A List of Things Contributing to My Current Natural High

• Having run 4 miles on each of the last two days.
• Having the roads practically to myself on the drive home just now.
• Driven, up-tempo hard rock.  (This is uncharacteristic, and I couldn't identify two songs out of twenty, but The Van has no tape deck, recent country releases are appalling, and nothing familiar was hitting the spot.)
• Rooibos.
• The White Sox and Twins matched one another almost play for play...and this evening's plans were postponed to the precise point that allowed me to watch or listen to everything from the 2nd inning on.
• Finishing Northanger Abbey yesterday and Advertising the American Dream today.
• That grilled, buttered blueberry muffin I ordered for dessert.
• Seres Queridos.  (I'd bet The High was as much a cause as an effect of my enjoying the movie - not that it wasn't good, but do you take my point?)
• Plans for a shockingly massively social weekend of travel...

* * * * *
"'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays.
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays."
     - The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

I have to take a nap, and soon - but since I've been a mite quieter than I'd intended:

- Work was grand today.  I'm pretty good about accentuating the positive, but it's always nice to have a day that makes it easy.  The great virtue of my three busy mornings doing retail is that the customers have become familiar, and today was very interactive.  Two people to whom I owe things came in early, and I'll take the debt as a signal of the ongoing relationship - one has passed on season tickets he can't use to Monday's Sox game, so that I owe him cash, and the other had left some orange juice behind last week; I figured I owed her a new bottle.  Later, others passed on NYC cafe recommendations, a condolence card for a co-worker whose father passed away recently, unsolicited compliments about the ease of getting Your Coffee at Your Coffee-Shop...

- Not unconnected to my return here is the resurgence of travel which includes that New York City trip.  I'll be visiting "the usual people" when I go down there, and in Boston on the day after the game, but I also have a few feelers out to folks I haven't seen in much, much longer.

- When I picked up the reading for next week's class session, on the first "golden age" of advertising in America, I took a moment to glance at a random page.  It revealed a set of ads hectoring parents to ensure their children's success in school, using an astonishing tone of voice: "The Eagle Pencil Company introduced parents vicariously to the terrible tensions of classroom competition: 'Jim's in the 4th grade....How he does bear down on that pencil! He must hang on hard, for pencils will slip through chubby, damp fingers! 15 examples in 15 minutes...will he make it? You can help him pass his test...make sure he has a smooth pencil, with a strong lead that won't snap in the middle of 4x4 and upset him."

Trivia interlude

Failed again: This one's substantive too...

It wouldn't be correct to say I haven't been following politics this season - I'm sure I'm still above the 90th percentile, if you list the populace by its attention to campaigns, et al.

But I the precision and breadth of my attention have been fading pretty quickly: we've seemingly been at this for a pretty long time, and beyond that I've practically felt myself cocooning.  The basic contours of my hopes for the election have been set pretty much since the day Senator Edwards dropped out, which left me with few complex, consequential thoughts, and even fewer comments to make - "You da man!" and "Indeed!" hardly count for anything.

That said, I was startled this afternoon by an ad sponsored by Planned Parenthood and re-broadcast by Mark Kleiman.  I'm not 100% comfortable with the use of rhetorical questions to imply malign negligence, but that wasn't what startled me - the ad probably hews well enough to conventions for edgy ads.

I had to concentrate, though, to work out who it could possibly be aimed at.  Without more context than the spot can provide, the ad itself has a sleazy air, so I would be wary of showing it to low-information undecideds; that could be a wash, with any victory on the merits balanced against the number of viewers squicked by the topic.  But then...high-information undecideds, even those new to the exchanges about the Illinois sex-ed bill, are likelier to consider the source, doubt whether Planned Parenthood is a so-called honest broker in a presidential race, and dial back their reaction on that ground.

I presume the ad is worthwhile anyway: (1) The expense of having paid staff or retained contractors make it was probably slim, (2) I'd suspect the ad buy was small in the expectation of viral and news-media amplifications, and (3) even if my concerns cut short some of its effects, it could still sustain and rally Senator Obama's existing supporters.  It remains striking that the whole thing probably works best inside this same cocoon, passed by attentive voters who trust PP's politics to other such voters.

I prescribed self-expression for a friend the other day.  Probably I'd think twice before rising to defend the recommendation - but for months and months, in every medium, I've been very far from practicing what I preached.

(Blogging in particular has been caught in a vicious circle. I have a plausible idea of how I might reinspire myself - stimulate a fresh start by simulating one, collecting new contacts to whom I'll owe the debt of constant updates - but with nothing much to show visitors and no proof that I can devote myself to the enterprise for three days at a time, I don't feel worthy.)

Why am I back here, though?  In practice, Xanga was probably brought to mind by Steph's birthday yesterday.  In principle, I suppose I'm pleased to return my gaze to an altar not only unlinked to my present doldrums, but downright distant from them.

On the cliche side of things, if I could figure out how to use cut-tags here I would hide the following down to the epigram, but I can't so I won't...
* * * * *
- Work: Today was a good day specifically because I spent ten hours working, broken into reasonable blocs of five hours each at the supermarket Starbucks and the box office.  I have few immediate reservations about my two jobs, but the fact that wage-work more cheering than anything else is a symptom of the bigger problem.

- School: I am literally years behind on some papers, and there are more recent ones in the docket underneath them.  Anyone I might admit this to in person would either brush it off as typical or be righteously appalled.  The occasional breakthrough in research or composition is fun, but it's hard to ignore how trivial one breakthrough is.  I'm enjoying learning Latin by surfing through a textbook with a classmate, but it's not a foundation for anything I'm supposed to be working on.

- Romance: I ought to abide by a gag rule on this one - any thorough account would encourage inferences that it would be poor form to publicly allow, and on top of that this entry is no place for a thorough account.  (I could elaborate on a crush I have on a customer, but that would hit the exacta of Multiple Improprieties over A Misguided Fantasy.)

- Theatre: I'm not doing any shows, and haven't done since the otherwise pleasing show that rendered comatose the most important of the neglected term papers.  Worse, I've looked back on my dabblings and realized that undergraduate theatre, at least, did more lasting harm than lasting good; community theatre was a wash only because a few shows - which supercollided me with people I can't imagine not knowing - make up for the legions of others which didn't.  I grant you the power of the Performing High, but for some time now and for the foreseeable future, it has been and will be hard to justify seeking it.

I feel backwards saying it, but...I promise I'll write a less substantive post later!
* * * * *
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner')