Fungible Convictions

Said by Lindsay the the night of our wedding, after I kicked a trash-talker’s ass at foosball.

Can’t really thank Patrick enough, both for speaking something so heartfelt and for thinking far enough ahead to print me out a copy:

We weren’t sure what to expect of the residents of Juneau. After the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP pick, the vast majority of stories Lindsay and I read about Alaskans portrayed them as Alaska-first/America-second, libertarian-except-when-it-comes-to-what-Uncle-Ted-(Stevens)-can-do, dismissive of if not violent toward women, and suspicious of outsiders.

We knew Alaska would be a beautiful honeymoon spot, but we were worried about how locals might feel about a Holyoke alumna and MIT employee—both of us Obama supporters—dropping in less than a month before the election.

I’m not sure we could have been more surprised. The local Obama headquarters…

…was next door to Governor Palin’s mansion:

And granted, this was Juneau–which is liberal by Alaskan standards. But shopkeepers wore Obama buttons, Obama-Biden signs were in lots of lawns and front windows (compared to just two McCain-Palin signs), and the all of the local paper’s original reporting had to do with Troopergate, a scandal that a few days ago resulted in a unanimous bipartisan decision from an Alaskan legislature committee that Palin committed ethics violations.

However, everyone we talked to still loves Governor Palin. Die-hard Obama supporters took umbrage at people coming from “outside” and judging Alaska, Alaskan politics, and Alaskan citizens through the lens of a presidential campaign. Palin’s done a lot of good for the state, they say. But none of them wanted to see her as vice president. One person–a shopowner we ran into a couple times–put it simply: “We’ll take the hit. For everyone’s sake, I hope she stays our governor.”

Politics aside, the handful of Alaskans we got to meet were some of the warmest people we’d ever met. We were invited to dinner by a mother and daughter we met on a hiking trail. We got all sorts of great restaurant tips from a high school guidance counselor (carrying an NRA tote bag) who sat next to Lindsay on the flight from Seattle to Juneau. And we had a moving conversation with an incredibly sweet man, who happened to be a Vietnam vet and who will, for us, likely forever be the face of PTSD: who knows how the conversation got there, but he talked about having to save the lives of his fellow troops by calling in airstrikes that he knew would necessarily kill civilians. It’s worth pointing out that this is the same man who would, when Lindsay and I were in town during the day, make sure we had rose petals on our bed and a fire in the fireplace.

A week from tonight, Lindsay and I will be drunk. And also married. The last month—which included the start of my MIT job—has therefore left hardly a breath to be had. So I think it prudent to run through some highlights:

• We booked our hotel and a bunch of activities for the honeymoon in Juneau. Had John McCain chosen Sarah Palin before we chose Alaska, honestly we might not have gone. Which would have been a shame. But such is the election season: I could easily imagine this conversation having taken place if the timing was different . . . “What about Alaska for the honeymoon? Actually, nevermind. Not with all the hubbub about Palin.” That said, as relaxing as the honeymoon will be, I’ll still be the one asking people at the next table what they think about their governor.
• MIT gave me a digital SLR, a Canon. Because I didn’t yet have a safe place to keep it in my office, I kept it at home for a while and got a chance to play with it. The quality of its photos are pretty stunning:

  

• Lindsay and I have had to make about half a dozen trips to Paper Source, as we’re designing and printing our own wedding menus, donation announcements (we’re giving money to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society rather than distribute favors to the guests), and the program:
Wedding Program – Upload a Document to Scribd

But one of these trips to Paper Source led to the awesome impulse buy of adhesive, re-placeable 8.5″x11″ pieces of chalkboard. We stuck one on our freezer door:



• I’m falling behind (again) on Identity Theory work. Typically I sit down for a couple hours on a weekend and read through all the fiction submissions and then distribute the better ones to assistant editors for their thoughts. But wedding planning has pretty much spoken for every recent weekend. That and home improvement—receiving wedding gifts has necessarily forced us to throw some old things out, pass along nice things to Lindsay’s sister, or generally reorganize
• MIT work has given me a really good opportunity (among other good opportunities there) to make good use of a ton of tools. Since I shuttle between different offices throughout the day, I use Brightkite so people know where they can find me. My colleagues and the grad students love to network, so that ramps up my use of LinkedIn. Evernote is becoming key to keeping track of links and documents, and now that it syncs with del.icio.us, I’m bailing on del.icio.us. And people have pointed me to some ridiculous design resources: CSS Beauty, Best Web Gallery, Most Inspired, Creattica Daily, PSVibes, Fuel Your Creativity, Tutorial9, Web Designer Wall, PSDTUTS, Online-Photoshop Tutorials, I Love Typography, Fontfeed, and Digital Photography School.
• Lindsay had her bachelorette party last weekend. The various husbands and boyfriends got together to play Rock Band all night while the wives and girlfriends took Lindsay out. It was far and away the worst hangover I’ve ever seen in someone. I shouldn’t have laughed so much.
• The Red Sox are in the playoffs again. And I’m sad to say I barely noticed. That fact is probably the best illustration of how I’ve lost track of time during the wedding planning and job change: I’ve always measured out the year with the rhythms of the baseball season—April through October is the meaty part of life, while November through March is just Christmas and cold—but this year it’s been about countdowns. The countdown to August 25th (my first day at MIT), the countdown to October 4th (the wedding), and of course the countdown to November 4th (the election).
• Speaking of the latter, another reason I’ve missed the baseball season is Countdown. At either 8pm or 10pm each night, we take a break and watch MSNBC, and now that Rachel Maddow has her show at 9pm, that’s two hours Lindsay and I are spending on politics. We may very well stop watching after the election—we’re very aware that Countdown, for us at least, is there for cathartic reasons, to watch Keith Olbermann call people out on lies because we’re so tired of being lied to by people in government. Being lied to isn’t new, and Olbermann very much plays favorites and distorts the truth himself, but the stakes are so much bigger this time of year and the lies come so much more naturally, disturbingly so, and are in some cases so petty, that at the end of the day just before bed we need to watch someone fluent in the language of indignation.

My guess is I won’t post again until after the honeymoon. So if anybody has questions you want me to take to Alaska, let me know. And when I post again, my left hand will be a few ounces heavier.

Lindsay: somebody bought our steak knives

Andrew: !
woot!
oh wait
steak knives

Lindsay: yeah

Andrew: damnit

Lindsay: ones for steak

Andrew: I WANT OUR BIG KNIFFIES!

Lindsay: and our pots and pans
I know I know

Andrew: come on, you can’t threaten anyone with pots and pans…
…unless you ask them to “pop off”

I haven’t posted a word since February, and I haven’t been reading. I’d always found reading and writing to be frustrating processes; they demand change. With work busy in the springtime, my fiancee’s moving in, friends’ weddings taking up the weekends, etc., etc., I simply wasn’t interested in mental change, in challenging my brain.

But wouldn’t you know it, I’m most assuredly getting dumber. Since I stopped reading and writing in the spring, I’m not as creative, thoughtful, or patient. And double those deficiencies because of a two-month-plus bout with insomnia—by taking Ambien I’m physically rested but not mentally, and my short-term memory is entirely shot.

My fiancee thinks the insomnia comes from stress, and she might be right in the sense that the longer the insomnia lasts, the less I’m able to process a day’s happenings and the more likely I am to be overwhelmed. But what hadn’t occurred to me until this week is that by not reading and writing, I’m cheating myself out of another method of processing life’s information.

So here’s a post. It’s not detailed and doesn’t refer to much. But maybe by getting back in the writing habit, I can stave off stupidity for just a bit longer.