There’s a rumor floating around the blogosphere that the famed Deep Throat, who (if you’re too young to remember) helped Woodward & Bernstein investigate Watergate and take down President Nixon back in the day, may be dying.
That’s good news for folks like me, who are really curious to finally find out who the guy was. However, I do not think it’s Rehnquist.
I am settling more into a regular routine now, three weeks into school. Classes four days a week, work the other three. Which means I don’t really have any days off, but some days are lighter than others.
And some are more stressful. I’ve been at Starbucks three months now. I’m pretty comfortable doing the job most of the time, but the stress level has not significantly abated and I don’t think it’s going to. The store is quite high-volume – we can get as many as 100 customers an hour – and there’s the usual mix of personalities and staff drama to cope with. It can get hectic but it’s really not all that bad.
No, the real stress comes from being located in a less than pristine part of town (Market Street, not too far from the Tenderloin). On a daily if not hourly basis, we have to deal with people who come in and try to steal anything they can lay their hands on — from our tip jar to bags of whole coffee beans — to drunks who fall asleep in the cafe and piss all over themselves and our chairs, to my personal least-favorite: junkies who shoot up in the bathroom and leave blood splatters all over the place. Sometimes they’ll leave a used syringe as a parting gift. This last is particularly unpleasant, because since you don’t know what kind of diseases the junkie might have, we have to lock down the bathroom until we can do a major disinfecting scrubdown.
I’m a lifelong city-dweller, so being annoyed by homeless people is hardly new to me, but I have to say that the homeless we have to deal with here do seem to be more distressing than the ones I dealt with in New York. Granted I never worked in a Starbucks when I was in New York, so maybe I was just oblivious to it there. I don’t know. But as much as I enjoy slinging coffee, I would definitely be happier if I could do it someplace where I did not have to deal with junkies, people who piss themselves, and petty thieves all the time.
Plus I have a quiz tomorrow and I hope I’m going to do well on it. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve had to study for this kind of test and I hope I’m retaining the right information from the readings assigned.
I have to work tonight and am not going to be able to watch any of the Super Bowl. Is “bummed out” too dated a phrase to use anymore?
I had Accounting class last night, which gave me the perfect excuse to ignore the President’s SOTU speech. Not that I would have watched it anyway.
Best morning-after quote goes to Jesse at Pandagon:
I honestly do think there was a typo in the propoganda sheet: this is the pwnership society, where we all get pwned by the government.
If that makes no sense to you, here’s a translation. In the wonderful world of gaming, when you utterly and completely kick someone or something’s ass, you ‘pwn’ it.
Seriously, though, what on earth is BushCo thinking with these proposed changes to Social Security? An ‘ownership society’ where you do not in fact own your own private account and any money left in it goes right back to the goverment when you die? If you’re not going to make a real change in the structure of Social Security, then why do it at all?
On a personal note, the debate about Social Security has gotten Scott and I to talk a bit about retirement planning. We’re going to have to ramp up our savings somehow, although how exactly we’re going to do that with me in school and a bunch of debt already is unclear. We do have several 401ks already but haven’t done much contributing the last 3 years or so due to our lowered incomes. Realistically we won’t be able to save much of anything until I’m back in the workforce full-time, and that’s 2 years off (and another student loan to pay off). It’s a little scary when I think about how badly we’re doing in retirement planning. So I try not to.
The one thing I do know is that should the BushCo plan come to pass, this family is not diverting one penny of their $ into a so-called ‘private account’.
When I first heard about this I thought it was a hoax, but it seems to be true. Apparently forced prostitution is not just for third-world countries.
A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.
Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners
Today’s must-read link is Ezra Klein on the politics of branding.
Although Democrats have often been called the party of identity politics (in the sense that a significant part of Democratic party politics has been built around a coalition of ‘identity blocs’ such as women, gays, Latinos, etc), Ezra contends that actually it’s the Republicans who have done a much more complete and successful job of it:
Over the past 30 years, Republicans have successfully merged identity with politics, the importance of which is almost impossible to overstate. When your party affiliation becomes enmeshed with your sense of self, attacks on your candidate become attacks on your person, and thus ends any hope of being convinced out of your position. No longer are you dealing with policy or evaluating arguments, now your personal defenses are up, your worth is being called into question, and the rightness of your original position is transcendentally important.
And he’s got a really good point. One big problem with identity politics as practiced by Democrats has been that it has not yet managed to promote a sense of overall party unity.
In some ways the Republicans have had it easier. Their membership is not very diverse, so it’s easier for them to create that feeling of commonality that has allowed so many republicans to feel their political identity is a part of their core self. Democrats have not done a very good job of convincing people that, say, a working-class Latino union member and a tenured gay university professor have a true common cause despite all the surface differences. It’s certainly not an easy job, but it’s more and more obvious that it is a vital one.