“‘You have some good ideas,’ they would tell me. ‘Maybe if you joined the church you could help us start a community program. Why don’t you come by on Sunday?” I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly. Between faith and simple endurance. That while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic. Doubtful of my own motives. Wary of expedient conversion. Having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation so easily won.” -Barack Obama, “Dreams From My Father”

Given that I was raised an upper-middle class white boy in the posh suburbs and he grew up under much different circumstances, there haven’t been many things in Obama’s books* that I can relate to on a purely “me” level, but in both works the way that he approaches his religious beliefs and concerns: The desire to believe met with an instinct of skepticism. Obviously, Obama’s church is not my church, but nonetheless this part spoke to me.

* – I finished Dreams From My Father, finished The Case Against Barack Obama, and by tomorrow I will be finished with The Audacity of Hope. I should have spread these out as I am going into overload. I think I’m going to pass on Barack Obama: Illuminati Puppet for the moment…

Tom Perrota has an uninteresting-yet-interesting piece in Slate on the Sexy Puritan:

I didn’t think too much about Sexy Puritans as a type until I began looking into the abstinence-only sex-education movement while researching my novel, The Abstinence Teacher. I expected to encounter a lot of stern James Dobson-style scolds warning teenagers about the dangers of premarital sex—and there were a few of those—but what I found over and over again were thoughtful, attractive, downright sexy young women talking about their personal decision to remain pure until marriage. Erika Harold, Miss America of 2003 (the right sure loves beauty queens), is probably the best-known to the wider public, but no abstinence rally is complete without the testimony of a very pretty virgin in her early- to mid-20s. At a Silver Ring Thing event I attended in New Jersey in 2007, a slender young blond woman in tight jeans and a form-fitting T-shirt—she wouldn’t have looked out of place at a frat kegger—bragged about all the college boys who’d tried and failed to talk her into their beds. She reveled in her ability to resist them, to stand alone until she’d found the perfect guy, the fiancé with whom she would soon share a lifetime full of amazing sex. While her explicit message was forceful and empowering—virginity is a form of strength and self-sufficiency—the implicit one was clear as well: Abstinence isn’t just sour grapes for losers, a consolation prize for girls who can’t get a date anyway.

The surprising thing about the article to me is that people bought into some archetype of the physically plain and quiet abstinant. That’s never come even close to what pops into my mind when I think about a girl that proclaims that she’s saving herself for marriage. It seems to me that the ability to make that claim – and make it loudly – requires certain things that beautiful and popular people have in spades. Eccentricity is something that only bulletproof people can get away with and that has serious social repercussions for anyone without that kind of insulation.

Take two people that I’m going to name Betty and Edna. Betty is pretty and popular and Edna is quiet and bookish. If Betty loudly proclaims that abstinence is the way to go, she will either live up to her proclamation or she won’t. If she does, she will still get dates. Guys will date her thinking that they can change her mind or because for one reason or another they care because she brings enough else to the table. If she is a hypocrite, her popularity will insulate her from accusations of hypocrisy. Guys that talk about sleeping with her will be disbelieved by large segments of the student population. Guys that badmouth her will face social costs unless they’re on better footing than she is, and since she’s on good footing, that’s not terribly likely, so a lot will stay quiet.

Edna is a different story. She doesn’t bring enough to the table socially for guys that want to sleep with her to be willing to go through the time and effort of trying to manipulate her into doing so. They’ll just move on to the next person. Guys that do date her and don’t sleep with her will badmouth her. Many will be able to use her insecurities to get her to fall down on her convictions and many will probably say they slept with her anyway just to save face. Guys that do sleep with her will brag about it with impunity once they move on or even before they move on because there isn’t much social cost to losing her anyway. It all matters less. The costs are less severe for treating her badly. She is uninsulated and unprotected by the friends and social reputation that she doesn’t have.

All of this pertains to high school and social networks in college, but dynamics from those days continue forward. Those that got away with it in high school will be more cavalier about it afterwards. Those that paid a price for it will be more quiet. The dating situation changes substantially after college, but on the all one of the things that has surprised me is how relatively rarely sexual attitudes did.

It’s funny how so many years later, the anger and the anger over the anger about OJ Simpson’s acquittal in California still lingers. The subject came up on the smoking docks of the company I worked at in Estacado. I can’t remember how Simpson came up, but almost immediately the two white participants in the conversation rolled their eyes at the idiotic California jury while the black guy immediately jumped to Simpson’s defense.

During the waning days of the trial, I was taking a sociology class where the case came up relatively frequently. The class was unusually white (I don’t remember a single minority, actually). After it had been announced that the jury had come to a verdict and before the verdict was announced, they took a hand count of how they thought the jury would rule. All but three said that they would find him guilty. I was one of those three. More-or-less from the moment that the demographic breakdown of the jury was announced, I was sure that we were looking at a hung jury. Once the jury was unhung, though, I knew that it wasn’t in favor of acquittal. Not within the three hours it took for them to come to their conclusion anyway. Shortly after, we heard the football players yelling down the hall “Not guilty!” “The juice is loose!” Having almost no black student population, the football players were the only pro-OJ demographic.

My sociology professor would relate to us the next day that she cried when she heard the verdict.

I am in the school of thought that Simpson was about as guilty as they come and I don’t believe that the defense team sufficiently knocked it down. I was of the school of thought that he got away with it because he was black. The jury was stupid.

The further away from it all I get, the less sure I am of any of that except for Simpson’s actual guilt. I still believe that I would have voted to convict and I don’t think I would have been wrong for doing so. At the same time, some of it comes down to what qualifies as “reasonable doubt”. I am not 100% sure that Simpson did it and to the jury that may have been enough (focusing on the word “doubt” rather than “reasonable” where I would focus). It’s also noteworthy that while I read daily articles on the trial and got commentary from my biased mother, I wasn’t in there for eight hours a day while the all-star defense team pounded, pounded, pounded away at the case to create just enough doubt to get an acquittal. Sheck cross-examined the DNA expert for something like eight days just hammering away at the DNA evidence to the point that it probably became difficult to hear all of the reasons that the evidence might-maybe-possibly not say what it clearly seemed to say without coming to believe that there were some holes.

The other thing I have chilled out on is the racial angle. Simpson did not get away with it solely because he was black and had eight black jurors. That’s not even enough for an acquittal and given that the non-black jurors came up with the same verdict in three hours suggests that it wasn’t purely racial. Beyond that, though, I think more important than Simpson’s race was his wealth and celebrity neither of which are attributable to his race (in any direct way). Set up the same evidence with either a poor black defendant or a rich white one and I would give the latter greater odds of acquittal. Then lastly, to the extent that the black jurors did unilaterally decide to line up in racial solidarity and the other four caved or were similarly biased), it’s worth pointing out that with a jury pool that was 40% white, there was only one white juror. That’s likely another attribution to Simpson’s deep pockets. None of this is to say that race did not inappropriately benefit Simpson, but it’s not clear to me that it was determinative at all.

So after all this time Simpson is going to jail anyway for a somewhat unrelated crime (I say “somewhat” because if it hadn’t been for the first, he wouldn’t have been in the position that invited the second). I’m sure a lot of former football players that I once knew are heartbroken.

Postscript: Generally speaking, race is a subject that we don’t cover here at Hit Coffee. I am making an exception here, so we’ll see how that goes. I ask that comments please show respect towards disagreeing parties. Accusations of racism, actual racism, and derogatory nicknames of the participants in the trial or the surrounding controversy are discouraged. Thank you in advance for not making me regret bringing the subject up.

When I was a junior in college, I was riding a pretty high tide. My grades were good; I had a steady girlfriend that I’d been dating for a couple of years; I was thinking that the sky was the limit. Underneath it all, though, all was not quite right. My girlfriend Julie had started making life decisions that were going to require that I make more money than the average computer guy. I was also starting to think that becoming a computer guy was not actually what I wanted. So I started looking at other options. I had a couple friends in law school and they encouraged me to take that route. It sounded good to me.

There was one major roadblock that I could see: The Law School Admissions Test, more commonly known as the LSAT. I was never a good test taker. I had to take remedial reading in junior high because I’d flunked the statewide standardized exam. My teacher was dumbfounded that I was even there because I was ridiculously brighter than all of the other kids in that class, but when I had to take the test again I flunked it again. We were scared to death about the SAT that I needed to take. We were so shocked at how well I did (which wasn’t really all that well, actually) that we assumed that they must have made some sort of mistake. I don’t do well on standardized tests and I am worse with timed tests.

Spungen said that taking a class rose her score five points. If I’d known that, I would have signed up for a course. Instead I simply got some books and studied. Unfortunately, after all the studying I couldn’t get the score that I was aiming for and my score had only gone up two or three points. Still shy of where I wanted to be.

At the time I was working an overnight position that was in a way an ideal college job. I could spend my nights studying, though that was hard because I was so tired. I could also steal naps, but when I fell asleep at the wheel twice over the term of my employment there in retrospect I realize that I was not getting the sleep that I thought I was. The test day was not ideally situation, unfortunately, because it came after a day of hefty coursework wherein any sleep I would get would need to be at work. When I needed sleep, I could arrange it so that I could get some. Usually. But not that night. It was one emergency after another and I got less than an hour’s worth of sleep.

I drove that morning to the University of Colosse Law School in the Capitol District and took the test. Or at least I think I did. I kept falling asleep. My pages were rife with pencil scratches where I’d fallen asleep while trying to illustrate a problem on the scratch paper. The LSAT is difficult enough when all cylinders are firing and my mental car wouldn’t even start. At the end of the test there is a little box you can check if you don’t want to be scored (with the LSAT, unlike the SAT, you couldn’t simply take your best score, so you don’t want a bad score on your record). I checked it and decided to take the test later under circumstances that weren’t quite so unfavorable. In fact, I was actually going to take the night off before so that I could get some legitimate sleep. Fancy that.

A few months later was the next test, which fortunately enough was on the Southern Tech University campus where I lived and was going to school. I took not only the night off before the test, but even the night before that so that I could get on something resembling a schedule that would have me wide awake at 10 in the morning when I was often going to bed. The test was on a Tuesday and I only had one class on Tuesdays, a phys ed course. A week before the LSAT was to occur, the instructor missed a class because of some family emergency. That meant that one of the PE “exams” was now the morning of the law test. Worse, the test in question was running a mile-and-a-half. Worse still, the professor would not let me take the test early or late. So I was going to have to run a mile and a half (in the gawd-awful shape that I was in) and then walk across campus and take the most important test that I’d taken in half a decade. Not ideal.

Running the mile-and-a-half turned out only to be a component of the problem. The problem, it turned out, was the water I had to drink to replenish myself. Or at least the water that I thought that I had to drink. It turned out that I drank way too much because I didn’t sweat it off. Rather, I had to stop twice on the walk over to the annex to take a leak. The LSAT is a pretty heavily timed test, especially for somebody like me where thinking quickly isn’t my strong suit. I’m the sort of guy that always thinks of the perfect comeback to some joke or bum argument some time during the next day. I’m also terrible at saying “I am good enough with that answer to be able to move on.” It was a struggle for me to finish the test to my satisfaction in even ideal circumstances.

There are six or so rounds of testing and there was not a single section of testing that I could get through without at least one required restroom break. In one section I had to go twice. And I don’t mean that I would leave and go just a little. The only thing that surprises me more than how much liquid I expelled was that I’d managed to drink that much in the first place. Of course, I’ve always been a thirsty person and I can rarely make it through a movie without at least one restroom break, but even so it was surprising. Almost as bad as losing 5 minutes (of 35 minutes) on every section to go take care of things was the fact that even when I wasn’t, I was distracted by needing to. I had maybe ten minutes of undistracted test taking in each round of the testing.

Having passed on the test once, I couldn’t really pass on it again without it raising serious eyebrows with admission offices. So I had to take whatever score I got. It was beginning to matter less and less to me psychologically. It was becoming apparent that I was simply destined not to go to law school. Maybe my subconscious had eradicated my bladder to that effect. I was burning out scholastically and my relationship with Julie was falling apart and without that need I was starting to want a break more than I was wanting to be a lawyer. It was possible that I could take the LSAT again to bring up my score or if I’d done too badly if you take it a second time and score more than a certain number of points better than the two law schools I was looking at would discard the first. But by that point God had spoken to me in the john and that was that.

I didn’t do as badly on the test as I had thought I had. I’d scored above average, even, though that’s of small comfort when most law schools (at least in the league that I was looking at) accept only about a third of their applicants. There was one law school I’d looked at that I might have been able to get into even without retaking the test, but I was more than happy to move on. Looking back, I think that it was the right call. So maybe I owe my PE instructor a debt of gratitude.

While I don’t usually go for online videos compared to downloadable, mostly for quality reasons (*ahemyoutubeahem*), I’ve actually been enjoying the Hulu service recently. The idea is fairly straightforward; they stream reasonably high-quality copies of broadcast TV shows, with very limited commercial interruptions (no more than 15 seconds at a time, and in the standard commercial break spots). They have a number of viewing options (fullscreen, normal, or in the window with the “lights down”, a function that basically greytones everything to the point where you can focus on the video).

What got me watching the series was that they had a few episodes of House that I hadn’t seen, after Hugh and his wife got me into watching the series. Thus far, I’ve been able to catch up with a couple here and there.

The upside of the series is that they have some pretty good selection. The downside is that unless a video gets popular (or somehow gets in with a sweetheart deal), it “expires” from their service quickly; a few of House season 4 are still up, but House season 5 episode 1 is already tagged to vanish from their service tomorrow for some odd reason I can’t fathom.

The big media companies long highlight what they want to do (versus what consumers would like) on the shows. In order, here’s where I think Hulu goes right and wrong:

Right:
– They offer decent quality video. As in, progressive scan, two very viewable resolution sizes.
– The commercials, while present, aren’t annoying to the point of ridiculous. Though they are somewhat repetitive, a worry for the solvency of the service since it seems they only have 3-4 sponsors tops.
– They have a decent selection to choose from.

Wrong:
– There’s no way to watch a series completely through, unless somehow they got authorized to carry it. If you try out a show on Hulu and end up liking it, your best bet is hunting down DVD season box sets.
– The episode you watched today and emailed your friends to recommend, could easily be gone by the time they try to get to it.
– Lack of download options makes the service only usable if you have a strong, reliable network connection. I doubt their higher-quality feed would make it through a DSL-speed connection. plus, it only prebuffers as far as the next commercial break, meaning that letting it sit to load and then watching it won’t work.

I can understand the options they’re given, and if they had to sign something saying “no downloads” for licensing reasons, but the one restriction that annoys me most is the inability to download the episodes in some form or format. I have media center boxes throughout the house, and being able to download them (with commercials included) would make me likely to snag them and put them on for viewing away from my main computer. Even if I had to pay $1 per episode or something, it might be worth it.

I broke down and got a brick of Velveeta a few weeks ago. I’ve been able to muster up more discipline since getting married since my usual “Bare Cupboard” diet doesn’t work as well whenever there’s someone else buying temptation. So I figured that I would be able to hold off and meter my eating somewhat.

Velveeta used to be something of a special treat for me. I wouldn’t get it all that often simply cause once I got it I could eat the entire brick in no time flat. Heck, I didn’t even need to melt the stuff. I could just cut it off and eat it. In too large of quantities. So I reserved it mostly for group occasions where I needed to make my special chili which contains all manner of cheese and faux-cheese. Despite this, though, I always had a soft spot in my heart for the stuff. How could anyone have a problem with Velveeta? It’s like cheese, but different. It lasts longer. It doesn’t need to be refrigerated. It melts wicked-fast. It is a scientifically superior cheese.

My wife, it seems, has changed me.

I can barely eat the stuff. I can’t eat it at all without it being melted. I don’t like it on crackers melted or otherwise. It’s only mildly edible when supplementing something else. Chili, actually, cause it makes ravioli taste funny. Thank goodness the scientists put so much effort into the stuff, cause it’s going to take a loooong time to work through that huge darn brick.

The same sort of thing happened before we left Estacado. I bought some Cheez Whiz on a lark and didn’t even finish it. We gave it to one of the homeless guys that used to help us out with chores around the house. He hasn’t been corrupted by my wife as I have.

A while back I mentioned in a comment on Phi’s blog that because of my wife I no longer have the same appreciation for American Cheese that I once did. There are certain brands that are worth trying (one of which, oddly enough, is Sam’s Club brand!), but by and large I eat other cheeses if I can. It’s hard to go back when you’ve had cheese that actually contains significant amounts of cheese.

I am kinda pissed at Clancy about this, actually. She took things that I used to like and made me not like them anymore. She’s mean.

All is not lost, though. She will take the Easy Cheeze from my cold, dead hands.

No big surprise, but Cascadia isn’t nearly as hospitable to Walmarts as were Delosa and even the hip parts of Estacado. There are absolutely none in Cascadia. Google Maps says different, but Google Maps is lying. The nearest one is just outside of Uniontown a bit to our north. I think that the only reason they got to build there is that it’s on an Indian Reservation. It’s about fifteen minutes away and despite what a couple websites say it’s not really a Supercenter. They have a couple aisles of food but that’s about it. There’s another one that’s twenty minutes away and that is an actual Supercenter, but that’s more than a bit of an inconvenience. And my shopping habits are all about convenience.

A while back I wrote that the real advantage of Walmart for a lot of people isn’t the low prices but the convenience and availability. Big city people are free to scoff at Walmart because they have so many other options. The same is very much not true in a lot of smaller towns (and no, it’s not always because Walmart destroyed options that used to be there). I said the following about CostCo:

A lot of Walmart opponents like to prop up CostCo. Leaving aside the fact that CostCo is more a competitor of Sam’s Club than Walmart, there aren’t nearly as many of those around. If I’m in a town that has both a Walmart and a CostCo equivalent, I’d be more than happy to shop at the latter. But Walmarts are everywhere and CostCos are not. Whereas CostCo is apparently spending its money paying its employees a more liveable wage, Walmart is pumping its back in to expansion into places that don’t have a whole lot of retail options. It’s great that CostCo has the HR policies that it does, but living out in BFE it’s Walmart and not CostCo that is providing service.

For me it isn’t about price, it’s about convenience. I really like being able to have a shopping list that can almost entirely be satisfied by going to a single place. I can get some headphones, some sliced cheese, some cool aid, and some shoe inserts all at the same place. A shopping trip that used to take me four stops and two and a half hours is now forty-five minutes. I can stop on my way from anywhere to anywhere and if I see that sign, I know that I can get a wide array of products. I don’t even have to know where in the country I am. I know what’s there (for the most part), I know where it is (usually), and I have a pretty good idea what it costs. As we look at different places to live, how close the nearest Walmart is will be a selling point since it would otherwise take a great deal of time to find out what all is available in the area. The fact that I pay less for all this is merely an added benefit. One that I would gladly give up if I got to keep the convenience.

I now live in an area where CostCo is as geographically convenient (more, actually) than Walmart. So I decided to be true to my word and make a point of going to CostCo. I made my first trip out there the Sunday before Labor Day. I got there at about 6:30 or so and… they were closed. At 6:30? It must be because it’s right before a Holiday. Maybe it’s because it’s a Sunday. But really, is closing early on Sunday a good idea for an outlet their size? Whatever, I decided, I’d go back the next weekend.

The next week I happened to be in the right part of town at about 7:00 on a Saturday and decided to take the opportunity to go to CostCo…. and they were closed. Again. When I got home I looked at their hours and discovered that they closed at 6 on every Saturday and Sunday and they closed at 8 on weeknights. They were losing some really serious convenience points with that. My ability to get home from work by 8 is limited and I like to do my shopping at night. But I decided to be a good citizen and support the valiant retailer by altering my shopping habits.

Last week I made my third appearance, this time at 4:30. Not a whole lot of time to shop, but I’d at least be able to look around and decide if I wanted to blow $50 on membership. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me in without having a card. Oddly enough, they weren’t even checking everybody’s card. Maybe I just looked like I didn’t belong because I wasn’t entirely sure what to do. For whatever reason, I was waved down by the greeter, asked if I had a card, and told that I would need a card before they would let me in. It was one of those odd things where if I was a teenager or a minority or something I’d swear that I had been profiled. Whatever the case, I decided to go ahead and get membership. After all, good citizens support retailers with responsible employment practices. Everything I’d heard about this place told me that I could shop here regularly enough to justify the cost-of-admission.

The good news was that there was no line. The bad news was that the card-printer was down. There was a mechanic-person looking at it and every ten minutes or so I was told that it would only be another ten minutes or so. So I waited. And waited. And waited. Then at about 5:45 or so they had it working. I paid my money and got my card and the greeter lady let me in. I was actually somewhat impressed by the selection and thinking that the card was a pretty good investment. The prices were comparable to Walmart’s, though the selection a little more spotty. But I was expecting that. One of the ways that CostCo keeps the prices they do is by signing on with fewer brands. Some take the position that fewer options are better because brand-overload leads to buyer’s remorse. I’ve never believed that, but I am not a brand-loyalist at the sorts of things I purchase at retailers (though I am an absolute loyalist when it comes to a lot of things). I figured that it was a sacrifice worth making.

The problem is that they don’t just have limited brands, they have limited options in other ways. I figured that the brand-limitation mostly worked on brand-substitution for a comparable array of overall products than at Walmart, but that turned out not to be the case. Certain items, such as low-fat cheese or turkey pepperoni, are absolutely nowhere to be found. These are staples of my shopping, so that was not good. On the other hand, some of their economy-size packs were really good. I could get a 30-pack of my usual 10-pack of insta-burritos and save money and have selection because they’d put 15 of one kind in the pack and 15 of the other. Sweet! They also had an excellent selection (and good prices!) on instant oven meals like premade pizzas and things like that. Unfortunately, that’s not conducive with Clancy’s diet.

Nonetheless, I figured that I would be able to work it out and split my trips between the Honorable Corporation of CostCo and the somewhat more expensive but more comprehensive and convenient Safeway. That could work. Unfortunately, I’d only done a little looking around when it was 6 and they had to close. I had actually already decided when I went in there that I didn’t have time to buy anything cause the lines were extremely long. After I left there I went to Safeway and got all the stuff that I actually needed. I’d go to CostCo the next week, I decided.

So last Sunday I made my second trip. This time I already had my card and got there at 4 to make sure I gave myself plenty of time. So I’d definitely be able to get stuff like the John McCain and Barack Obama biographies and maybe some foodstuffs. There were only a couple things that I needed and I knew that they had that. Except that they didn’t. They suddenly had low-fat cheese (of certain varieties if not others) but absolutely none of the main product that I’d specifically gone there to get: FiberONE Cereal. FiberONE or a cereal like it was non-negotiable. But it wasn’t there. It wasn’t a batter of their being out. The shelf space had been turned over to a Honey Oats of some sort. Not much fiber, more sugar. They did have GoLEAN, but that brand has significantly more sugar and less fiber. So even after shopping at CostCo I was going to have to go to Safeway or Walmart anyway. Worse, the lines at the counter were incredibly long. If I was going somewhere else anywhere, I needed to just go ahead and get a move on. So I left once again without spending a dime.

So it looks like The CostCo Experiment was a bust. I tell myself I may go there again if I need something that I know they have, but apparently I can’t know what they have until I get there. They probably keep a lot of stuff well-stocked that I can count on, but I don’t want to have to shop twice every weekend for a couple months just to find out what those things are. If they had a good brand substitute, I’d feel better about it, but that’s not what they seem to do. Which is unfortunate because I was totally looking forward to being the Conscientious Consumer.