Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2009

Happy New Year

Happy 2009.  I just helped my mom clean out our coat closet, where we found an envelope of photos of people none of us recognize and are not sure if we actually know; nine pairs of gloves no one has worn in the past 20 years; extra wallpaper from the bathroom circa 1975; my Math Olympics jacket prize from 1987; two sealed pounds of Amaretto coffee beans; loads of expired phone books; an extra fixture fora  chandelier we got rid of ten years ago; my grandpa's old winter coat; three golf balls; a thermos (empty, thank goodness); and a couple of coats.

Perhaps more tomorrow about the new year and maybe a resolution or two, but in the meantime, check this out.

Movies 2008

Last year, I wrote: "Being in LA has caused me to see a lot more movies and a lot less theater." That has remained true, although at least I've scaled the movie number back to where it was before coming out here.  In 2006, I saw 22 movies.  Last year, I saw 33.  This year, it's back to 22.  And 4 of them weren't in a theater, so maybe they shouldn't even count.  (I'll also note that 8 additional were free screenings, either through the Writers Guild or some other random screening I found somewhere, so I only *paid* to see 10 movies this year, which doesn't seem like a particularly excessive number.) I've tried really hard this year -- I try hard every year, but after seeing 33 movies last year, I made an extra-special effort -- to avoid seeing movies I didn't absolutely expect to really enjoy.  I didn't succeed in every case: I was wrong about Gonzo (the Hunter Thompson documentary) after seeing the trailer, and didn't like the movie at all.  I was wrong to even bother watching Baby Mama on DVD.  I was wrong to bother with a free screening of the Harold and Kumar sequel.  And I will ask for a pardon as far as my choices to see Sex and the City and Definitely, Maybe, because I didn't pick them.  At all.  But aside from those, I think I did a pretty good choosing what to see, and I did enjoy most of what I saw.  Although the highlights, I would say, were less high than previous years -- I didn't *love* too many of the movies I saw this year, and a lot more fell into the "liked" category than anything else.

Broken up into 4 chunks below -- roughly: loved, liked, didn't like, very much didn't like.

1. The Visitor

2. Frost/Nixon

3. Slumdog Millionaire

4. Away from Her

5. The Great Debaters

6. Tropic Thunder

7. Charlie Wilson's War

8. Role Models

9. Milk

10. Then She Found Me

11. You Don't Mess With The Zohan

12. Forgetting Sarah Marshall

13. Pete Seeger: The Power of Song

14. 21

15. Leatherheads

16. Bee Movie

17. Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

18. Definitely, Maybe

19. Baby Mama

20. Sex and the City

21. Gonzo

22. The Bucket List

Answering some anticipated possible comments:

"Milk is going to win Best Picture.  Why'd you only rank it 9th?"

I liked Milk, but to me it felt like a very standard bio-pic, nothing special.  It was a bit paint-by-numbers, you knew how the movie wanted you to feel about the characters, and it checked all the boxes to provoke those feelings.  I think I learned just as much about Harvey Milk from his Wikipedia entry, and while Sean Penn's performance was fine, even as bio-pics go I don't think it was a standout film.  Don Cheadle and last year's Talk To Me was a more enjoyable, more interesting movie, about a notable person I didn't know much about going into the film.  Not that it's a bad movie -- like I said, I liked it -- but I find it hard to get too excited about it.

"Role Models?  8th?  Really?"

Yeah.  It wasn't amazing, but there were a lot of funny moments, it delivered on the premise, I liked it.

"Zohan?  Higher than Sarah Marshall?  Are you insane?"

The hummus jokes were funny.  Sarah Marshall got a little dull in the middle.  For what it was, I thought Zohan was really solid.

"I never heard of The Visitor.  What the heck?"

It's a character piece -- a depressed college professor who returns to his long-abandoned New York apartment to find that two illegal immigrants are living there.  He befriends them and typical movie plot unfolds.  It's well done.  Far better than I anticipated.

Responding to the comments on the books post

"Why the scarcity of fiction? Is there a particular reason? Care to post about that?"

I don't know why the scarcity of fiction, except that I just find I'm not drawn to most fiction, and when I force myself to pick something up I usually find that I want to very quickly put it down.  There's something about the pace of most fiction, the way most fiction -- even excellent, award-winning, no-doubt-fantastic fiction -- is written seems to put me to sleep.  I get lost.  Maybe it's just that I read too quickly, or that I read for information... I don't really know what the problem is.  To some extent, I think I find that a lot of fiction is just hiding the ball -- I want to read stuff where the writer has something to say, and you get inside his or her head a little bit, and can feel like there's a bit of a connection.  And in a lot of fiction, if any of that is there it's hidden behind layers of characters and plot that I just don't care that much about.  I don't really want to be transported into the fictional life of some other place and time, especially somewhere that the normal rules of this world don't apply.  Except that as I write that sentence, I realize what I'm saying doesn't hold true for television that I'll watch and enjoy, so maybe I'm just inventing explanations to justify.  David Shields has written about this.  He writes:

"For me, anyway, the fictional construct rarely takes you deeper into the material that you want to explore. Instead, it takes you deeper into the fictional construct, into the technology of narrative, of plot, of place, of scene, of characters. In most novels I read, the narrative completely overwhelms whatever it was the writer supposedly set out to explore in the first place."  LINK

I think I'll stick with that explanation.  But, anticipating one possible comment: yes, Anonymous Lawyer was fiction.  How can I say I don't generally enjoy fiction when that's what I wrote?  My answer -- and again it may just be my own bizarre explanation of something I just don't understand about why I like to read what I read -- is that I don't think Anonymous Lawyer reads like most fiction, I don't think it has a lot of novel-like qualities to it, and the most interesting pieces of it, whether on the blog or in the book, are where I'm actually commenting and reflecting on things in the real law firm and law school world and not stuck in the (contrived) thread of a plot.  The traditional "fiction" elements of Anonymous Lawyer -- I mean the plot, basically -- is not the most interesting part of the book.  In my opinion.

That answer is too long and says nothing.  I'll try responding to the other comment:

"A post about how you find the time (do you read these books while traveling, etc.) would be really helpful and interesting."

Easier in NY than LA because of the subway.  Far easier.  Airplanes give me lots of reading time.  Being early to meetings, sitting in the waiting room / sitting in my car / sitting in traffic (kidding).  A few nights a week I'll read for a little while before turning off the lights and going to sleep (no TV in my bedroom), especially when there's something I'm excited about reading.  When the writing isn't flowing and I've wasted enough time reading threads on Chowhound or Baseball Think Factory or Television Without Pity, I will force myself to read something real so it doesn't feel like I'm completely wasting my afternoon.  A few pages over breakfast or lunch if there's nothing I'm catching up with on the TiVo.  And occasionally the fact that the library won't let me renew the book any longer, and I really want to read it, will force me to find time.  It helps that I read quickly.

Books 2008

As of today, I've read 102 books in 2008. I've sorted the books into pretty much the same categories as last year. The mix is about the same -- less fiction than last year (2, down from 6), fewer politics, fewer food, fewer writing and entertainment. More general popular non-fiction stuff. But basically the same. 

Best ten of the year, each one highly recommended: 

1. Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. Sounds boring but absolutely isn't. A discussion of how we behave in traffic, what traffic engineers think about when they're planning roads, why some people are early- mergers, some people are late-mergers, and which is most efficient.... Okay, it still sounds boring. But it's the best book I read all year. If you drive, you should read it. 

2. One in Three: A Son's Journey into the History and Science of Cancer by Adam Wishart. Another one that I guess probably sounds boring. Sorry. But, again, it isn't. Wishart intersperses the story of his father's diagnosis and treatment with the history of cancer and how modern thought about cancer has developed. Perhaps because of my mom's breast cancer, I found it a pretty compelling and affecting read. Even better than that, it was real science written in a comprehensible way without feeling dumbed down. 

3. The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession by Adam Leith Gollner. There are lots more fruit than the ones in the supermarket, and Gollner finds them. Fruit that taste like ice cream, fruit that look like cotton candy, fruit that make your taste buds turn weird. I'd be surprised if movie rights haven't sold, or at least a Food Network TV series. 

4. Free-Range Chickens by Simon Rich. Short humor pieces. Quick read, but Rich is very very good at what he does, comes up with instantly funny premises and then executes succintly and effectively. Not every piece is a winner, but it's a pretty impressive collection. 

5. The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America by Joe Posnanski. This book is a couple of years old, and I should have read it sooner. I knew nothing about Buck O'Neil going in. No matter. Posnanski, who's a great writer with a great baseball blog, tells a wonderful story. From Booklist, because I'm too lazy to paraphrase: "After spending a few years trying to write a baseball book, sportswriter Posnanski lucked into a story that positively cried out to be told. Buck O'Neil, a Hall of Fame member and Negro League veteran who died last October, was a man who loved the game with a burning passion that never lessened in intensity. During the last year of his life, O'Neil joined Posnanski on a road trip to Kansas City (where Buck played for the Kansas City Monarchs), to New York, and to Minneapolis (for Buck O'Neil Day at the Metronome). Along the way, as O'Neil remembers names and faces from his life on and off the field, we are transported back to a time when baseball was, if not more innocent, at least more like a game and less like a business." 

6. Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business by Alex Frankel. Inside the product-naming industry. If you ever wondered how the BlackBerry got its name.... Solid, solid book. 

7. Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling. Why we buy what we buy, and why we like the products we like, but with examples and stories you haven't read before, and aren't in every other book that sounds sort of like this one. 

8. Horizontal Hold: The Making and Breaking of a Network Television Pilot by Daniel Paisner. Should have read this years ago. If you have any interest in the television development process, this book's great. Holds up despite being 15 years old, which I really wasn't expecting. 

9. The Numerati by Stephen Baker. The story of data mining. 

10. Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton. Business school sounds a lot like law school. Good read.

And three more highly recommended books of 2008 (or, in the third case, 2007, but I got to it late) by a friend and two Internet-friends:

Follow the Roar: Tailing Tiger for All 604 Holes of His Most Spectacular Season by Bob Smiley.  All golf fans should already have a copy.

Lawyer Boy: A Case Study on Growing Up by Rick Lax.  All aspiring law students should already have a copy.

 

My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley by Ben Casnocha.  All aspiring entrepreneurs should already have a copy.

Everything I read in 2008: (each category sorted in rough order of how much I liked the books) 

FICTION (2) 

Who Stole the Funny?: A Novel of Hollywood (Robby Benson) 

A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories about Human Love (Ben Greenman) 

POLITICS (2) 

Looking Forward to It: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process (Stephen Elliott) 

The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (Matt Bai) 

HUMOR (3) 

Free-Range Chickens (Simon Rich)* 

I Am America (And So Can You!) (Stephen Colbert) 

BORAT: Touristic Guidings to Minor Nation of U.S. and A. and Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Borat Sagdiyev) 

PERSONAL NARRATIVE NON-FICTION (7) 

Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School (Philip Delves Broughton)* 

Lawyer Boy: A Case Study on Growing Up (Rick Lax) 

My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley (Ben Casnocha)

Cabin Pressure: One Man's Desperate Attempt to Recapture His Youth as a Camp Counselor (Josh Wolk) 

Camp (Michael Eisner) 

The Last Lecture (Randy Pausch) 

Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer (Chuck Thompson) 

POPULAR NON-FICTION (23) 

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) (Tom Vanderbilt)* 

Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business (Alex Frankel)* 

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (Sam Gosling)* 

The Numerati (Stephen Baker)* 

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (Jennifer 8. Lee) 

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture (Taylor Clark) 

Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory (Mickey Rapkin) 

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Rob Walker) 

Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America (Donna Foote) 

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Clay Shirky) 

The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't--and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger (Daniel Gardner) 

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (David Weinberger) 

One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (Rebecca Mead) 

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them (David Anderegg) 

American Nerd: The Story of My People (Benjamin Nugent) 

Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape (John Stilgoe) 

Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation (Sheila Weller) 

The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It (Jonathan Zittrain) 

Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (Michael Kimmel) 

Stop Whining, Start Living (Dr. Laura Schlesinger) 

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism (Matt Mason) 

Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Christopher Lane) 

How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work (Megan Hustad) 

ESSAYS (6) 

The Braindead Megaphone (George Saunders) 

Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me (Ben Karlin, ed.) 

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman (Nora Ephron) 

(Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions (Steve Almond) 

Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings 

Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (Lee Siegel) 

MEDICINE (12) 

One in Three: A Son's Journey into the History and Science of Cancer (Adam Wishart)* 

The Surgeons: Life and Death in a Top Heart Center (Charles R. Morris) 

Intern: A Doctor's Initiation (Sandeep Jauhar) 

My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing "Slow Medicine," the Compassionate Approach to Caring for Your Aging Loved Ones (Dennis McCullogh) 

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (Jill Bolte Taylor) 

Life in the Balance: A Physician's Memoir of Life, Love, and Loss with Parkinson's Disease and Dementia (Thomas Graboys) 

Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting (Meredith Norton) 

Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath (Michael Paul Mason) 

The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine (Sherwin Nuland) 

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life (Sandra Aamodt) 

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (John Ratey) 

Body Signs: From Warning Signs to False Alarms (Joan Liebmann-Smith) 

SOCIAL SCIENCE / ECONOMICS / FACTS (19) 

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely) 

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Leonard Mlodinow) 

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (Ori Brafman) 

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World (Tim Harford) 

Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich (Jason Zweig) 

Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things (Richard Wiseman) 

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) 

Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell) 

The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (Michael Shermer) 

Reality Check (Guy Kawasaki) 

Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (John Lott Jr.) 

Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (Eric G. Wilson) 

Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin (Lawrence Weinstein) 

One to Nine: The Inner Life of Numbers (Andrew Hodges) 

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (Farhad Manjoo) 

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (Gerd Gigerenzer) 

The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Sonja Lyubomirsky) 

Our Underachieving Colleges (Derek Bok) 

What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty (John Brockman) 

WRITING AND ENTERTAINMENT (9) 

Horizontal Hold: The Making and Breaking of a Network Television Pilot (Daniel Paisner)* 

Reality Show (Howard Kurtz) 

Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB and UPN (Susanne Daniels) 

Laughing Matters: On Writing M*A*S*H, Tootsie, Oh, God!, and a Few Other Funny Things (Larry Gelbart) 

The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (Alice Weaver Flaherty) 

Sit, Ubu, Sit: How I went from Brooklyn to Hollywood with the Same Woman, the Same Dog, and a Lot Less Hair (Gary David Goldberg) 

Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television (Lee Siegel) 

Good in a Room: How to Sell Yourself (and Your Ideas) and Win Over Any Audience (Stephanie Palmer) 

Breakfast with Sharks (Michael Lent) 

SPORTS (6) 

The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America (Joe Posnanski)* 

Follow the Roar: Tailing Tiger for All 604 Holes of His Most Spectacular Season (Bob Smiley) 

Baseball Prospectus 2008 

Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember (John Feinstein) 

Senior Year: A Father, A Son, and High School Baseball (Dan Shaughnessy) 

How Bill James Changed Our View of the Game of Baseball (Rob Neyer) 

FOOD (12) 

The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession (Adam Leith Gollner)* 

The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen (Michael Ruhlman) 

The Food Snob's Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Gastronomical Knowledge (David Kamp) 

Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook (Jamie Oliver) 

The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes (Tom Parker Bowles) 

Waiter Rant (The Waiter) 

The Mensch Chef: Or Why Delicious Jewish Food Isn't an Oxymoron (Mitchell Davis) 

Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter (Phoebe Damrosch) 

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Michael Pollan) 

Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking (Herve This) 

Roast Chicken and Other Stories (Simon Hopkinson) 

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Gillian Riley) 

OTHER (1) 

The New Jewish Wedding, Revised (Anita Diamant)

Forks

My fiancee and I spent two hours in Bed, Bath, and Beyond yesterday, contemplating the differences between seventy-five different sets of silverware for our registry, as if our satisfaction with every meal for the rest of our lives depends entirely on whether our forks have rounded handles or square ones.  My fiancee finds it amusing that even though I profess to not have any sort of preferences about these things, as soon as I'm actually holding two spoons in my hand and comparing them to each other, suddenly I have an absolutely fixed and unshakeable opinion as to which is "better."  (And, purely coincidentally, it's pretty much always the cheaper one....)

I spent the entire two hours in Bed, Bath, etc somewhere on the border between amused and appalled at the number of products one can theoretically own, and the hard sell over at the registry department to get us to put one (or six) of everything on the list.  The woman recommended that for a hundred guests, register for 300 items, because "no one's just going to get you a butter knife, and if they do, you should disinvite them."  That is a lovely sentiment from Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  If your friends don't buy you things, don't let them come to the wedding.  Brilliant.  We tried very hard to find things we don't really need, like a pie pan, and a meat thermometer, and a gigantic spoon, but still were only able to come up with 62 items.  And most of them are pieces of silverware.

I'm as guilty as anyone of imagining some sort of fantasy adult life, where I use a whisk, and am able to use a corkscrew without breaking the cork, but it still seems sort of sensible to have a general rule that if, in our first quarter-century of life, we have not used a certain item, whatever it may be, it is unlikely to find much use in the next seventy-five years.  I grant as an exception my number one registry desire, an ice cream maker.  Even though people have told me all I need is ice, salt, and a plastic bag, I know myself well enough to know that I'm not going to end up making ice cream in a ziploc and I will need some more help to get me to do it.  I'm convinced that even though up until now I have subsisted on store-bought ice cream, there is some space under the satisfaction curve that I can capture for myself by being able to make beet-and-celery-root ice cream, or turkey-and-cranberry-sauce ice cream, or smoked-gouda-and-ketchup ice cream.  Even if I end up throwing most of it away after one bite.

My mom has a set of dishes from her wedding thirty years ago that have sat in a cabinet in the living room for my entire life.  They have never been used.  The silverware is still in its original plastic packaging.  These are the special occasion dishes, I was told as a child.  We are still waiting for that special occasion.  My fiancee and I may acquire these dishes under the abandonment statute.  I mean, if I were to merely take them from the cabinet, no one would ever know they were missing.  Even better, if they were no longer there, my mom could move the never-used crockpot and fondue set from the garage into the cabinet, so that they will be ready for use should the need arise.  Because the only reason they've never been used is because it's too hard to go into the garage every time you want fondue.

The Barry Schwartz book, Paradox of Choice, talks about how our consumer culture has gotten a bit overwhelming, with more choices than we can ever rationally evaluate.  There were products in the store that I just don't understand why we need multiple manufacturers producing.  Ironing boards, for instance.  An ironing board is an ironing board.  I don't know what features a more expensive ironing board could possibly provide.  A pet vacuum is really just a vacuum, no?  Unless it's designed for pets to actually be able to use to vacuum (which would be neat!), I don't understand what the special feature of it is.  Toaster ovens that can roast a turkey should just be called ovens, especially if they don't actually make toast.  The world needs to decide why we sell nylon spatulas when nylon spatulas melt when they touch a hot pan.  Also, why we sell metal tongs that conduct heat and burn you when you touch the ends.  The difference between a candy thermometer and a meat thermometer has not yet been explained to me.  And I don't know anyone who has ever made homemade candy in their oven.  A cookie sheet is a cookie sheet.  A muffin tin is a muffin tin.  A box grater is a box grater.

And a fork is a fork, whether it has a frosted handle or a square edge, or beveling, whatever beveling is.

As you can imagine from this post, I am a joy to walk with through Bed, Bath, and Beyond, while holding a scanner and a checklist.

Blagojevich

Is today the day Blagojevich becomes a household name?  I imagine news anchors are spending the morning learning how to say it.

Also in the news: wow, Jay Leno at 10:00.  That is not so good for people hoping more new television shows get on the air so they can get jobs writing for them.

Sorry for the slow posting -- my fiancee is in town visiting and residency-interviewing.  But coming soon: I post about the movies I've seen and books I've read in 2008, along with some continued back-and-forth in my head about whether to finish and post the draft post I've started about some career-related angst.  Also, last night's series of finale of Boston Legal was long but decent, and I had a dream last night about pizza.

Sleep Wins

As a proponent of naps, and sleep in all forms, I recommend this article from today's NY Times.

Seriously.  My high school commute, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, was almost 2 hours each way, and I had to get up at 5:30 every morning.  I was chronically sleep-deprived, without question, even though I did get a little sleep once I boarded the bus in the morning.  Ever since, I've been trying to erase the deficit.  (And, fortunately, the college student schedule, my software-job-in-Texas-be-there-by-10-or-so schedule, the law student schedule, and the "writer" schedule, all make it pretty easy to do so.)