Capitol Hill, D.C.
The New York Times (mobile) reported yesterday that “strikingly, the disparity for the first 10 months of this year, as the recession has dragged on, has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field — in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven.”
W.
T.
F?
Sorry it took me so long to get back. Inboxes get overwhelmed. One of my favorite London scenes was Smithfield’s Meat Market at 2:00am. It’s where William Wallace was executed outside the City wall, where butchers sold & slaughtered livestock. It’s now a massive wholesale meat market that opens at 1:00am(?). Walk among the stalls, where in the back are hung hundreds of skinned dead animals and butchers with razor sharp knifes and thick hands cut through bone like butter. Take pictures. Then go to one of the butcher’s pubs, which have special medieval-issued liquor licenses to open until 2am. Smithfield’s is only a few blocks away from St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Go with your boyfriend; bring iPods; split up; take pictures; reunite; go to the pub & revel in butcher slang, a metaphorical chaos born of latenight hard negotiations. And the photo ops are outstanding: The butchers. The suppliers (a world of ethnicities from a city of ethnic restaurants). The steaks. The puddles. Everything about the place is a London album’s dream. Then we’d buy two wheels brie. They barely fit in our fridge and the only other foods we kept in our apartment were bread, peach preserves, and emergency Ramen. It’s a good way to go. Wholesale, wheels of brie were 8 pounds each.
I could ramble on and on about that place. But it seems you leave soon so here’s a list:
Lemme know if any of this works out.
Oh, and Radiohead was my “Smithfield’s Playlist”.
One of my favorite things about city living is looking in through the tinted windows of a passing bus or squealing Metro train, allowing my eyes to focus on the various scenes and individual faces that, for a moment, are young and old, sitting and standing, beautiful and very tired.
Then one boards the public transit to become for a while the scene or individual face others observe and scrutinize anonymously to themselves.
“The next station is Capitol South.”
En route to Columbia Heights it occurs to me just how inattentive I am to most of my life’s debts. Taken as a whole, they are insurmountable. But some may yet be repayable, and some absolutely must be repayed. An example of the latter is the $180 I owe Ken Bemmy who spotted me for last month’s rent.
Shit, I just missed my stop.
A short while ago, @HarvardResearch tweeted a story coming out of Children’s Hospital in Boston about a study led by researcher Heather Rosen, MD, MPH, who “found that uninsured children were over three times more likely to die from their trauma-related injuries than children who were commercially insured … Moreover, publicly-insured children were 1.19 times more likely to die from trauma when compared with commercially-insured children.”
I’m off tonight from work, which is unfortunate, as I am still a staggering $300 short on the rent payment I’m due to pay tomorrow. I’m unsure of where I will get the necessary funds, but am quite certain that I must somehow come up with them, as Saiid’s relationship with the landlord is already unfriendly, and homelessness would put a damper on my winter on Capitol Hill.
UPDATE: Ken Bemmy saves the day.
Rent is due on the 6th and I’m short $290. I have four consecutive days waiting tables to breach the deficit, four consecutive days putting the roof over my head at the mercy of the American tipper, along with foreign clientele, who are invariably confused by, and often astonished at, the gamble of it all.
Like a bar, the tables at an American watering hole are real estate the owner employs people at two to three dollars an hour and says, Have at it. In effect, the American batman performs a service that for customers that the proprietor is excused both legally and by society from compensating. “The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense,” writes Dylan. So is the American service industry.
The Great American tipper is a political animal. The Great American barman is a political strategist. The Hawk ‘n’ Dove is a Packers bar, and tonight the Packers play the Vikings at home in Green Bay during Primetime for selling food. But Sunday is an unpopular shift, as the half-price burger is the obvious menu choice.
The Hawk ‘n’ Dove’s burgers are exceptional, and at $4.75, they’re a steal on Capitol Hill; but the better the deal, the lower the bill…
Some people tip a percentage, others tip commensurate with satisfaction, others tip in other ways. Some don’t tip at all. The half-price burger is unfortunate when xcombined with percentage tippers, who unfortunately are not at all uncommon.
Marcos Sanchez & Niklas Hofmann from Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung contacted me regarding an article they are writing on Hossein Derakhshan for Monday’s edition. As I don’t expect I’ll be available for a phone or Skype interview tonight or tomorrow: I sent them the following:
My feeling is that Hossein made a tremendous mistake in returning to Iran. Exile is a terrible state in which the afflicted is never again home or whole. My father was exiled from Chile under Pinochet, and after over two decades in the United States, where he has never been accepted as “American”, he returns from Chile periodically to face the stigma of being somehow “less Chilean” than he was before he left.
That said, I still believe that Hossein’s return to Iran was a terrible mistake, as “Editor: Myself” is no longer edited at all, and the Iranian Blogging Revolution he helped catalyze has this year created many questions about the future of digital activism. Thus, foreign scholars, skeptics, and observers give questions answers that Hossein’s perspective, as a the seminal digital Iranian, might have proven to be the most relevant.
As I said, I never met Hossein, and a man’s blog is not necessarily his heart, journey, & soul…but I fail to see the benefit to anyone of his voice being silenced while his countrymen & women continue to assert theirs into a perilously unmapped digital future.
On a visit to the stall furthest from the entrance to the Library of Congress Jefferson Building’s ground-level men’s bathroom only a moment or so ago, I discovered the following etched into the stall door:
This week on Capitol Hill, while our elected employees have barked like a pack of angry seals in quicksand into cable news cameras about a Strong Public Option to the health care reform bill, the weather outside has been rain and autumn gloom.
The Library of Congress’ Jefferson Building, where I now write this post, is approximately equadistant from the Capitol Building and the bar I tend tonight and have been working seven nights of every week since August.
The bar’s proximity to the Capitol makes foot traffic the difference between my ability to earn a living wage every night, or walking home with less cash in my pocket than is worth mugging me for. The latter has been the case all week, and so today’s overcast — pictured above from the aforementioned Jefferson Building’s north patio — makes me nervous, as tonight is Halloween: an otherwise potential firestorm of gratuity and dance music.
The queue at the Capitol Hill Post Office in the 400 block of Pennsylvania Avenue is long enough to warrant leaving and coming back during my pre-iPhone days, which ended on my birthday a little over a week ago. Now, I don’t mind waiting in line, and blogging the experience in real time —
The married Boomer couple behind me is restless, iPhone-less. “This is bullshit,” mutters the mister. “Yes it is,” agrees the missus.
In the epilogue to Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, the great Hunter Thompson writes that the book is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism, which he describes as a first-person journalistic recorded in writing, drawings, recordings, etc., as it happens. Thompson’s failed experiment is a fine American tale; but in our current iPhone era, Gonzo Journalism is at last an actionable method.
Fuck Voicemail
25 November 2009Originally commented here: For almost four years, I kept the same voicemail message. It was distinct, succinct, and promised nothing. It went: “You’ve reached the mobile phone message box of Pablo A. Manriquez. Please leave any and all information relevant to your call. Thank you.” What made it distinct was that I said the message as if to say “…the mobile phone message box of Pablo, a Manriquez,” which I am. I ensure no call back or even that the message will be checked at all. I normally did check them every few days, but sometimes I’d let them overfill my Inbox so callers got the “users Inbox is full” message from the operator.
Then I got an iPhone. And with it, the awesome power of handheld Facebook, Twitter, email, texting, etc.. Suddenly, the telephone function was an annoying necessity for calling my parents during free nights and weekends, when they scold me for never answering during the week and not setting up my voicemail so that they can leave messages. I try to explain to them that I fiendishly check my email (they’re not on FB or Twitter) and that if they really need to get ahold of me, I’m as likely to see an email or text as I am to ignore a phone call. No good, they say. They want that additional capacity to contact me. No good, I say, because then everyone else can too.
Ultimately, I usually ignore phone calls because they’re usually from bill collectors; this is the same reason I started ignoring voicemails. But the problem with both is that they interrupt. I keep no pop up or audio alerts in my browser settings for the same reason. Cult of Done, yo. Cult of done.
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Tags: Cult of Done, HBS, iPhone, voicemail