Matchbox D.C.

Did I first try it after it passed the height of its glory or something? I mean, I would have sooner based on the recommendations of countless foodie friends, but there are always four million people in line, and so my friends and I would wind up eating down the street somewhere.

I dearly love pizza with fresh mozzarella and basil, but this one arrived slightly cold. The cheese didn't have the right texture at all. 2 Amys was vastly better, as is Coppi's or even arguably Bertucci's. On the other hand, my companions' mini-burgers with gorgonzola did look delectable. Two little ones paired with a salad is probably a nice blend of self-indulgence and health -- maybe I should do that next time.

David Bernstein, be warned.

Things that People In My Social Circle Like That I Do Not Understand -- Hobbies and Interests Sections on Resumes

This should be an "enough said," but maybe it isn't. So here goes nothing, the Case Against Hobbies Sections:

1. They force me to scale back on stuff that is potentially job-related. Yes, I know, it's true that probably nobody is that excited, years after the fact, that I was an intern for three months in Dartmouth College's Office of Public Relations. Or that I taught a creative writing class to a group of inner city kids back in 2001. But who knows, maybe somebody will see some obvious connection between these activities and the relevant position that I don't. Immediately after college, I had a lawyer tell me that she thought that being an admissions office tour guide was a leading indicator of what would make for a great large law firm paralegal. Strange things happen.

2. They reward annoying SWPL-ness at the expense of substance. I have always sensed that none of my hobbies and interests, such as they are, are quite "right" for the genre. I am supposed to like extreme sports or something that show that I am adventurous. Except that I am actually terribly clumsy and will find ways to injure myself previously unimaginable by more normally coordinated people. Also, apparently liking travel would be good, except that I would have trouble honestly claiming such as a hobby or interest, despite the fact that I am working on it.

An honest answer -- "Reading, reading, and reading some more" -- would probably not be good. Sometimes, talking about reading scares people into thinking that I am pretentious. Other times, it draws questions like "What kind of books do you like to read?", to which it is probably not helpful to respond, "Well, I'm willing to try any that have words and pages." (True, I suppose this is not a problem for people who actually have well focused tastes in books. But I don't, so it doesn't in my case.) In any case, the real problem is that "Reading" does not seem to be a particularly good marker of SWPLness, and so is not interesting to the kind of person whom I am supposed to impress.

One might say that the kind of employer who cares over-much about this sort of thing would be a poor fit for someone like me anyway. This is true, but I tend to think that the world would be a better place if SWPL class markers were less important, rather than more. Reducing their importance in the hiring process would be a nice first step.

Things People In My Social Circle Like That I Do Not Understand: The Case Against Travel

So I am not sure if I actually totally buy the argument sketched out below, but at some point, I need to get this contrarian argument off my chest. That is: I don't really get travel. Like... I don't totally abhor it, but I don't understand the fuss that socially normal upper-middle-class people make over planning trips and talking about trips with their friends and showing other people photos. It is possible that none of them really like it, and that all of them are just pretending to like it in the interest of seeming socially normal. Heaven knows I've played those kinds of signaling games myself. But somehow, I doubt that this is the only explanation.

Some possible explanations: one, that travel was just oversold to me at a tender age. I think of the high school guidance counselor who was convinced that it could be a really, really good idea to take time off and travel, maybe do humanitarian work in Brazil or live with a family on a Rotary exchange scholarship in Belgium or something. Because travel was good for Personal Development; I was apparently severely Personally Underdeveloped*; and Personal Development was really more important to Harvard and Yale than SAT scores. Which made me want to yell, no, b.s. (Jerome Karabel hadn't yet published The Chosen, , in which he meticulously documented the anti-Semitic origins of the Ivy League's obsession with said Personal Development b.s.That is good; if he had, I might have been too tempted to throw it at people in those days.) I did not opt for the whole year abroad, as I could not have taken an additional year of asking, as per the title of the Daria movie, "Is it college yet?" I did secure a Rotary Exchange scholarship to live in the Spanish Canaries for a few months before my senior year of high school. It was nice, and I learned a bit about how to make tortilla espanola and secured a lovely pair of delicate heels that I still wear out to cocktail parties on occasion. I also wrote a college essay about it, because writing a college essay about Ayn Rand or anything else that really mattered to me would have been suicidally egg-headed. Still, though, I felt badly that my life was mostly unchanged.

Ditto my experience living in Paris as a Dartmouth student. There was the unfortunate and perhaps statistically unlikely accident that I blundered into a health conscious host family that hated meat, fat, etc. Lesson learned: I do not look or feel good when my weight falls into the 80s. There's a line in Caitlin Macy's The Fundamentals of Play to the effect that it takes a very special kind of person to miss Connecticut while in Paris. Maybe; I passionately missed Hanover the entire three months that I was there. Not because I am a country mouse -- as Pnin and others who know and love me will attest, I am anything but -- but because I'd finally found my educational meritocratic spiritual homeland. I had friends for the first time, dammit, and I was nothing but loath to leave them.

So I guess there are three benefits that travel is supposed to have, according to the people who like it. One, there's the aesthetic and educational experience of getting to see new places. Two, there's the benefit of observing cultural differences. Three, relaxation. I'll talk about each in turn.

I think #1 is the strongest argument for travel, but even that it is oversold. Yes, it's nice to be able to walk around Notre Dame Cathedral and see it in the flesh, as opposed to merely looking at slides and discussing it with a group of twelve other art history students. But I maintain that slides and books about places are underrated. First, because there are no hordes of tourists and crying babies and what have you packed into the art history seminar room. Second, because the typical tourist experience is often necessarily more shallow than reading journal articles about a particular cathedral and then sitting around discussing them while looking at slides. Third, because it is easier (for me at least) to process material by reading it than by hearing a tour guide talk about it.

The argument for #2 is that travel enhances cross cultural understanding or some such thing; this is the point that my guidance counselor was trying to make, I suppose, with her briefs about Personal Development. Maybe the problem is that I am still personally underdeveloped, but at least at some general level, the argument seems trite. Yes, people are different. Cultures are different. Is there really anyone who doesn't know this?

More seriously, my most interesting adventures in understanding the range of human difference and behavior haven't come through travel. They've come through friendships, through the kind of conversations that you can have only with someone you've known for years who sees the world through eyes very different than your own. Probably the best experiences I've had in this vein are via the constant negotiation in romantic relationships, where I've really had to engage with difference up close and constantly. Though I suppose living with roommates does this at some level too.

It's perhaps instructive here was that the reason I missed Hanover so much while in Paris as that I felt like I'd finally found a congenial if foreign culture, and I didn't want to stop trying to get my arms around it. I'd gone from a decidedly average background to near the top of the educational meritocracy. I was strung out on code switching. France was the last thing I wanted or needed.

#3 refers to a very different type of trip. Lying on pretty beaches and so forth. But I'd rather relax at home. Again, it's easier to read there. And I'm more comfortable when I'm surrounded by familiar things. Plus, there's the administrative annoyance of packing and so forth. Which is relevant for the others, I suppose, but the cost of packing there seems low relative to the benefits.

*I think she was referring to my love of Ayn Rand novels, not my height or my cup size, but I can't be sure.

This week in libertarian blog fights

So David Boaz wrote an essay in Reason called "Up From Slavery" in which he defended the proposition that there really has never been a libertarian golden age. I read it, nodded a lot, and thought it made many sensible points. I thought about posting it to the blog, but since I didn't have many new thoughts of my own to add, I refrained.

Then other libertarians started debating some of his points. Perhaps the most vociferous was Bryan Caplan, who claimed that women were more free during the Gilded Age than they are now. I have been trying to grok how all of this is relevant to the problems of moving libertarianism forward today, but alas, nothing is coming. Also, what Jacob Levy and rapscallion said.

Really, though, I've very little interest in wading into this. Women's rights are good. More economic liberty would also be good. Can't we libertarians just all agree on those basic two points and start talking about say, cap and trade or immigration again?

Things that People In My Social Like That I Do Not Understand -- Short Stories

Perhaps "social circle" is the wrong term here, since my social circle right now is mostly full of political types. But back in college, when I used to hang out with more literary-minded students and creative writing professors, people in my social circle liked short stories. Or, at least, understood the point of their existence. In Intro Creative Writing, everyone had to write five short stories and choose one to polish for final grading. Similarly, in Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction, you had a choice of submitting novel chapters or short stories for most individual workshop classes, but had to polish two for final letter grades. My middle and high school teachers assigned them. The other students who were good at English obligingly read them and seemed to enjoy them.

I was looking through a stack of discount books in Barnes & Noble in Arlington this weekend, and I found a cheap copy of Eudora Welty's short stories. I was tempted to buy. But I knew I'd never read it, because despite Welty's name, short stories have always struck me as sort of ew. So I left it languishing with its other neon-red-tagged bargain book companions. As I left the store, I realized that most other people wouldn't respond the same way, and I started musing about why.

I've never been able to write short stories. Well, I knocked them out for the two creative writing classes described above, as well as other exercises earlier in my educational career. Most of my professors and teachers signed off on them. But they weren't really short stories; they were novel chapters that stood more or less alone. Sometimes in college, people called me out on it. There were the obvious call-outs: "You wrote about a character with the same name for the novel chapter, is this actually connected to a bigger project?" But there were less obvious criticisms: "You're trying to develop this character much too fast in too short a space. Your project's better suited to a longer piece."

They were right. My arcs were always off. I'm comfortable writing long pieces, in which characters slowly shift and develop over hundreds of pages. I can't do character-driven short right. I wonder if it's some misplaced conservative urge; I believe that people don't fundamentally change much, and that character-driven stories are only convincing if they're over a suitably long haul.

That aside, I don't much like other people's short fiction -- even acknowledged masters of the genre, like Eudora Welty. I always feel cheated, like I want to spend more time with the characters and have been unfairly cheated of the chance.

ETA: It's actually 7:30 p.m., not 4:14. Stupid timestamp...

Things That People In My Social Like That I Do Not Understand -- Thank You Notes

I have read -- many, many times -- about the importance of writing thank you notes in both personal and professional situations. I know that all good, well-mannered people write them, and so I follow suit in the interest of not being considered ill-mannered.

Yet I am bad at them. I write one sentence, "Thank you for [X]" and then find myself squinting uncomfortably at the abundant blank sheet of paper in front of me. What else to include? I have already gotten to the point. I find myself struggling to come up with three or four more sentences of content before lamely concluding "Thank you again for X." As though I needed to resummarize the three sentences of content, because otherwise my reader would be confused about the central point.

Nor am I particularly touched when I receive them from other people. Instead, I find myself wondering if I should keep them. Living in a small studio and such, I do not have space to keep people's thank you notes, Hallmark cards, and the like. Yet it feels rude -- a degradation of someone else's effort and caring -- to throw one immediately in the trash right after I receive it.

What am I missing? Am I just bad at writing thank you notes?