Month: March 2004

Here’s a 2003 graduation speech by the president of Principia College. It’s about how busyness keeps us from truly living. Now, because the college is affiliated with Christian Scientists, the tenets of that faith really fill up the second half of the speech.

Still, it’s got a lot of good points about How We’re Living nowadays, regardless of religious affiliation (or lack thereof). As my buddy Jack, who forwarded the speech to me, wrote, “If you don’t relate to the religious references, substitute ‘human being’ wherever you encounter ‘Christian Science’.” Sounds like a plan.

Nice piece on BusinessWeek.com about how presidential administrations invariably reject the policies of their immediate predecessor.

Bill Haseltine has retired from Human Genome Sciences, and Chris Byron in the NYPost takes the opportunity to tear him a new hole.

I only mention this because, last fall, I sneaked out of a speech by Haseltine at a translational genomics event I was attending in Phoenix, AZ. Why did I sneak out? Because the Yankees had tied up game 7 against the Red Sox in the AL Championship Series, and were on their way to handing Boston its most soul-crushing defeat ever! There was no way I was going to miss that!

So I sneaked out on Haseltine’s hagiography and watched Mo Rivera mow down the Sox until Aaron Boone got up and hit a home run in the bottom of the 11th for aforementioned soul-crushing defeat. Did I mention that the Yankees season starts tomorrow (in Japan at 5am e.s.t.)? Go, Yankees! Down with Haseltine! I mean, down with Red Sox!

Peter Ustinov died this weekend. I never really followed his work in movies and TV, but Lauren Christy did.

Hey, VM readers! I’ve decided to start bringing in guest bloggers as part of my nefarious strategy to develop Virtual Memories into something more like a magazine than a monologue. This week’s guest entry is from Todd Kutyla, who provides us with an introduction to Capitol Offense, an occasional column that’ll discuss the absurdities of life in Washington, DC. If you have an idea for a column, drop me a line sometime and we’ll talk about starting up a side-page on VM.

When I was asked to contribute regular postings on life in DC I jumped at the opportunity. Maybe I jumped a bit too quickly, because right after I agreed to write something things got a little crazy here in the nation’s capital — at least for me.

It took me a while to figure out what I was going to write about. Ideas were in no short supply, I just couldn’t decide which to pursue in this space and which to save as private rants to my wife and friends. Then I lost my job.

I am (at least for the next 5 weeks) a policy analyst with a small think-tank. We do mostly health policy and when one of the major grantmakers decided to change their focus we, and a lot of places like ours, lost a huge source of funding. Add that to the general climate around town — I’d call it bitter — and you have a situation ripe for downsizing. Don’t feel too bad for me though, I was looking to make a move anyway, and this forced me to put things in motion a little faster. By the way, if any of you readers know of anyone looking for a former policy analyst who is really good with people (I was a bartender for 5 years), creative (I’ve written for magazines and apprenticed with an artist/furniture designer), and who is looking to do less policy and more communications/marketing in his next job — barring of course the possibility that somebody will offer him a lot of money to design and build furniture — drop me a line.

So here I am with a mortgage and raising two kids in the District, and now I’m racing against the clock to find a new job. What an opportunity.

What better way to start writing about life here in DC, where more than your brain, your abilities, or your pocketbook; your Rolodex is your most valuable asset than to give you a glimpse of what it’s like to look for a job here in the cradle of democracy.

Being reasonably well-connected in the health policy arena, I know the value of being able to call up somebody to get advice or information and having that person give you exactly what you need exactly when you need it. Being less well-connected in the communications and/or design fields I also know the panic of flipping through that big black cylinder on my desk and coming up all-but-empty. Fortunately, some of the people in my cylinder are willing to look in their cylinders and I think I’m in as good a shape as I could hope to be at the moment. Nonetheless, it’s a harrowing time. Luckily the cherry blossoms are coming into bloom. I love DC this time of year.

Here’s a summary of the job search so far:

Last week my boss — who let me say up front, is one of the best people you could ever hope to work for in- or outside of DC — calls me into his office. We’ve been on the financial ropes here for s little while as I mentioned earlier, so I’m not surprised when he tells me that as of the end of April there’s just no money to keep me. Actually, I was planning on telling him the following week — this week — that I’ve started to put out feelers, and ask for his help making some connections. The end of May would have been ideal. But, hey it’s spring along the Potomac, if you have to be unemployed for a few weeks, there’s not too many better places or times to spend the free hours between interviews.

This week my boss and I both started making phone calls. Jack is one of the most respected health policy analysts in the city and has contacts all over the place — including with some of the best communications firms in the city. His calls will mean a lot. Even if it’s just getting people to sit down and talk with you, and hopefully give you some of the names out of their big, black cylinders. I’m also working every connection I have, which range from a Partner in a top health communications firm that we’ve worked with in the past, to a Project Manager at an advertising & communications firm who called me last week to order some of our reports for her clients and who I ended up chatting with for 10 or 15 minutes about our project and her relationship status — she broke up with the boyfriend who may or may not have been the guy who was going to rent my basement.

I had a meeting with the partner, who hooked me up with a designer friend of his (that’s a story for another time, maybe the next installment) and is putting together a list of contacts for me. I have a meeting next Thursday with a Director at another huge public relations firm that Jack introduced me to. Though I probably don’t want to work there — in large part because I will not be offered a job there — this meeting should garner me another, more targeted and so more valuable list of names. Are you starting to see how this works?

I will not send out a cold resume for this job search or respond to a job listing from the Washington Post. In this town, that is a waste of time. Here more than other places I think–perhaps because of the bureaucratic mentality that pervades even the private sector–Human Resource people are the last people you want screening your resume, unless you are a squirrel applying for the job of nut-collector. I’ve never, in ten years and three job searches in this city had any luck with HR people.

So I’m grabbing my nose and jumping into this thing with both feet. I have only a vague idea of where I’ll end up. I know at the very least my title in the next position I hold won’t be Policy Analyst or Research Associate.

Obviously I will end up doing something connected to politics. Even catering in this town ends up being connected to politics after all. I suppose if I weren’t political to some degree I wouldn’t stay here what with the lead in the water, high crime rate, lack of representation, and oppressive summers. Then again I might–free museums, great running trails, beautiful parks, and of course the cherry blossoms?

–TJK

Now that they know, of course, we’ll have to mobilize the cabal.

It’s hard to believe Gary Kasparov is mixed up in this. I would’ve thought this was Bobby Fischer’s terrain . . .

Why did someone look up

jana novotna oops photos

on Google this morning, leading him (I’m guessing it’s a him) to this site?

The 9/11 commission is in full witch-hunt mode, blaming Clinton for not (illegally) assassinating Bin Laden and blaming Bush for not preemptively invading Afghanistan.

The commission members and their staff seem to have forgotten the administration-crippling effects of Clinton’s philandering. Thanks to his inability to keep his cock in his pants, years of his administration were paralyzed, and his every action was second-guessed to an unimaginable degree.

Remember when, just before the House voted to impeach, he launched a cruise missile strike? That, we were told at the time, was an instance of Wag the Dog syndrome. Now the debate seems to avoid any mention of the effects of blowjobgate on the presidency. (By the way, that attack involved a launch of 200 cruise missiles on Iraq, which had recently kicked out UN weapons inspectors who were trying to ascertain the status of Hussein’s WMD. The shooting war with Iraq was going on long before Bush came into office.) Why, check out this report on the hearings, which discusses Clinton’s actions and inactions from 1998 on, and do a word search for “impeachment”, “Monica”, or “blowjob in the oval office”, and you’ll come up blank. The entire episode has been elided because, I suppose, it’s too sordid. Sorta like Lacuna, Inc.

After the bombing of the Cole and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (and the truck bombing of the WTC in 1993), the consensus seemed to be that Bin Laden’s targets were military or overseas. Bush, it’s now implied, should’ve foreseen a massively destructive attack on American soil, and preemptively invaded Afghanistan to uproot Al Qaeda and the Taliban. A few months after the most contested election since 1876. With the backing of no foreign power. With a secretary of defense who was hated by the military establishment and was being touted as “first to get fired” in the weeks before 9/11.

Both administrations made tons of mistakes, but think back to 9/10/2001, and remember who you were then, and let me know if you honestly thought that anything like the next day was possible. It was so far outside the world we knew that I don’t blame anyone for not predicting it and acting on it. Even the Israelis didn’t have to deal with attacks like that day.

Just venting, sorry. This sort of revisionist history really irks me. I mean, it’s just like when I read a Mitch Lawrence column on the NBA and can see that he’s got his facts wrong. It shouldn’t be my job to catch this stuff!

Update: Gregg Easterbrook writes about this so much better than I do!

Saw The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night.

If you ever tried to forget her/him, you oughtta see it. If you ever wanted to call her/him, months after it’s all over, you oughtta see it. If you ever let failed love for someone make you put your life in a holding pattern, you oughtta see it.

[I wrote some pretty lengthy personal stuff after that paragraph, but I decided that this place just isn’t the forum for that. I’ve tried to be pretty open about my personal life on this blog, but there are a lot of things that I haven’t mentioned, out of privacy considerations and for other reasons (the fact that I have a new girlfriend is one of them). You can write me about reactions to love and its ending, or hit the comments link to start a conversation about it.]

Update: Go ape! Yet again! (Thanks to Arts & Letters for the link)