Blog

Posted on

Today we drink, tomorrow we marry!

We got our marriage license Friday morning. The woman at the clerk’s office of the parish courthouse knew Amy from childhood, so her part of the process was pretty smooth. However, when it came to asking me, “Which state was your father born in?”, we discovered that they weren’t prepared for the answer of “Cluj, Rumania.” But everything went off pretty smoothly.

We made it into our hotel in the city yesterday and met up with numerous early-arriving wedding-guests, including my parents (both Scylla AND Charybdis!). Ate beignets at Cafe Du Monde, had dinner at the Asian Cajun, and drank a bunch of gin with friends.

Today, we meet with the DJ, pick up tuxes, get a spa treatment-thing that Amy booked, and get all our parents in the same room for the rehearsal dinner (heavy on dinner, light on rehearsal). Then we hold court at Pat O’Brien’s for more of the early-arriving guests.

Bourbon Street was pretty lively last night. A group of us, including one guest’s 13-year-old son, walked down a ways to meet up with Amy & her group of buddies. I laughed about the idea of being 13 and walking down that street, but the kid didn’t seem too fazed.

Haven’t taken any pix since I got here, but I’ll try to take a couple tonight. They’ll be stupid candids in a bar, but those are cute, I guess.

Posted on

Wedding update

It was an ugly/bumpy flight, but we made it into New Orleans! Thanks to benzodiazepines, I was just fine!

Unfortunately, I blistered through the book I brought along with me (Charles Portis’ Norwood), and neither of the others I brought for the trip are appealing to me right now (Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch and Richard III (I inadvertently grabbed this instead of Richard II, which is an even dumber move than messing up the Dermot Mulroney / Dylan McDermott axis)), so I may need to pick up some other reading material while I’m here.

Sure, most people don’t spend the days before their weddings worried about book selection, but we seem to have everything under control: paperwork gets filed tomorrow, DJ gets his musical “guide” in the afternoon (along with a stack of CDs that we want to use), tux pickup is on Saturday, and public drunkenness is scheduled for Saturday night.

My brother plans on shooting video of the wedding and posting it pretty close to live (depending on the wireless setup at the venue). I promise that I will have NOTHING to do with getting that set up. But it’ll likely show up on this site.

Posted on

Mind reading

Whew! I found a reading for my wedding on Sunday! Being all literary and such, it was pretty difficult for me to come up with something good (I’ll post it sometime after the wedding). In my neurotic way, I felt pressure to come up with a Really Good Reading. The search reminded me of an article I read once about how difficult real writers find it to do things like write a note for their kids’ schoolteachers.

Anyway, it’s a Really Good Reading. The friend who’s going to read it on Sunday tells me she cried when she read it this morning. Amy sez she got choked up, too. Dames. . .

Posted on

Sunday-Sunday-SUNDAY!

When Amy & I picked a date for the wedding, we had to accommodate my conference schedule, the weather in New Orleans, and our magazine & catalog deadlines. We settled on March 12: not too hot and humid, low chance of northeasterners getting derailed by snow, no conference for a week or so. It looked like a good date.

Since then, we discovered that our wedding night overlaps with both the premiere of The Sopranos AND Selection Sunday.

No one in Amy’s family will have a problem with this, but my brother and some of my friends will be praying for the uninterrupted functioning of their TiVos.

Posted on

Breathe with me

I’ve long contended that conspiracy theories are a substitute-religion for the disillusioned; it gives them the opportunity to believe in a Greater Power, even if it’s just a power for evil. I think this ties into that Orwell passage I quoted a few weeks ago.

Brendan O’Neill at Spiked has a great piece on the mainstreaming of paranoia:

The rise of the conspiracy theory points to an important shift in journalism and public debate. There has been a move from debating the substance of someone’s beliefs or behaviour to focusing myopically on the motivations behind them; from challenging individuals over their words or actions to trying to uncover some deep, dark ulterior motive. This has had a deadening effect on public debate. It replaces a critical engagement with political developments with a destructive neverending search for the secret agenda. And it means that no one is ever truly held to account for what they say or do. After all, if Blair is merely the puppet of dark neocons forces when it comes to Iraq, then how can we hold him up to public ridicule for what has happened there?

This is not investigative journalism; it is gossip.

Read more, if you dare.

Posted on

Update

Sorry I’ve been out of touch, dear reader. We’re closing in on the wedding date (March 12!), and this has necessitated a ton of work at the day job, preparing the April issue of the magazine so that my associate editor can handle what I’m leaving behind.

This will necessitate my knocking out articles on biogeneric drugs and site selection criteria for pharma facilities, and updating our glossary of pharma & biopharma terms. Since one of my associates at a major pharma company just sent me an in-house list of acronyms used in the industry, it looks like I’ll be updating a bunch of the glossary entries for this year’s edition.

And I’ll be getting married in 9 days. So, I’m probably not going to post anything for the next bunch of days, is what I’m saying. Typing. Whatever.

Posted on

Mo’ Woe

In January, I wrote about Anya Kamenetz’ book, Generation Debt, and Daniel Gross’ criticism of it. I was mean (enough to warrant a smackdown challenge from Mrs. Kamenetz), but hey. Buy a dog.

Today, we have more criticism of the book, by Kerry Howley at Reason:

Kamenetz, a 2002 Yale graduate, is the latest spokesperson for a paroxysm of anxiety among “emerging adults.” But you don’t have to accept Kamanetz’s absurd thesis—that a group of people among the healthiest, wealthiest, and most educated in human history deserve your pity—to get angry about the way their prosperity has been manhandled. The term Generation Debt is nothing if not apt: Young Americans come of age in a world where heaps of their as yet-unearned cash has already been promised away. They are embodied I.O.U.s to Medicare, to Social Security, to extended obligations in foreign countries with unclear objectives and no end in sight. A glance at the latest projections for, say, Medicare Part D is fair game for some righteous anger.

As a bonus, Chris Farrell at BusinessWeek has an article critiquing the arguments of another book in the “WAH! We’re going to be poor” cycle, Tamara Drout’s Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead:

Drout takes a hardline stand in her book. She argues that the younger American generation faces a life of “downscaled dreams.” The traditional middle-class life is out of reach for more and more young people. Going to college, owning a home, and having a child — or two — is increasingly expensive. Paychecks are increasingly meager, so more and more, the younger generation is taking on onerous debt. “They will be the first generation who won’t match the prosperity of their parents,” Drout writes.

Considering that a staple belief in American society is that each generation ends up a bit better off than the previous one, Drout’s charge is remarkable. And it’s also largely nonsense. For instance, she laments that recent college graduates, already burdened with student-loan obligations, have to rack up steep credit charges to furnish their apartments and buy a wardrobe for work.