog post unless you have your own Tumblr blog. That’s so silly. This is 2010 and you’re maintaining a closed system where I can’t comment unless I’m a member of your club? I already have a blog. Why should I start another one just so I can comment on what you say? And you don’t even have trackbacks, so I can’t be part of the conversation if I blog about your post on my non-Tumblr (i.e. regular) blog.

Tumblr is different from Twitter or Facebook. It holds itself out as a blogging service. But blogging services should not be insular. Anyone can leave a comment on a WordPress blog or a Blogger blog. Not so with Tumblr.

So I just get annoyed when a link takes me to something on Tumblr.

End of rant.

The Relevant President

Posted on by

Quiz:

After the 1994 midterm elections that wiped out Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and gave us House Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Clinton was reduced to pleading pathetically to the media that he, as president, was still relevant to the political conversation.

How long after the 1994 midterm elections did this happen?

(a) November 1994, a few days after the election.

(b) January 1995, shortly after the Republicans took formal control of Congress.

(c) Not until April 1995.

Answer: (c). It was not until the evening of April 18, 1995 — more than five months after the election — that President Clinton said the following in a prime-time press conference — a conference that two of the major news networks declined to cover:

The Constitution gives me relevance. The power of our ideas gives me relevance. The record we have built up over the last 2 years and the things we’re trying to do to implement it give it relevance. The President is relevant here, especially an activist President. And the fact that I am willing to work with the Republicans. The question is, are they willing to work with me?

Rhetorically, it was seen as one of the low points of his presidency — having to appeal to the Constitution for his relevance — even though it contained the seeds of his return to public favor.

What’s the point? The point is, give Obama time. Clinton floundered for months after the Republicans took over. He let them overplay their hand. It wasn’t really until a year after the midterms — the government shutdown of late 1995 — that Clinton really got his mojo back.

(Of course, the government shutdown also enabled him to meet a young intern named Monica Lewinsky, so it wasn’t a total plus.)

Incidentally, guess what happened the day after that infamous press conference? The Oklahoma City bombing. Tragic as that event was, it allowed Clinton to play a role the public likes to see in its presidents: chief comforter and expounder of the nation’s grief.

Now, history never repeats itself exactly. Despite what Mitch McConnell seems to think, he is still going to be the Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate, which will deprive Obama of a foil that Clinton had in Majority Leader Bob Dole. It’s not clear whether the economy will come back in the next two years, it’s not clear whether Obama has the political acumen of Bill Clinton, and it’s not clear whether John Boehner will overplay his hand like Newt Gingrich did. We’ll see.

This week’s election results give me hope, in a way, because they point the way to Obama’s re-election. He’s not automatically going to get re-elected; several different things will have to go right.

But there’s certainly a very good chance of it.

Election Night 2000: NBC Coverage

Posted on by

As I mentioned in my previous post, NBC was my choice when it came to news coverage on Election Night 2000. (It’s still my choice today.) Was it because of the anchor, Tom Brokaw? The commentator, Tim Russert? The music? The set? The graphics? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a loyal NBC fan; it’s hard to switch brands in life, whether you’re talking about news or peanut butter.

Anyway, NBC’s coverage that night was terrific. Below is a compilation of the highlights, from the very beginning at 7:00 in the evening to the very end at 5:00 in the morning. I stayed up and watched until they went off the air at 5:00 in the morning. I love Tom Brokaw’s droll expressions of disbelief as things just get weirder and weirder and the mood gets late-night giddy as everyone starts to suffer from lack of sleep. It’s highly entertaining.

(Looks like embedding is disabled, so you’ll have to click on the arrow and then the link.)

Election 2000, 10 Years Later

Posted on by

This Sunday, November 7, is the 10th anniversary of Election Night 2000.

On November 7, 2000, I had been living in my apartment for eight days. I had just moved to Jersey City after living in central New Jersey for about a year. Recently I’d started a one-year law clerkship in Newark, which meant that I could finally move back up to the northern New Jersey/New York City area. I really wanted to live within the five boroughs, but my job required me to remain a legal resident of New Jersey, so I decided to live as close to New York as I could. Jersey City seemed to be an up-and-coming place, so I decided to give it a try.

I was supposed to move into my apartment in September, but the apartment had been newly renovated and the inspections kept getting delayed. I was able to store my stuff there, but I wasn’t able to actually move into my apartment until the end of October.

As for the presidential election, the daily tracking polls had been swinging back and forth for days. For a while, Bush had maintained a small lead, but as Election Day approached, Gore seemed to be closing the gap. Commentators were saying this was going to be the closest election in ages. Nobody really knew what would happen. Some were saying that Bush could win the popular vote but still lose to Gore in the electoral college. Wouldn’t that be typical? Bush, the “popular” and “plain-spoken” candidate, could win the straightforward vote, but that sneaky, calculating Al Gore could wind up winning on a technicality.

As a state employee, I had Election Day off from work. As my co-clerk and I, both liberals, had left the office on Monday evening, we’d tried to bolster each other’s spirits. “I guess the next time I see you, on Wednesday, we’ll know what happened,” I said to her.

On Tuesday I woke up late and voted. (I must have filed my voter registration in advance.) I can’t remember what I did for most of the day — I probably did some unpacking.

That evening I had to attend a continuing legal education lecture until 8 or 9 p.m.; all licensed attorneys had to do this during their first two years of practice. I was really irritated to have it on election night, but I took my Walkman and a pair of headphones with me so I could listen to the early results during the lecture. (It was a big lecture hall with a few hundred people.) Afterwards, I took the PATH back to Jersey City, and as I came up out of the PATH station to walk home, I quickly put my Walkman back on. The conventional wisdom was that if Gore won Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, he had a good chance of winning the election; if he lost one of those three, Bush would probably win the election. The reporters on the radio were saying that Gore had won all three: Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. As I continued walking home, a woman, who must have guessed what I was listening to, said to me, “What’s happening with the election?” I told her about Gore’s winning trifecta of states, and we were both happy.

When I got home I turned on NBC to watch Tom Brokaw, my news anchor of choice. I didn’t have a TV stand, so my TV rested on my desk chair while I sat on my couch and watched in my half-unpacked apartment.

And we know what happened over the course of the night, as the election entered the Twilight Zone: Florida taken from Gore, Bush declared the winner, Bush’s total narrowing, Florida retracted, Bush maintaining an infinitesimal lead in Florida as Gore begins to pile up a lead in the national popular vote, surprising the pundits. I stayed awake and watched it all, riveted to the TV until NBC’s coverage ended at 5:00 in the morning.

Ten years later… here we are.

Jerry Brown Wins

Posted on by

Oh, another thing: it really makes me smile that Jerry Brown will be the governor of California again. Not just because he’s a Democrat, but also because I just love to see people achieve second acts late in life. Perhaps it’s my fear of death or my fear of getting old, but I really like the fact that a 72-year-old man can look forward to governing the largest state in the country for the next four years. It gives me the warm fuzzies.

Tom Periello’s Loss

Posted on by

It was a bummer to see Tom Perriello lose in Virginia’s 5th District — not that it was a surprise, given the national mood. But I have a special interest in Virginia’s 5th, because it contains Charlottesville, where I went to school and spent eight years, and I particularly liked Perriello, who took the district back for the Democrats two years ago: he’s my age, and he’s wonky and smart, with an Ivy league background. He seemed like such an uncharacteristic representative of southside Virginia, which makes up the majority of the district, the largest Congressional district by area in the state. He was a particular favorite of Obama’s, too.

He won 80 percent of the Charlottesville vote last night and 57 percent of the surrounding Albermarle County vote, but he lost the race overall, 50.75 percent to 47.05 percent.

More about Perriello’s loss from the Cavalier Daily (UVa’s newspaper) and the Daily Progress (Charlottesville’s newspaper).

Why the Dems Kept the Senate

Posted on by

Here’s why the Democrats kept the Senate tonight:

And to ensure that the Senate could protect the people against themselves, the Framers armored the Senate against the people. …

And around the Senate as a whole there would be an additional, even stronger, layer of armor. Elections for senators would be held every two years, but only for a third of the senators. The other two-thirds would not be required to submit their record to the voters (or, to be more accurate, to their legislatures) at that time. This last piece of armor made the Senate a “stable institution” indeed. As a chronicler of the Senate was to write almost two centuries after its creation: “It was so arranged that while the House of Representatives would be subject to total overturn every two years, and the Presidency every four, the Senate, as a Senate, could never be repudiated. It was fixed, through the staggered-term principle, so that only a third of the total membership would be up for re-election every two years. It is therefore literally not possible for the voters ever to get at anything approaching a majority of the members of the Institution at any one time.”

— Robert Caro, Master of the Senate

If all 100 senators were up for election every two years, the Republicans would have romped tonight. But two-thirds of the Senate is immune to public repudiation in any particular election.

By the way, the link above takes you to the entire first chapter of Caro’s masterpiece. Essential reading if you want to understand the U.S. Senate.

Election Night, 12 Years Ago

Posted on by

I doubt there’ll be any election surprises tonight. But twelve years ago, in the 1998 midterm elections, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal and the House impeachment investigation, the Democrats overperformed:

Democrats roared back in the midterm elections yesterday, winning impressive victories in crucial Senate and gubernatorial races around the country despite months of dire predictions by Republicans and Democrats that President Clinton’s scandal would drag down his party’s candidates.

While Republicans maintained control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Democrats’ strong showing, in an off-year election when the party in the White House typically loses seats, made it far less likely that the Congress would move ahead aggressively with its impeachment inquiry of Mr. Clinton.

Yeah, we know how that last part turned out. Still, the Republicans thought they’d make some gains that night, but instead they lost five House seats and had a net gain of zero Senate seats. Several days later, Newt Gingrich stepped down as Speaker of the House.

It was a good night for Democrats; for instance, it was the night Chuck Schumer ousted Al D’Amato from his Senate seat.

Tonight won’t be quite as fun, but it’s nice to reminisce.

Sick, and Catching Up

Posted on by

Blogging has been light lately. As I wrote previously, I started to feel sick shortly after we landed at LaGuardia at the end of our vacation. Over the past week I’ve nursed a pretty terrible cold: scratchy throat, then laryngitis, then congestion and coughing. Plus a low fever that lasted two or three days. Friday seemed to be the peak; I’ve slowly been getting better since then. I’m sure I caught it from Matt, since he got sick a couple of days before we left for Disney World and was coughing almost the entire time we were there, and we shared a water bottle the whole week (there was some kissing, too). I worked mostly from home last week and barely left the apartment, except for two nights when I dragged myself out because we had theater tickets (Middletown at the Vineyard, and A Free Man of Color at Lincoln Center). And yesterday our building’s fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate for about 90 minutes because they couldn’t figure out how to turn off the alarm.

Except for the fire alarm, this weekend was all about chilling out: exploring the new Back to the Future trilogy Blu-Ray set, reading a Walt Disney biography, reading the paper, doing crosswords, and watching TV. Last night we caught up on the last four weeks of Brothers & Sisters. Oh, Kevin and Scotty: such drama, you two.

Anyway, I look forward to getting better soon and not coughing anymore.

25 Years of Time Travel

Posted on by

Twenty-five years ago today, on October 26, 1985, Marty McFly went back in time. (The movie was released during the summer of 1985, but it was set in October.)

In honor of this event, the Back to the Future trilogy is being released on Blu-Ray today. I’ve ordered my copy and it should arrive later this week.

Also, last night and this past Saturday, there were special showings of the original film in actual movie theaters. I wish I’d been able to go! We had plans last night, and Saturday was our last day at Disney World. We could have seen it at the movie theater at Downtown Disney, but that wasn’t how I wanted to spend my last day there. Still, it would have been so great to see it on the big screen again. I vividly remember the first time I saw it in the theater — I chewed my soda straw in two during the climactic clock tower scene.

Happy time travel anniversary!

Disney World

Posted on by

Our trip to Disney World was, honestly, one of the most enjoyable vacations I’ve ever taken. True to the cliché, it really did feel magical in lots of ways. It wasn’t perfect — Matt was sick and coughing much of the time and kept both of us awake for a few nights, and I had stomach trouble once or twice — but it was a great opportunity to escape from the real world, get in touch with our inner children, enjoy ourselves, have a couple of great meals, and most importantly, spend some quality time together.

We were totally immersed in the Disney experience from beginning to end. From the moment we boarded a Disney Magical Express bus at the Orlando airport on Sunday morning to the moment we got off the bus and stepped back into the airport the following Saturday evening, we were in Disney’s hands. We were on Disney property the entire time. We slept on Disney property, we ate on Disney property, we shopped on Disney property, we traveled by bus, monorail, choo-choo train, riverboat, and raft on Disney property. We spent time in all four major parks: the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, the Animal Kingdom, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios. We went on some rides two or even three times; mid-October is one of the less crowded times of year at Disney World. Not that there weren’t a lot of people; there were. But compared to the holiday season or summertime, it was mostly fine. I can’t imagine what it’s like when it’s really crowded.

I’ll probably write more about the details of our trip, but for now, here are some tangential things I’ve been thinking about:

(1) I kind of wish I were a dad. Whenever I saw a dad with a little kid — on the bus, in one of the parks, in a hotel lobby — I felt a huge amount of respect for the dad and for what he was doing. I thought to myself: that guy is doing something I might never have a chance to do. I’ve been thinking about fatherhood a lot during the last year — maybe because my brother is now a dad — and it makes me kind of sad that I might never one. I’m missing out on that whole stage of life, that whole experience of personal growth and of contributing to the world’s future. I might leave nothing and nobody behind when I’m gone.

(2) I’m a news junkie — particularly when it comes to politics — but I avoided the news almost entirely while we were away, by choice. And when we came back, I realized that I hadn’t really missed anything. You know what? Politics and political news today is totally juvenile and unnecessary: who said what to whom, who got fired by whom, who blogged about what, and so on. Whatever. It’s such a waste of time.

I also didn’t check my RSS feed once. Except for email and posting to Twitter via Foursquare, I pretty much stayed entirely off the internet. It was great.

* * *

And… now that we’re back, I’m sick. I literally got sick as soon as our vacation ended: we were sitting in the cab on the way home from LaGuardia and my throat started to feel scratchy. I must have caught whatever Matt has. I guess my body was holding out via sheer willpower. Yesterday we spent most of the day sitting at home catching up on a week’s worth of backlogged TiVo recordings and nursing our illnesses.

I bought a biography of Walt Disney while we were at Disney World and I started reading it on the plane ride home. I’ve already read a biography of him before, but I wanted to somehow continue the experience. I wish it didn’t have to end.