Keeping it simple:

1. Try to remember to assume that what I do makes a difference to the people I love.

2. When I like people, tell them.

3. Write or draw something every day, even a little bit, not including online stuff.

4. Don't spend time on random reading or random computer pursuits if I have other needs and other things to do, including sleep.

5. Practice tapdancing at home at least once a week, instead of never.

6. Start reading some of those cookbooks I have.

OK so as usual I stayed up too late and went to bed knowing I’d have to get up for work in five and a half hours, and I dreamed that I’m at work:

It’s a really slow day, not a lot of patients, and I’m greeting this new one, a nice little old lady who’s shuffling around the room while I fix the sheets and so on. I give my standard spiel: this IV here is for antibiotics but you only need to be hooked up to it once every eight hours... press this call button if you need anything... etc.

Something she says reminds me of an old Chinese proverb about the emperor, can’t remember what.

I’m getting ready to move on and I think, Please let the day stay this peaceful. Then I think, When the place is this empty, I just wanna lie down in one of the empty rooms and take a nap. Wish I’d gotten more sleep.

I take a break to do my paperwork, and I see we have some obnoxious new forms with lots of checkboxes for what you did every hour of the shift. I check off the ones labeled “Thinking about the emperor” and “Praying”. I think: I guess that’s productive, but is it really necessary every hour?

This essay by Lew Rockwell, "The Reality of Red-State Fascism", is worth reading for a couple of reasons.

1. It's well written.
2. It uses the word "fascism" in a clear context, and not apocalyptically but with a sense of history.
3. Lew Rockwell is a libertarian conservative. I don't have a lot of patience for those guys, but in this case it's nice to know there are some thoughtful ones out there, sort of.

Of course, he still thinks socialism is the devil, and he has the strange idea that the Gingrich Republicans of the '90s really cared about freedom at some point. But, given that, isn't this pretty good:

[The Clinton impeachment] crystallized the partisanship of the bourgeoisie .... The right in this country began to define itself not as pro-freedom, as it had in 1994, but simply as anti-leftist, as it does today.

There are many good reasons to be anti-leftist, but let us revisit what Mises said in 1956 concerning the anti-socialists of his day. He pointed out that many of these people had a purely negative agenda, to crush the leftists and their bohemian ways and their intellectual pretension. He warned that this is not a program for freedom. It was a program of hatred that can only degenerate into statism.

Rockwell also has an even stranger and really wrong idea, I think, but it comes from his idealism: he thinks there's no connection between the bottom-up loony-right movement of the '90s, made up of rural Representatives and evangelists and militia types all ranting about the evil federal government that was gonna lock people up, and the current top-down gang who are the federal government and are locking people up. He sees an inconsistency there, so he figures the movement was seduced and betrayed:

"The vigor and determination of the Bush administration has brought about a profound cultural change, so that the very people who once proclaimed hatred of government now advocate its use against dissidents of all sorts." Well no. The "profound cultural change" was that they took over the government; they only ranted against it before because it wasn't on their side.

(link courtesy of Max Sawicky)

Let it be recorded in infamy that Susan lent me The Da Vinci Code to read. I know she didn't say it was good. But still. Argh.

Holy shit is that book dumb. I know I should just try to enjoy the silliness and the thrilliness. But except for a couple of escape scenes that could've been in any other kind of airport book, it's not that thrilling. And much of the time that shit just don't make sense.

He writes like a 12-year-old (or maybe like someone trying to summarize a movie). The characters are stupid. (How stupid? Two educated French people hear the medieval French word for the Holy Grail, which is pronounced pretty much the same as the modern French word for the Holy Grail, and they say things like "I've never heard of that strange word," until someone tells them in English "It means the Holy Grail.") They keep exclaiming that various things are amazing or unbelievable or brilliant when they're not really, just to save the writer the trouble of being impressive. Two thirds of the way through the book, the main freaking character has still refused to explain (even to himself, and this is a guy who explains a lot of things to himself, in badly written detail) the big secret that he's apparently known from the start, for no reason.

The historical-mystical-feministical trappings just make it worse because the guy so clearly doesn't know what the hell he's talking about and is just counting on his readers to know less. It makes me cringe the way I do when people say "'history' is a male supremacist word because of the 'his'" or "'fuck' is an acronym". (Though I'd really like to see someone write a conspiracy thriller based on the latter.) And though Opus Dei really is creepy, Dan Brown is so hysterically determined to spread the word (he actually drops the web site address of an anti-Opus-Dei organization into a character's thoughts) that he gives anti-religious-fascist-secret-societyism a bad name.

Of course this probably wouldn't piss me off if he weren't making a zillion bucks.

At least it's got a kind of complicated conspiracy theory. How could someone who thinks the golden ratio is exactly 1.618 come up with a complicated theory of any kind? He didn't. Apparently it all comes from this book Holy Blood, Holy Grail which was just about entirely based on stuff said by one bizarre guy... and that guy's story is a way better story.

Now here I have to admit that one of my favorite books ever is Alan Moore's comic From Hell, which similarly steals a wild-ass conspiracy theory (Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution) and makes it into a novel and a critique of Western civilization. But at least Moore (a) credited the source and admitted it was really unlikely, and (b) can fucking write.

OK, there's one bit I liked.
Near the beginning there's this French police chief who has all these fancy investigative gadgets. Typical techno-thriller breathless descriptions of how it all works. And then someone mentions that the guy has been getting in trouble for spending too much police money on all that crap. It's kind of funny.
That's all...

Added: I wasn't gonna comment on this, but... yeah, I do find the book kind of offensive on religious grounds, too. Not so much for the whole "Christianity is a fraud" angle; that's old hat. It's just in this case the facts and interpretations Brown uses to support his anticlericalism, which he seems to figure his readers will never have heard of, are so often plain wrong and stupid, and the higher truth he claims to reveal is such thin gruel.

Brown thinks Christians never believed in the divinity of Jesus until the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. He thinks that at the same time, evil Constantine made up the canonical gospels, and also the legend of Mary Magdalene being a prostitute (which started 400 years later, was never accepted by Protestants, and isn't accepted these days by Rome either). He's not saying these things were lost to history; he really wants you to believe that they're documented facts you'd know about if you were educated. Like Philip Pullman (though Pullman is 10,000 times better), he seems to think the Roman Catholic Church is both the most evil branch of Christianity and the only one worth mentioning. And he tells you simultaneously that pre-Christian societies were all about goddess worship and sex magic, and that the oppression of women began with the book of Genesis—attributing that book, with a straight face, to the Christians. Like those jerks on the other side of the fence who wrote the Left Behind books, he's made a zillion dollars by reading the Cliff's Notes to someone's contrarian Bible studies and selling them to others as half-baked Fun Facts.

As for the higher truth: the book is all about a big secret (though it isn't really; according to the main character, all scholars worth their salt already know it, they're just looking for the proof) and a noble secret society protecting the truth from Church assassins. OK. But he doesn't just think the big secret would bring down the Church; he thinks it's really inspirational and has its own special magic which makes certain ones of its guardians Very Important People. I'll be vague here because even bad books shouldn't be spoiled, but trust me: if you buy the rest of his worldview, then the special magic part is just plain irrelevant and ludicrous. It's kind of like saying "Bob Dylan's agents are trying to kill me because I know he lip-synched all his performances—and I have a bunch of valuable bootleg Dylan tapes." (It makes perfect sense if you know that the guy Brown lifted the story from thought he was one of the Very Important People, but Brown doesn't seem to get that.) And he seems to think he's still paying his respects to the real/true/nice part of Christianity, but he has so little clue, it's like saying "I still respect Dylan for his great clarinet playing, and for rallying the troops in Vietnam."

(If you want me to go ahead and spoil the plot, highlight this text: The idea is this. Jesus never claimed to be divine, he was just a good guy who was trying to be the literal King of the Jews, and this failed political campaign for some reason inspired a righteous mystical movement for a few hundred years, till evil Constantine took over; but not only that: living descendants of Jesus walk among us, carrying his bloodline!—which you should care about for some reason, maybe because kings and blood are cool.)

Confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General—depressing. They asked many of the right questions on his justification of war crimes. As far as I've read, they stayed away from any other evidence on his legal qualifications (e.g., his history of rationalizing death warrants in Texas by ignoring the details of the cases, and his opinion that that corrupt bully Kerik would make a fine head of Homeland Security). Ashcroft was a delusional crusader, but as this guy says, it's hard to tell whether Gonzales is evil or just stupid. And I have a sinking feeling that he'll get the job no matter what.

My New York sweetie, the lawyer who took me to see my first real live Bush administration creature, writes:

I can't believe I live in a country considering abandoning the Geneva Convention. This shithead is headed for the Supreme Court. Give this guy a chair on a faculty committee and let him question everything and anything he wants, but don't put him in the freakin' government.

1. US deserters flee to Canada to avoid service in Iraq: Immigration hearings have started up north.

2. Account of a trial in Israel, after six years of imprisonment without charges. I found this story because I was wondering what's become of Haggai Matar; he's free now and still causing confusion:

"Haggai Matar, the conscientious objector, enters the courtroom; none of the dozens of soldiers understands what an Israeli civilian is doing here. You're not a soldier? A friend of the accused? Everyone here has a defined role and this is not one of them."

(I forgot how young that guy is, till I read this old interview where he mentions being present at age eleven at the rally where Yitzhak Rabin was killed. I was 23, and I vividly remember listening to the radio and having one of my first conscious "Wow, the world can get dramatically more fucked up at any moment" moments. I wonder what those moments will be for the kids who are being born now.)

I just got an E-mail from a stranger which read, in its entirety (minus signature),

Hi eli,
What's your connection to Vermeer chocolate?
thanks.

I figured this for either a follow-up to some drunken conversation I'd totally forgotten, or the world's subtlest spam, but the signature and return address belonged to a small but real SF neighborhood newspaper.

I wrote: No connection. Who are you and what are you talking about?

He wrote: I'm the copy editor for _________(*). An Eli Bishop is involved with Vermeer Chocolate but the writer didn't know Eli's job title. I was trying to find it out. Sorry for the mixup.

So now I'm 'satiably curtious about a few things: Who's this Eli Bishop? What's Vermeer Chocolate? What's his involvement? And are all copy editors the kinds of people who just charge through life with no doubts?

Seeing as how this reckless E-mailer apparently didn't think of calling Vermeer first, I could've made up something really interesting and watched it get published. (*Thus, name omitted to avoid embarrassing a guy who did me no harm.)

I admit, that's what I think these days when someone decides to move to San Francisco.

We're still working on getting the cool Texan out here. The problem is finding her a job (something I'm just no good at at all; my own solution, "go to nursing school", isn't so practical).

BUT the New York blizzard, and a strange spike in demand for literate people in the business world here, have conspired to send a distinguished Irish explorer of Brooklyn who likes to talk to people our way starting next month.

Please, no one tell her the horrible secret that lurks within our pleasant hills! At least not until she's fully assimilated.

Last night:

I've been sent as a temp nurse to someone's clinic in a kind of loft space. The doctor is a pleasant lady who looks like she's seen it all. She'd like me to start an IV, draw blood if possible, and give a dose of antibiotics, in the little room up the ladder. She tells me the patient is a little odd and strong-willed, but not to worry. I look at the chart and see that the patient is Agamemnon.

I didn't know he was still alive. Since it's been several thousand years, he's probably a sorcerer. Not knowing what to expect, I go up the ladder.

The room is dim and casually decorated. He's sitting at a little table. He looks about 60, medium long hair and mustache, square face, looks Greek. (Looks kind of like Brigham in Finder, but older and calmer.) And he has an open third eye in the middle of his forehead, and a fourth eye near his left cheekbone.

I feel like I'm supposed to bow or salute, but I just introduce myself and go back out to collect supplies. I'm afraid to ask the doctor about the extra eyes, figuring they're probably just a magically-induced hallucination, so I just ask her if she ever sees anything unusual there. Yes.

I go back and have no trouble starting the IV, though I have to use a tiny pediatric needle.