I live in an apartment building with three elevators, which may sound like a lot, but the largest of the three is often reserved and quite often one of the other elevators is “out of service”. This morning I went down to the main floor to drop a DVD in the mail and one of the elevators was broken, the door stuck open on that floor. I looked at it and as if to answer my question an adolescent boy standing nearby confirmed “That one’s broken.” Our conversation continued:

Boy: That one has been broken on this floor twice and once … *points down*
Me: On the first floor?
Boy: This is the first floor.
Me: I meant the basement.
Boy: It’s called the “Terrace”.
Me: Right.
Boy: There’s a “T” on the button and there’s one there. *pointing to the numbers above the service elevator* They skip the 13th floor too, but I don’t know why.
Me: That’s because some people think the number thirteen is unlucky.
Boy: That’s retarded.
Me: Yes, it is.
Boy: So the 14th floor is the 13th floor, unless you count the Terrace as the 1st floor then the 12th floor is the 13th.
Me: I like to think I live on the 13th floor.
Boy: Cool.

After that my elevator arrived and off I went, back to the 13th floor. I’m not sure how old he was, maybe 10; but the conversation made me think about what it was like back when I took everything quite literally. There was a time when I would have had difficulty understanding that sometimes people refer to a basement as a “terrace” because they think it sounds better. Nowadays I might not agree with their reasoning, but at least I grasp why in their deluded minds it makes sense.

Tonight I accidentally left my cell phone in my apartment when I ventured off to the bridge club which was a bother because if I wanted to retrieve it before going into work it would mean a detour, albeit a slight one, back to my apartment. The window between the end of the game and the time I must be at work is often very small and almost entirely consumed by the drive.

At the club, there was a man who always needs something – mostly he needs rides. I have almost always been willing to give him a ride when he has asked, unless there was some good reason I could not. Tonight, toward the end of the evening, when he asked if I would drop him off on my way into work, for the reason given above, I replied, “Nope.” (When he asked I was in the middle of deciding just what to bid with a tricky hand and that was the reason my reply was so succinct.) He looked surprised and then affronted, but said nothing.

Once my course of action on the hand in question was clear, I began to feel rather guilty for not explaining further. I wondered if perhaps I should explain then; but the moment had well and truly passed. Eventually it occurred to me that no explanation was necessary. In fact, I began to get annoyed at the fact I felt guilty (I blame my upbringing). I got further annoyed at his taking offense at my refusal to inconvenience myself to do him a favor. When did charity become obligatory and is that then still charity at all? The answers I came to were that it hasn’t and it isn’t. In fact, I concluded that just not feeling like giving him a ride would have been an equally legitimate reason not to do so. In a reversal, I was suddenly glad my response had been exactly what it was, lest I reinforce the expectation that I will always have a tangible reason for saying no.

When I was growing up there was a movement among non-denominational charismatic churches that was very popular for a time. It revolved around random acts of kindness as a way to reach out to people and demonstrate god’s love for humanity. God and I don’t have much use for one another these days, but I do still like the concept of practicing kindness just for its own sake. It feels right to make the world a better place even if only in a very small way for some other person. When compelled by social expectations, the actor is still concretely improving the life of the person on the receiving end, but this way madness lies … you just can’t force people to be nice, no matter what the Democrats would like you to believe.

The Jewish philosopher Maimonides delineates eight levels of giving. The first and highest level is:

Giving an interest-free loan to a person in need; forming a partnership with a person in need; giving a grant to a person in need; finding a job for a person in need; so long as that loan, grant, partnership, or job results in the person no longer living by relying upon others.

It seems safe to say that Maimonides would approve of Kiva.org. Which brings us right back around to those people who heavily “rely on the kindness of strangers” (to paraphrase Tennessee Williams) and in so doing eventually come to expect it, they are beneath pity.

After a frustrating afternoon at the bridge club, I knew sleep was a long way off in spite of a shift at work lurking in the not-so-distant night. Once again I had forgone sleep to play bridge only to be rewarded with a spate of hyperactivity in whatever part of my brain is into tormenting me over such things as making a bad decision in the face of the unforeseeable.

So I met a friend for dinner and then we walked to one of those carrion bookstores that appear suddenly in the vacuum of a vacancy at a shopping center. I was struck by the stack of Burger King® branded boxes looming in the entryway. The pricing scheme took a moment to absorb, most of the books (remainders all) were $3, $4 or $5 with outliers at $2 and $7. These books could be bought in groups by price at a further discount … so four books priced at $3 each could be bought together at $10, but there was no discount for buying one of each at various prices. Armed with this information I dove in and found the organization to have no particular guiding logic. There were loose groups, but nothing hard and fast and certainly nothing alphabetical.

I find a lot of titles that I already own in these kind of stores. Two such titles, both strikingly beautiful works, but utterly unrelated were found nestled next to one another on a shelf Mathilda Savitch by Victor Lodato and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower.

The former a novel that I bought on a whim after reading the first chapter while standing in the aisle of the bookstore. It then languished until I was in the mood to take it up again, only to simultaneously wish that I had read it sooner and saved it longer as I both wanted to devour it whole and savor the experience.

The latter I have no recollection of when I bought it or what inspired me to do so, but I read it right on the heels of another collection of short stories by a different author. It threw into sharp relief all the deficiencies in that other collection, how coarse and cruel this other author was just for the sake of being so. “What’s a book like you doing in a place like this?” I thought.

More so was I surprised to find Joan Sinclair’s collection of photography, Pink Box. This book had literally been on my Amazon wish-list for years, but always priced just out of range for an impulse buy and I never seemed to have a good reason to splurge. Ditto for Nerve: The First Ten Years which was nearby in one of the few areas that had a discernible theme. The Bunny Book was there too, but that’s exactly the sort of thing I would expect to find in the sex section of a remaindered book store. (Come to think of it, perhaps it wasn’t the sex section but the “books with a pink cover” section that I had stumbled upon.)

Hidden on the bottom shelf in the travel section I found an odd bundle of Moleskin® notebooks. I was so intrigued (I’ve a bit of thing for Moleskin® notebooks, but I hadn’t come across anything published within one before) I bought it on a gamble (the bundle was shrink wrapped). But then I fell for a bait-and-switch when I bought The Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities when it was actually A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities that I had recently added to the aforementioned wish-list.

I spent a number of years avoiding Starbucks. I had a favorite local coffee-shop that was independently owned and was not put out of business by the Starbucks that sprung up nearby unbidden, but lived on only to be ousted by the whim of a new landlord whose girlfriend wanted to own a coffee-shop … in that exact location.
Needless to say, I wasn’t going to try the interloper’s place and slowly I warmed to the idea of trying out the oh-so-conveniently ubiquitous chain.

I discovered it wasn’t bad. It was so not bad that I started going there pretty often. The green tea Frappucinos were good. The banana chocolate smoothies (with an added shot of espresso or two) were even better. At least one Starbuck’s barista knows me on sight. I got a gift card that I registered with them to get free WiFi access and coupons. With every trip, I was further lulled into the sense that this was not an evil chain afterall and then last night I logged into my account to check the balance on the aforementioned gift card only to find this:

Autumn is my favorite time of year. First it is one of only two times a year when I get my grubby little hands on dark chocolate covered Peeps®:

Once they’re gone it’ll be a long winter until they reemerge in Easter chick form.

Second, October is the only month in which one can drag a life size zombie French Maid into the elevator and only elicit a comment about “going all out” for Halloween (I didn’t bother to mention the fact that I would have bought this particular item had I found her at the flea market in May, the only difference being that I might have gotten a better price):

No, those are not my hands; she isn’t standing on her own just yet, but I intend to have her all fixed up soon enough. As for her pre-flea market existence, the seller told me he acquired several items from a now defunct haunted house down at the shore; he noted that the other figures he purchased from there were “even creepier”. I’ve yet to give her a name, but I’ve decided she should be the first thing one sees upon entering my apartment (call it burglar deterrence). As for accessories she came with a big plastic butcher knife that I don’t have any real use for and a surprisingly realistic looking foam human heart which I intend to place on her tray (at least some of the time). One of my good friends found a brand new wig for her at Goodwill today and I already have plans for finding her a Santa hat in December.

I knew the social networking giant had jumped the shark way back in 2008 when one of my mother’s friends wanted to know if I had a Facebook so she could “friend me”. Two years later when my beloved Daniel told me he was establishing a Facebook account I told him that I had lost respect for him. Despite that, when he joined I felt some desire to join as well, still I shied away from it.

And I’ve never been able to articulate precisely what it was that made me so uneasy about the concept of Facebook, other than a few (mostly) glib remarks about hating people and not voluntarily interacting with them any more than I already must.

This morning I was flipping through the current issue of Newsweek and I came across an editorial by David Lyons on the subject of Facebook and the privacy concerns surrounding it and he managed to put into words what I could not:

In the past five years Facebook has repeatedly changed its privacy policy, always in one direction, and every time this happens, the same movie plays out: people complain, Facebook stonewalls, then spins, then pretends to be contrite, then finally walks things back—a bit. Nobody seems to notice that, after the walk-back, Facebook is still grabbing more personal info than it was before …
The truth is, Zuckerberg needs your data. His business is built on it. You are not Facebook’s customer. You are its inventory—you are the product Facebook is selling.

The article goes more into much more detail about the nature of the changes, etc. It goes so far as to note that the current rendition of the privacy scuffle will in all likelihood play out without leaving so much as a dent in Facebook’s popularity. (100 millions new users in the last four months is an astounding figure.) I hold out hope that it will one day soon hit a saturation point and become just another fad that nobody wants to admit having once taken part in. (MySpace, anyone?)

Daniel does make a good point when he notes that I share far more information on my LibraryThing account than he does on his Facebook one. I’m comfortable with people knowing I own a lot of books; I’m even comfortable with the inferences that can be drawn from my collection such as the fact that many of the horizontal surfaces in my apartment have books stacked on them — twenty-six volumes deep in spots, if you must know. The difference is that LibraryThing has never made me feel like a commodity, which these days on the web is rare.

Today is “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day“. The founder may have denied having anything to do with it, but you can still participate: just grab some crayons or an Etch-A-Sketch and get cracking!

But the salesperson said it looked so natural ...

Convalescence means two things to me: ginger-ale and films I wouldn’t otherwise watch. Today’s pick was the new “Robin Hood” movie. Unfortunately since I’m recovering from having my last two wisdom teeth removed, popcorn was out of the question and this was definitely a popcorn flick. My parents went to go see the film last night and this morning when I was on the phone with them they suggested I would enjoy it. I wasn’t sure how much, but then it was 10 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday and I didn’t have anything better to do so I popped an ibuprofen and went.

I may have written about this before, but going to movie theaters is a sort of cure-all for me, a ritual I engage in to cope with any number of ills. Morning shows on the weekend are typically quite deserted. I’m a fan of weekday late shows for the same reason, well that and the fact that my nights off are Monday and Tuesday.

“Robin Hood” was better than I had expected, but it had me ruminating on the screwy rating system that allows copious and graphic violence in a PG-13 movie. Of course, had there been a sex scene, it would have been rated R (not that it needed a sex scene, it’s just weird that that would been the tipping point). I’m scared to say it, hopefully he doesn’t hit girls, but I agree with the interviewer who angered Russell Crowe so when he said his accent sounded a bit Irish. Cate Blanchett looked very pretty, but maybe a bit lost, perhaps because she was supposed to be simmering with desire for Mr. Crowe. Her character really came alive in the scenes that she did not share with him. A side note, Ridley Scott seems to have some sort of weird blood fetish thing going on, maybe he is trying to capture the vampire crowd (one of the previews was for a “Twilight” movie). Some of the sweeping panoramic shots were breathtaking, the scenery was used to its full advantage. It was pretty much everything as person could want in an action movie (horses!), good, but not great.

Now I can return to my regular viewing schedule of working my way through “Daria: The Complete Animated Series”.

President Obama has authorized the CIA to assassinate an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki. A more complete analysis of what this means can be found here. But in short, the President has decreed that this particular American has no right to due process under the Constitution regardless of the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional for the U.S. Government to even imprison an American as an “enemy combatant”. Pushing further the bad policy that allowed the Bush administration to imprison Jose Padilla without one, this administration is now claiming the right to impose a death sentence on an American without a trial — a step never taken by the previous administration.

This is just the most recent in a long line of reversals made by President Obama as it is in direct opposition to a response given by him when he was seeking the Democratic nomination, “I reject the Bush Administration’s claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.”

A lot of people will look at this and think something to the effect of, “I’m not a terrorist and I don’t like terrorists so why should I care?” But the fact remains that he is an American citizen and if we let the government deny this man his rights under the Constitution, by logical extension none of us have these rights.