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Last summer, in my first excursion here into politics, I wrote about the experience of hearing reason shouted down at a town hall meeting. I had gone there with my teenage daughter to speak for my hearing-disabled wife, who is unable to work and can only hear at all because of the medical benefits I bring home with the proverbial bacon: as a cancer survivor, she is permanently uninsurable on her own. This time I will mention only my cousin in Tennessee whose monthly premium for himself and his two diabetic daughters was just raised to over $3000 a month, with a $2500 per person deductible, and my friend whose father is dying of brain cancer while struggling to keep up his Cobra payments, and will be rewarded for his efforts by leaving his wife uninsured until she is old enough to qualify for socialized medi–…uh, for Medicare. I’m sure everyone reading this knows people in the same boat, or worse.

I know all the arguments against the current health insurance bill, and I share some of the reservations myself. But be honest. You may have strong moral objections to the way your town obtains its water supply. You may be disgusted by the cumbersome, outdated fire engines it owns. But if you see your neighbors’ house burning down with the family asleep inside and you use those reasons as an excuse not to call the fire department, you are not only a poor neighbor but a moral coward.

I’ve heard that we can’t afford it, but that’s nonsense. We’ve been perfectly capable of paying for all sorts of knee-jerk responses to 9/11 that, frankly, do not have half the moral force or justification of even the weakest argument for health care reform. Which is more noble and more compelling: to strike out in anger, or to heal? It’s the priorities, stupid, and they’re wrong, oh so wrong (when you just have to pass it along!). Anybody out there old enough to remember Leonard Bernstein’s Candide? Thought so.

The reason I’m writing this is that it’s time for us children of the 60s to make our voices heard. It’s time to let our congresspersons and senatepersonae, and the entire leadership in Washington, know that if health care reform is allowed to die because of the events of this week, they’re going to be drowned by a wave of populist rage that will make the one that supposedly erupted on Tuesday look like a tsunami in a soup bowl. It’s going to come from people our age, and if I know anything at all, it’s that for those of us who grew up to believe that this country could rise collectively to its moral responsibilities, letting this dream die now would be as bitter as death—and about as satisfying.

DON’T LET IT HAPPEN! It’s that simple. Let them know that if this thing doesn’t go through, there will be a day of reckoning the likes of which they have probably never imagined. And please, pass this on. And on, and on, until all of us who care about this have had a chance to speak our justifiably outraged minds.

When I compare my experience as an undergrad at UT at the same point, I think I can point to many more things and say, “I didn’t know this before.” It took a few years of being an undergrad before I could say that. Maybe that’s because liberal arts and music are much more squishy subjects and you spend most of your time learning how to learn, but it definitely makes me feel a little better about going into debt up to my eyeballs for this particular degree. The ultimate emphasis is on getting a job, which I appreciate.

Here’s an example to give you a better idea of the kind of thing we learn about: do food stamps work? Should the government allow trading of food stamps? Would it be better to give cash, instead? The general economic argument we discussed today was that people tend to buy more food than they need to because food stamps can’t be traded. Recipients would be just as happy receiving a cash sum of less value, and taxpayers would be spending less money. Win-win.

My response: why even bother calling the program “food stamps”? Why not just give them a tax break? The point of the program is to encourage good nutrition.

Recipients are receiving a benefit. It seems only logical that there should be some strings attached to that benefit.

School started last Wednesday. It hasn’t been too bad, so far–I have a pretty good mix of classes (economics, statistics, politics/agency management, and a class called “Energy and Society”) to keep me interested. My professors are all great lecturers and the subject matter looks promising. I’ve bought my books and am, for now, caught up on reading.

In other news: I bought a piano! I found a nice Kawai upright on Craigslist. It’s in great condition; I think it was built in the 1980s, but it feels brand new and very solid. I had a guy come tune it yesterday and it really sounds great. I’ve been annoying the neighbors by finishing up learning the first Chopin ballade.

Along the same lines: I’ve been meaning to put up another podcast. I’ve had the idea for a while and have been putting together a good playlist. It’ll be up soon, I promise!

Anyhoo. Off to bed for me.  More updates on California to follow.

The first time I really drank Pepsi on a regular basis was in Junior High. College Station ISD only had Pepsi vending machines in the cafetaria, so every day I forgot to bring a drink with my lunch I ended up buying a can of Pepsi. Thus, the love affair began. I have been hooked on Pepsi ever since. This is obviously brilliant marketing on Pepsi’s part. I am fully aware of my exploitation by Pepsico and I don’t even care–that’s how much I love Pepsi.

Another great example: Ikea. When I was little, my parents took us along to Ikea in Brussels while they shopped for furniture. They dropped us in the daycare center, replete with Asterix videos and a ball pit. After they were done shopping, we had meatballs with applesauce. Fast-forward nearly two decades: Jenny and I are moving to the Bay Area, specifically Emeryville, which happens to have an Ikea. I was so excited by this fact that I looked up where the Ikea was: only 1.9 miles from our new place! Granted, Ikea’s juvenile marketing is not nearly as smelly an affair as Pepsi’s, but it worked just as well.

Although the two preceding examples are only personal anecdotes, there is no disputing that marketing to children is an extremely lucrative business. It pays dividends years, if not decades, into the future. Although it is definitely not a good thing that the average child is exposed to 20,000 30-second commercials every year (I’m not sure how believable that number is, but even if it’s off by a factor of 10, the point still stands), those kinds of messages are easily forgotten. The best kind of advertsing is the kind that hits you square in the gut years after the fact. Suddenly remembering your favorite Happy Meal toy when you were five, you crave some lardy fries and a twenty-pack of chicken nuggets. The toy cost McDonalds 20 cents in 1989 and has made you spend $5 once or twice a month ever since in an effort to recapture what getting that toy really felt like.

There’s a good reason for that, though. Jenny and I have now moved out of our Austin apartment. We were done yesterday (Friday) around 8 PM; she then drove to Cedar Park to stay with her dad for a few days and now I’m in College Station with my parents, unwinding before we meet up in Dallas and drive on to… *gulp*… California… on Thursday. I can’t believe it. The summer flew by. It seems like yesterday we got back from Europe, but I think the real adventure is finally about to begin.

It was an incredible pain in the ass trying to get everything packed. Our cars aren’t exactly spacious: I drive a Mazda econobox (thanks to Victor for that term!), Jenny drives a Hyundai econobox, and considering we have to move everything but our furniture (that is, clothes, kitchen stuff, computers, books, scores, etc. etc.) it was quite a challenge to cull our wordly possessions down to two cars’ worth of stuff. We had to throw away a lot of perfectly good stuff–including our microwave!–because it simply wouldn’t fit.

Anyhoo–I think we managed it pretty well in the end. I’m just going to enjoy unwinding in a nice, spacious house for a few days before setting off on our 1.973 mile Oddysey to California.

[He'd] open his mouth to talk, only to find the words tumbling out in a raspy, imperceptible staccato, chopping off sentences before they had a chance to form. If he tried to say, “Tomorrow is my birthday,” for example, it would morph into a weak “Ma robf sss ma birfday.”

However, when speaking in front of an audience, giving a lecture, his speech is loud, fluid, and clear. Each type of situation–eating in a restaurant with friends, speaking on the phone, giving a speech–has its own mercurial set of rules.

To make a long story short, Adams was able to get an operation to fix the problem. Even though he was convinced he could solve the problem himself by using a pseudo-scientific approach to his speech, nothing he tried worked. A surgeon at UCLA performed “selective laryngeal adductor denervation-reinnervation,” which basically severs the nerve that is being told to spasm. Adams had to re-learn how to talk, but six months after the procedure his speech is nearly back to normal.

Adams’ experience is painfully familiar to me. As a stutterer, I too have my own rules and regulations: for some reason, phrases starting with an “s” or an “f” are difficult for me, so I try to avoid them and figure out a way around them. Calling some stranger for information on the phone is usually not a problem, but if it’s someone I actually know but am not particularly close to I have trouble. Giving a presentation with some PowerPoint slides is not a problem, but having to read a scripted speech or making a presentation without slides does not work. I try to parse the world around me into situations I know I can handle. Of course that’s all psychological, and of course it’s not much of a solution, but it works, and that’s enough for me.

I suppose stuttering has had its benefits. I worked on getting as large a vocabulary as possible so I can use words I know I can say in a particular situation. And I guess I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t feel like opening my mouth unless what’s going to come out is interesting and worthy of the effort I am going to have to expend to get it out there.

Nevertheless — if I could, I’d get an operation, like Adams did. I couldn’t care less if that’s considered copping out or giving up. Self-treatment of this thing simply doesn’t work. All I can do is mollify. I can’t ever actually fix it.

• Charles Koechlin: Sonatine No. 2, Op. 87: III, Menuet
• Einojuhani Rautavaara: A Tale of Fate, “Book of Visions”
• Maurice Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin: III, Forlane
• Igor Stravinsky: Suite #1 for Small Orchestra: Andante
• Dmitri Shostakovich: Fugue in F# Major, Op. 87 No. 13

Click here to download.

Let me know what you think! I’m quite new at this, so I’d love to hear some feedback.

I’ll be adding this podcast to the iTunes Podcast directory soon.

[Edit] I had to disable the podcasting plugin I was using (Podpress 8.8) because it was messing with the photo galleries I posted in the previous weeks.

My problem: my motherboard only supports 2 SATA slots, so only two hard drives for me. Buying a new motherboard is really cheap these days, but the problem with that option is that my processor’s socket type (939) has been deprecated. Add to that that my RAM is DDR2 and most new motherboards now only take DDR3, and my only real option is to build a new computer altogether. I figured I could recycle some parts of my old computer and turn it into a dedicated media PC.

… and then I started doing the math.

$714. Gulp. Looks like I’ll hold off for a while!

If those wealthy republican assholes in congress screw us out of affordable health care again, I will be very angry.

My last two moves were in Austin, so I never felt a need to throw away anyting when I packed. I just taped my desk shut and wheeled it into the moving truck.

The result of that strategy is that now, nearly four years later, I have an absurd amount of stuff cluttering my room. Figuring out what can come with us to California and what gets to be trashed is taking a long time. Still, it’ll be nice to start with a clean slate once we arrive… and it should be much easier to keep our new place clean without all of that extraneous garbage lying around!

We’ll be selling off most of our furniture too, so if you should want a desk, table, chairs, futon, TV stand, or book case, and you happen to live in Austin, send me a note.