Crawling Back to Normal

Time passes, and it does what it does, and slowly I have managed to crawl back to something that feels like normal. In no order whatsoever:

Casino Roulette

My first trip to Vegas produced the not-at-all surprising revelation that one casino is just like every other casino. Went wandering around one in the morning the first night there, thinking it would be cooler at night (ha!), left the nice air-conditioned MGM Grand to wander the Strip, got as far as the Luxor and needed to get back into air conditioning again. Where I found that the casino there looked almost exactly the same as the one at the MGM Grand. Then I took the walkways back again, making interior crossings from building to building as long as possible, thus leading me through whatever that weird “medieval castle” place is, and discovering again that their casino seemed awfully familiar. Well of course it is—the science of separating you (willingly!) from your money is just that, a science, and a science that is about as refined and well-practiced as any you’ll ever find. Casinos all look alike because that look makes you give them money, and lots of it.

I never gambled, by the way, but I watched friends gamble. And even with a well-practiced (online) blackjack system, nothing online prepares you for the subtle shift that happens when your dealer gets swapped out in the middle of a good run of cards, or when the pit boss leans in to see how things are going. Suddenly, money starts going away, very fast.

One more thing: the purpose of chips is to make your money abstract. If you were gambling with real hundreds or thousands or higher, you would definitely feel it more than when your money has been abstracted to colorful little chips. And once your money has been abstracted, it goes away faster. A science, thoroughly perfected.

Cleaning House

The process of going through someone’s house, cleaning up their life, is difficult for all sorts of reasons. (And a toolshed in Florida in August adds a whole new layer of difficulty.) My grandfather was one of the most unsentimental people I’ve ever known—he would sell off pretty much anything, without a qualm; but he still managed to accumulate mountains of stuff. And so, of course, as I helped with the awful process of working through it all, the following inevitable logic chain went through my head:

1) Man, he had a lot of crap
2) Man, people in general have a lot of crap
3) Man, I’ve got a lot of crap

Leaving me thoroughly resolved to do some house-cleaning of my own when I got home. But of course, once I actually did get home...

Bleah

The second the plane touched down, that’s when all my resolution vanished. I’d been solid and strong for days; now I was something else. Mostly petulant and lazy. God did I get lazy. Watched endless hours of the Olympics, not because I actually enjoyed watching table tennis but because it was on. Took days to crawl my way back to my normal routine. So if I owe someone an email or a phone call, my apologies, and I should get to it soon.

Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Obama

I had one of those birthday-things, and celebrated the awful occasion by going to a screening of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, one of my favorite movies. It was sponsored by Generation Obama as a fundraiser for the campaign, and afterward there was a panel discussion that included Aaron Sorkin, one of favorite screenwriters and of course the creator of The West Wing.

(And because my mom has mad skillz as a gift-giver, the very day I went to this function, she sent me a birthday box containing a DVD of Charlie Wilson’s War, which was written by Aaron Sorkin. She bought it a month ago, long before I knew this event was going to be held; she also had no idea that that particular movie was written by Mr. Sorkin, she just thought I’d like it. Yep.)

The panelists were under some constraint to keep their remarks focused more on Obama than on the movie we’d just watched, which was mildly disappointing. The question I didn’t get to ask was this: Mr. Smith is clearly a fantasy, because in it, Jefferson Smith is clearly defeated, and only obtains victory because one of the bad guys suffers an attack of conscience and confesses. And as we all know, in the real world, that simply never happens. So, while the movie’s portrait of naiveté versus idealism (Jeff Smith suffers because he is naïve; he wins because he holds firm to his idealism) is definitely relevant to this campaign, ultimately the movie probably offers a hopeful vision that won’t much resemble what happens in the real world.

Although after Michelle Obama’s marvelous speech last night, I don’t know, I’m suddenly feeling delightfully naïve all over again...