from a few different commenters in the fark thread for this column from National Review, about children of conservatives ending up being liberal:
Liberals: “I’ve learned that…”
Conservatives: “I was raised to believe…”
That’s about the best description of this particular modern social dynamic I’ve heard.
So, tomorrow, Tuesday, is election day in America. Here’s where I make use of my little pulpit to encourage everyone within reach of my electronic voice to make the effort to get out to your polling place and vote.
Sure, it’s an off-year election, and unless you happen to be in one of two states in the Union electing a Governor, you’re pretty much looking at strictly local offices. You might be hesitant, thinking those aren’t important.
You’d be wrong about that.
Local government officials have a heck of a lot of influence on your day-to-day life, even if it’s not readily apparent. Local officals have a lot of say in things like property taxes and local school policies. If, $diety forbid, you find yourself appearing in a court of law, the judge (who is elected in many jurisdictions) has quite a bit of say in how things go for you. So, making an effort and doing a little reading about who’s on the ballot makes a lot of sense, even if it’s just someone running for dogcatcher (especially if you’re a dog owner).
If you’re in Virginia (like I am), or in New Jersey (where I have at least a couple of friends who might read this), you’re electing a Governor, which is a big deal. I can’t speak much to the New Jersey race, except that I’ve heard of Chris Christie because of his national profile, and, he seems like a decent enough guy, for a Republican – this isn’t an endorsement, by any stretch, I just haven’t done my research – I encourage you, if you’re in the Garden State, to take a look at all candidates.
For my fellow Virginians, I can’t stress enough the importance of getting out and voting – I heartily recommend voting for Terry McAuliffe, not because he’s a particularly great candidate in my eyes (though I suspect he’ll do well enough on the issues I care about, and certainly won’t erode things further), but rather because his opponent, Ken Cuccinelli is so awful in all sorts of ways. As the Commonwealth’s Attorney General for the last four years, he’s been awful, particularly on women’s issues, and kind of a theocratic fascist (and that’s not that much of an exaggeration – dude’s made banning sodomy a major campaign issue), and there’s no indication that he’d moderate his positions any as Governor.
So, that’s pretty much my spiel – go out and vote. If you don’t know where, clicking here would be a good place to start.
Costumes for kids are still coming together, but the spouse and I got our kit on early for a party last weekend…with a theme: “dress your favorite decade.”
We were kind of stumped for a while, though it was kind of a foregone conclusion that we went with different aspects of the 80s; her the early 80s neon mall culture, me full-on sleazy late 80s Sunset Strip. Between the two of us, we might have had the foundation for a proper Beauty and the Beast 80s teen comedy; she the suburban princess, me the dangerous-looking fellow from the wrong side of the tracks. Together, they fight crime, or at least dance to middle-of-the-road British new wave at the climactic dance/party/event, and everyone learns a little bit about class consciousness. Anthony Michael Hall co-stars.
Also present, our friends from the 20s, 60s, and 70s, because reasons.
A good time was had by all, and that’s what’s important. Though I apparently looked scary in the dark, with those fake tattoos, at least to a woman who was wearing an honest-to-goodness dead animal around her neck. I’ll leave that without context; it’s more interesting that way.
I’m finding that for the first time in my adult life, my work group is made up primarily of people my own age. For most of my tenure as a civil servant, I’ve been the office “baby”, well into my late 30s. The federal service cadre I’be been part of is made up largely of Boomers sticking around to maximize their retirement benefits, and there hasn’t been a big trend in hiring younger up-and-comers behind me; maybe it’s different elsewhere. For my entire career, it’s largely been me in an office of chain-smoking fiftysomething divorcees.
But, this new office is different. I went out to lunch with much of my new team this week, and learned that I’m actually one of the older ones, though all of us are within a few years of each other, which means that for once, I share at least some common generational and cultural touchstones with my co-workers; we speak, on some level, the same language.
Plus, we’re all kind of geeks, which is cool – there are several board game afficianados here, and someone raised the topic of “A Very Potter Musical” and wizard rock in casual conversation about theater (we were comparing stories of kids’ activities) that wasn’t me – though I expect I’ll probably drop some “too-far” geek trump card sooner or later, but I’m trying to be a conscientious professional, while still leaving the door open for idle-time and after-hours geekery (and we did spin some Humdingers in the car – Scott and Kirsten have a couple of new fans).
It wasn’t at all surprising that among folks my age, we talk a lot of movies; and they’re the same movies that everybody of a certain age remembers – The Princess Bride (Which drew a rousing chorus of “Inconceivable!” when one person admitted to having never seen it), Labyrinth, and, sort of surprisingly, Willow, which is a great movie, but not one I particularly *love*, though I meet a surprising number of people for whom it’s a huge part of their childhoods (I met someone once who named their kid Alora).
It’s an interesting place to be, and one I look forward to exploring further. Suffice to say, for now, I’m pretty happy here.
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Unrelated – I saw Pacific Rim last night, and spent two hours with a huge smile on my face. You should really seek it out.
Even though the Government is still shut down, I went back to work on Monday, as I’d been, thanks to a broad interpretation of the Pay Our Military Act, determined “essential”, at least until someone makes another decision that I’m not. Who knows if I’m going to get paid for it any time soon, though.
As we used to say in the systems modernization office, “Embrace Ambiguity!”
But, I’ve gotten a full week in, with my compressed work schedule, and, kids out the door for school, I am in the midst of paying my bills with my fractional pay check, though decent planning has left me with enough to get by and then some.
No plans for much of the rest of the day. Long weekend coming, too. I can live with that.
So, it’s the fourth day of the government shutdown. I haven’t been to work since Tuesday morning, when I went in for fifteen minutes to sign the letter telling me I was “non-essential” and changing my voice mail to reflect the fact that I won’t be available until congress gets their heads out of their asses (the actual voicemail greeting was much more diplomatic).
I’ve no idea how long this is going to last, but it seems like everyone’s digging in for the long haul. One nice, sort of unexpected thing thing that gives me hope, though, is that at last count, my Congressional representative has taken a break from doing whatever neighboring Congressman Eric Cantor tells him to do and stating publically that he’ll support the senate’s clean funding bill, which is nice. I like to think that my letter to him helped, though it’s probably that he has more currently out-of-work federal employee constitutents in his district than anyone else outside the Beltway. Hopefully they’ll be some movement soon.
However, I’m planning for this to last a while, cutting back on non-essential spending, and looking for alternative income streams, which mostly consists of getting off my ass to finally get rid of some collectibles and unused electronics that have been taking up space, now that there’s some urgency to motivate me. Last night, I sold some rare, mint-in-box action figures and an autographed picture of James “Scotty” Doohan to my local comics and collectibles shop, and made a decent chunk of change. I’ve got some old electronics ready to get posted to craigslist if necessary as well.
Some of my guitars are looking nervous, though I’m pretty sure they’ll be safe.
Otherwise, I’ve been filling the time with stuff, both useful and recreational. I cleaned out my storage room/home office, getting rid of lots of crap (and setting aside those old collectibles), we’ve washed lots of laundry (and set aside a bunch of old clothes for donation), and this morning, I sanded our stairs to prep them for painting and the installation of new non-skid pads, and only banged up my knuckles a little bit.
I’ve also watched a season and a half of Breaking Bad and started playing through Mass Effect 3, which I’ve had sitting on my shelf, still in the shrinkwrap, for about a year. It’s good so far (for the record, I play Fem!Shep).
The general uncertainty about when I’ll get to go back to work and start getting paid again, though, is taking it’s toll on life. The stress is hitting me in all the usual physical places, though I’m managing. There’s not much I can do about it, and I’m in better financial shape than some folks affected by this, so I think I’ll get through it okay (the planned furlough planning helps here). Still, I wanted to go to the MD Renfaire with friends this weekend, but I couldn’t justify the trip, given the cirucmstances, which sucks.
Anyway, that’s about it from here. Here are some tunes:
So, it’s looking more and more likely that, barring a miracle before midnight, Tuesday morning I’ll be heading into the office to sign furlough paperwork, then getting essentially locked out until Congress can stop playing chicken with my paycheck.
While I’m known for getting occasionally political in this space, I haven’t actually done so in a while. Not that I haven’t been paying attention, but I’ve not had a lot of free time to write down even semi-coherent thoughts about much of anything, let alone the inner workings of federal budgetary policy and politicking.
I have a couple of thoughts on the current situation, however, and I have a little bit of free headspace (not that most of my headspace isn’t consumed by this business anyway, because of the rather large effect it’s having on my life and livelihood), so I’m writing some things down.
First of all, this whole business is largely a manufactured crisis. The comparison used by the vocal cadre of freshman Republican legislators who came in on the Tea Party wave, is invalid – the idea of comparing a Federal budget to a household budget is flawed. When you get to the scale of nations and national spending, “money” doesn’t really mean the same thing as it does on an individual level. It’s a convenient way of expressing the idea of resource distribution, stemming from the fact that at all levels, “money” is really a theoretical construct everyone agrees on as a way to ease the exchange of goods and services in modern widely distributed markets – “money” is only worth the value we all agree to give it – if we each only traded with a small, consistent community in a small geographic area, we wouldn’t need it, as barter would work just fine. When the entities that create the “money” talk about spending, it’s really just a way to describe balances of power in quantifiable terms people can sort of understand.
Whether or not you agree with how power is distributed on an international scale is one thing; that’s something worth debating about, and enacting laws and constructs to deploy a nation’s power in given directions – that’s a matter of defining priorities, and that’s what elected government representatives ought to be doing. Things like the debt ceiling and continuing resolutions and budgets are paperwork to allow government priorities to interact with the smaller scale economies that go about enacting them.
The current financial shenanigans are, for the most part, manufactured. It’s a matter of holding up paperwork in order to prevent anything meaningful from happening, because somebody didn’t get what they want; it’s a temper tantrum situation, where the body politic is the family unit, and the Tea Party Republicans are the toddler kicking, screaming, and trashing the cereal aisle at the grocery store.
The thing they don’t like, of course, is The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Whether their opposition to this package of healthcare initiatives has merit isn’t really the issue here – heck, I’m well-known as a total bleeding heart, and I have issues with some elements of the program (it was a compro – however, the issues they have with the law have been debated, discussed, and talked about at every level from individual talk over dinner to the floor of the Supreme Court, and in every legal way that matters, and it’s now the law of the land. The debate is over. It’s happening. Throwing a temper tantrum isn’t going to get the result they want, and the tactic isn’t going to go well for them in the court of public opinion, which is much larger than the echo chamber they often find themselves in.
However, there’s no short term downside to the tactics for them. When the government shuts down tomorrow, Congress continues to get paid; their staff might field a few more calls from unhappy constitutents, but none of them are up for election for another thirteen months, and that’s a political eternity – few low-info voters (and at the congressional level, that’s most voters) will even remember this next year.
This works for both sides on the issue: The Senate Democrats are, perhaps rightly, not particularly moved to cede to the right-wing demands – there’s no downside for them to keep doing what they’re doing – they’ll still get paid, and are at least paying lip service to the plight of political footballs federal workers. Giving ground here wouldn’t actually be compromise – it’d be giving into the tantrum. The entire process of enacting the ACA was compromise; lots of concessions were made all around to get it passed in the first place; everybody gave some. And, if nobody’s completely satisfied with it, it means it’s probably a good compromise, and a decent first step at getting us on par with the rest of the world regarding the idea of making health care a basic human right. Demanding “compromise” now, especially when suggesting that “give us what we want and we won’t shut the federal government down” is hardly compromise. Also, nationwide polls indicate pretty significantly that when the shit hits the fan tomorrow, the blame won’t be landing at Harry Reid’s feet*.
Still, however I might agree theoretically with Senate Democrats on the issue, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to lose at least a couple of days pay over this, along with about a million other federal workers, and the impact of that income loss on the US economy (not to mention the potential impact to my credit rating if it goes on too long) is wide-ranging, and won’t do the country any favors at all. It’s a bad situation all around, and totally avoidable.
to belabor the temper tantrum metaphor above, The Federal workforce are the sanitation staff that gets the pleasure of sweeping up the cereal aisle after the kid tears it up, sweeping up the spilled Cheerios and Froot Loops left in the wake of the rampaging toddler.
And I won’t even be getting the benefit of an unsuitably low minimum wage for it.
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*- In this case, and for the last couple of years, I’ve actually kind of felt bad for John Boehner. While he and I don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye ideologically, I can at least kind of respect the guy as a career politician who understands how the legislative sausage is made, and understands that give-and-take is how anything gets done in Washington. It’s hard not to see his frustration coming through, just a little bit, at having to wrangle all these Tea Party upstarts with their ideological purity, while still having to pay occasional lip service to their views in order to keep his job as Speaker. I feel for the guy, honestly I do.
I have finished my first week at the new job. As I mentioned previously, I think it’ll be a good experience; it’s been so thus far. I’m still not entirely sure how to deal with the additional time I’ve found myself with. I’m still trying to convince my body that bedtime is no longer 7pm, and that I don’t need it to wake me at 3am. I’ll get there.
Today, my “compressed day off” (working four ten hour days, with every Friday off; otherwise known as the Best of All Schedules™), I’m probably going to go Costco. I’ve already paid the bills. This evening, we’ll be heading over to a friends house for a celebration, since I’m not the only one who started a new job this week (it’s been that kind of week in my social circle). The changes are going to be good for all of us.
Oh – forgot to mention what happened last weekend- Wizard Rock show. Four acts, including good friends the Blibbering Humdingers and non-wizard rocker Jonah Knight, but also Hawthorn and Holly (including a set from their other Hunger Games-themed project, The District 13 Cowboys) and Mandala, she of the wrock project Witherwings. It was a good time.
Also, camping this weekend. Yay. Looks like I’m getting that life started.
tunes…
I’m sure most of you have noticed the incessant yet vague hints about potential new things over the last several months in this space. Well, now is the time for the veil of vagueness to be (kind of) lifted.
I officially started a new job this week. I’m doing roughly the same thing (federal contracting systems support and development), though I’m doing it at a different agency, which is (and this is the good part) only about fifteen minutes’ drive from my house. As of Monday, I no longer have to deal with the gruelling 200 mile round trip commute to Northern Virginia.
I’ve had this thing sort of on the hook since late July, if you count the feelers sent out to professional contacts about the position (a slot in a new division, which was actually modeled on the group I was working for). Those feelers led to other feelers being sent back the other way – at a certain point in this business, everybody knows somebody who knows everyone else, which led to what is quite possibly the best interview anyone’s ever given anywhere – seriously, this was one of those mythical interviews where, a few days out, I wasn’t second-guessing a single response I gave. That led to an offer, and paperwork, and several weeks of human resources professionals and supervisors from two different organizations negotiating over my services.
I’ve spent the last month or so detailing and documenting all the processes for the stuff I did at the old place, and training my replacements; my departure left the office short-handed (though I found out today that they are able to hire behind me and several other lingering vacancies – the solicitations are on the street as I type this), so I felt a little bit bad about leaving, but my goal was to do my best to leave the place in a better state than I found it, and I think I did.
The old place was sad to see me go – they all understood the reasoning (I had no work-life balance, because really, I had no life), and wished me well. They gave me a nice send-off gathering, and said lots of nice things about me.
The whole business is a bit of an ego boost, really.
The first couple of days at the new job have been positive so far; The team is small, and made up of people I’ve either worked with in the past, or have worked with folks I know (this agency moved their headquarters south from DC a few years ago, and filled out a lot of the staff with folks I worked with at the old agency’s Richmond site), so it’s comfortable already – it feels kind of like coming home, even though I’ve never worked here before.
I’m starting to get a handle on the new kinds of projects I’ll be working – this agency does some different kinds of things, so it’ll involve some different kinds of systems, and a fundamentally different way of looking at things, but it’s all related, so I’m figuring it out. At this point, it’s been a lot of training and reading and hand-shaking, though I’ve got meetings on the calendar lined up – I’m looking forward to jumping in and being useful. I seem to have a reputation for being highly-skilled and valuable in this particular community, and I really want to live up to the hype, despite my regular bouts with impostor syndrome.
So…yeah. I think it’s going to be good.
I guess it’s one of those date occurrences that really set off some people’s superstitious reflexes. Me? I don’t really care.
Been an okay week, I guess. The usual annoyances are still annoyances, though some are at least winding down a bit. More to come there later, if we haven’t talked about it. If that’s the case, you’ll have to wait.
I can point to one interesting thing I did this week, though. I went over to Guitar Center yesterday after work, and this followed me home:
That, dear friends who care, is a Takamine EG523SC. It’s very pretty, and it plays very nicely.
Why, might you ask, did I buy this, when I have a rather large number of guitars already? Because.
The main reason is that my twenty-odd year old Frankenstein Fender acoustic was feeling it’s age. Don’t get me wrong; I still love the home-made electrification and fancy black finish. That guitar is, in fact, sitting about ten feet from me right now. However, it was a twenty-odd year old cheap guitar that I’ve had since high school. It served me well as my main acoustic axe for a very long time, though that doesn’t change the fact that it’s got cheap plastic tuners and is made mostly out of laminate plywood, which isn’t exactly tone wood. Remarkably consistent, but kind of flat and lacking the character of a higher-end instrument. I’ve been playing a lot over the last year or two, with people (people who have some really nice instruments) and in front of people, and the cheap high school guitar wasn’t measuring up to what I needed.
I’m not considering it a replacement; it’s different in a number of ways. The old acoustic is a traditional “dreadnaught” style. This is what they call a Jumbo – it’s bigger, rounder, and deeper, designed to emphasize bassier tones. This balances nicely with the fact that it’s made mostly out of maple and spruce, both woods that tend to sound bright, so it’s got an interesting alchemy going on.
Secondly, it’s got a nice cutaway to reach the higher frets, and it’s electrified straight from the source, with a fancy electronics package on board including EQ and preamp- in short, it’s a modern acoustic/electric guitar, which is something I was lacking. Takamine is one of the pioneers of electro-acoustic technology, and thus, it sounds really nice plugged in. Also, it’s just pretty, with the flame maple sides and back, nice blonde finish, and all those abalone inlays. I’ve never really owned an instrument with this kind of fit and finish before – it’s really a piece of art before it makes a sound.
In any case, I’d been looking at this model, playing it whenever got a chance, often over the last eight months or so, and finally decided to take the plunge, especially since Tak recently revamped their line-up, and this this particular model isn’t being made any more; so if I was going to get one, I needed to jump on that soon.
I can also proudly say that the herd has actually remained the same size overall – I finally traded in the old pink Peavey Tracer Custom I bought in high school, and have spent the last ten or fifteen years wishing I’d spent the money on a Fender American Standard Strat instead. It’s not that the Peavey “superstrat” style wasn’t a solid, well-built instrument; far from it. It just hasn’t been me for the last decade or so. Also, if I’d bought the Fender for the same $700 bucks back then, I’d have a nicely seasoned instrument now, and one, in the highly unlikely event that I would be looking to unload it, would probably have actually appreciated in value by this point. Instead, I got about enough for it in trade to cover the Tak’s hardshell case and a little extra, and was happy to take it, mostly because I probably wouldn’t have gotten more in a private sale (these 80s metal guitars really aren’t worth a lot these days), and it was just taking up space in the house – I’d barely played it in the last five years – it just wasn’t me. So, I got to replace a dead spot in the collection with something I’d actually play, and it’s Guitar Center’s problem to find the right buyer. I call it a win (although I’ll miss the idea of that old guitar – buying it back then was a big deal).
Having had it only about 24 hours, I haven’t had that much time with it, but I like the time I have spent with it. I’ll get a chance to play with others this weekend, so its public performance debut is only a little ways off. I’m looking forward to it.
So, anyway. That was the big news this week. I’m kind of happy with my new toy right now.
And on that note, here are some tunes…none of which I’ve played on this particular instrument (yet):
