February 2003

Very tired today.

I’m spending tonight in another anonymous hotel room; the kind that has an ONCOMMAND television at one end of the desk and a Mr. Coffee at the other. Eventually the unstoppable homogeneity of these places gets under your skin.

(I remember a couple years ago, halfway through a three-week business trip to New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and somewhere in Canada, waking up in a hotel room with the blinds drawn. Sleep-dazed and work-drained, I spent maybe a full minute trying to figure out what city I was in. And then opening the blinds and seeing all the lights of the Vegas strip below me, and this horrible sinking oh yeah….

Or, not quite as depressing, being on a conference call with a partner in Europe, planning a meeting, and saying "well, I’m in California now, but in a few days I should be back in Boston," and then, two minutes later, "wait, I’m actually in New York right now.")

The Fiat in winter.

The reality is, I’m probably just oversensitive about this kind of abuse. “Just because I’m whining doesn’t mean I’m unhappy,” seems to have become some sort of unspoken weblog motto.

But I liked my phrase, “unstoppable homogeneity.” I think I got the idea from that Simpsons episode where the family goes to Brazil, and Homer wears a T shirt that has a picture of Uncle Sam taking an enormous greedy two-handed bite out of the earth, with “TRY AND STOP US” emblazoned underneath.

The Corrections is getting worse. He’s dropping too many little implausible intellectual jokes all over the place, like the cruiseship having a “Soren Kierkegaard ballroom,” and the stern midwestern father quoting Schopenhauer at every opportunity. The section with the talking turd was just painful.

Impromptu winter art.

Did I mention it snowed?

Boston is cold and dark, and it is starting to dawn on me that around this time of year, I always get a little down.

Miguel found an mp3 of the Bill O’Reilly interview.

This exchange between Bill O’Reilly and a man whose father died in 9/11 is one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen. Mike Champion sent me a link to some audience responses to Bill O’Reilly’s performance in that interview, most of whose belligerence clearly extends not only to international affairs, but to people who disagree with them as well. Is this compassionate conservatism?

It is snowing this morning in Boston.

Out our window.

My sister Peach is in town to do a poetry reading tonight.

Peach and Joe at the office.

A beautiful and moving letter written by an American peace activist in Baghdad.