Damn my roommate. I think secretly she’s made it a goal to find a movie that makes me break down the way she’s always doing. And she’s getting closer. This week we got Kal Ho Naa Ho (“tomorrow may never come”), a Bollywood tear-jerker about a bookish M.B.A. student who meets her own personal existential Jesus. I misted a little, and that’s saying something. I can’t get over how wrong it feels to my Western sensibilities that a movie of such gut-wrenching power could also contain a musical number entitled “It’s the Time to Disco”.

Unrelatedly, the sniffles are slowly tailing off. I had the cold from hell this weekend, after standing around D.C. in freezing weather. I believe Randall’s 30 mL reference point now. Yicky.

Anyway, I’ve been dragging my feet on the trip photos because it turned out to be more annoying uploading with Putty’s SFTP program than I remembered. Hopefully I can get it done tomorrow with WinSCP. In the meantime, here’s a pair of interpretive dancers at the Be Bar Saturday night:

And here’s the crowd for the “We Are One” concert on Sunday afternoon:

If you click through to the full image you can get some sense of the scale of the Washington monument, and of the crowd around it. On Tuesday, of course, most of the mall was packed to a similar density.

If my cousins read this, you guys are totally the beehive in my bonnet. As with other cities, I rejected D.C. when I experienced it from the touristy bird’s eye perspective. It took a few days with native expert pleasure-seekers to meet the side of the city life that keeps its employees sane, but I did it.

I don’t know if there’s such a thing as an opposite to the “fag hag” archetype (“dyke’s kike” is applicable but tangential, and rather old-fashioned), but I really enjoyed loafing around town with their gang, for whatever reason. We’re all funloving buttoned down liberals, and as such D.C. presents some unique opportunities. Genuinely interesting political action, rallies and such. Colliding cultures everywhere – we didn’t find time for Ethiopian, but we had some quality dim sum and some mediocre Mongolian – bars open late, and of course, a thriving alt scene.

Here’s a pro tip: if you’re clubbing for the sake of clubbing, not to pick people up, queer clubs can actually be more fun than generic establishments, even as a straight male. Partly it’s atmosphere, partly it’s the varied clientele but I like to think mainly it’s the ambiguity. You make fewer assumptions about people’s motivations, you dance like nobody’s watching you (no ladies anyway), you feel no obligation to make yourself stand out other than by being yourself.

Oddly, the only place I personally wiggled my booty freely on the trip was on top of the fountain in Dupont square, but that’s a story for another night (and no, I don’t have pictures of it).

This should be the first of several posts looking back on my vacation. I’m sure as hell not going to get it all out in just one or two.

I know all the less-than-fun at the beginning and end of your vacation isn’t what you remember in the long run, but I still kind of wish I’d picked another time to come down with sinusitis.

Partly, it’s the fact that being malaised made me really unproductive in my first two days back on the job. Partly it’s the difficulty of concentrating on what I want to describe to y’all. Partly it’s that I’m throwing my diet out of whack in an attempt to heal faster, right when I’d like to be providing a nice baseline for my trainer. She has so little to go on right now, that she asked if I was a vegetarian because there was tofu in yesterday’s lunch and dinner.

As of 730 EST Friday however, I’m feeling about 50% better. Alka-seltzer and spicy food kept me going, but it was my workout that actually helped me begin to clear my mind. I’m still running on 7 of 8 cylinders, but I’m breathing a little easier.

Now we’re listening to NPR’s “curmudgeon corner” criticizing the papers for beating the dead horse of Obama’s inauguration being historic. I actually thought about this when I was in the nation’s capital. The word “Historic” was absolutely everywhere. And it did get a bit annoying, but not because there was any doubt that it was the right word.

I doubt any other word would have better summed up the feeling in Washington, D. C., because it was so complex and wondrous. “Watershed” has a nice ring but as exposition doesn’t get you much further. Analogies fare better; somebody, possibly Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, described it as part Woodstock and (I think?) part religious revival. These aptly address the human aspect – fraternal and borderline rapturous – but there was another level to the ceremonies, and that’s what the papers are trying to do justice.

There was weight in the moment. Weight on a personal level. A sense of participation, as though it was not just Obama but we were also taking an oath of office, that we co-owned the moment by being there. And in it, we felt… momentous. That’s a good word for it.

Change isn’t about a destination. Part of the reason news anchors’ questions seem stupid and their platitudes stilted in moments like these, is that news has to be framed around axioms that make sense to whoever’s watching. Old injustices and hatreds don’t die, they just get stretched out into the feather-light arm of the asymptote, where their importance in the equation becomes less visible. The dreams of our founders, and indeed of the good Doctor King, are immeasurable and without end. They don’t stop on the outcome of any one election.

But–and I’m resisting the urge to quote Malcolm Gladwell here, because I begrudge the effectiveness of his studiously non-technical analogies–there are qualitatively important points in the evolution of a complex system. In human systems, you can sometimes sense that special quality.

If Sunday’s message was “We are One”, then Tuesday’s message might have been, “We are the Hammer”.

Thus, awe gives way to elation in watching a political machine stop in its tracks, as that one crucial cog is knocked free. A lot of what Obama will be doing in his first days, any left or center-left politician in his place might be doing–removing the religion filter on aid dollars, halting the 911 show-trials, putting the Bush doctrine as far (and loudly) behind as possible. These things change like the drapes when power swings in our two-party nation. What we’re feeling now is a sense of alignment, even alliance with the force of history, that gives us hope they will come to characterize a wider and lasting change.

This feeling only grows stronger as he speaks. When he begins to make individual policy points, the crowd responds, “yes” or “amen”. The subtext shifts gradually from “it’s about goddamn time” to “thank you” to “wait a minute, did he really just say that?” to “OMG I LOVE THIS MAN”. By the end, people are crying and cheering and jumping up and down and generally failing to cope with how nice this new America sounds.

It sounds just like the place we’ve always wanted for ourselves.

Next, pictures.

So the rest of the party seems to have just showed and I may need to keep this really really short. I got into D.C. tonight around 530, and the place is on fire. Everybody’s in a party mentality. Even the guys who usually peddle fake oakleys are peddling Obama souvenir posters tonight (can’t really argue that those are fake).

More details will follow. My awesome cousins & co. want to go back out to some gay bar, I think, because we got back from the bistro and the night is still young.

squee!

That is the sound of me diving into my resolutions headfirst.

Actually, it’s a little intimidating. On the strength of recommendation, convenience and a really impressive first session, I have agreed to a minor gut-punch in the bank account. I can take it, but I have to admit, this is the first time probably in my adult life that I’ve experienced genuine sticker shock. In a nation that works and eats itself to death, learning to reverse the damage and live a healthy lifestyle carries a luxury price tag. I couldn’t do this on less than a hacker’s salary.

The good news is, I wasn’t doing anything with my weeknights, so it was a snap to schedule.

You might say that, rather than making my schedule busier, regular training sessions mean that I now have a schedule. I have something that justifies reacquainting myself with Google Calendar. This can only be to my benefit, because when scheduling is free-form, I never feel compelled to utilize the time that I have.

Which leads to the second point. I got a book in the mail this week, in time for the long long ride to D.C. It’s… a rather famous book, particularly among the sort of people who know what “lifehacking” is. Particularly, people for whom the pursuit of efficiency and productivity is another form of geekdom, like software or hardware.

I don’t understand these people, myself. But I do envy their success, and if I could emulate it, I would. Ten years ago I couldn’t have. Five years ago I tried, with mixed results, but never came up with anything that was sustainable in the absense of constant coaching. A few things have changed. One is that I have this book. Another is that I have no homework, no coursework and thus no real excuses for feeling rushed all the time. Another, and this is where I’m really holding out hope, is that the system of the world is evolving towards my doorstep.

How so? Well, consider my routine. I wake up. I shower, take my meds, possibly grab something to eat, take a quick look online and then close the computer to bring it to work. I sit in traffic for 40-60 minutes, stereo cranked and singing as enthusiastically as I can to keep from getting annoyed at the other drivers. I run in from the parking lot, feeling my skin dry with each second exposed.

I get inside and depending on how I’m feeling, I make some coffee on the Keurig. I settle into work, check my various sites again as outlook fetches my mail, and do whatever needs doing before the morning scrum. From there, I work more or less uninterrupted until I either run out of steam at 430, or realize at 530 that the rest of the team left while I was absorbed in something, and that I can’t make more headway without them.

Either way, I’m pretty wiped when I get home, and maintaining or servicing any old pencil-and-paper todo list seems too much to process. It takes a little energy even to hop back on the computer, but I usually accomplish it somehow. It’s here that things like specialized productivity webapps and a heavily automated Gmail inbox come into play. And it’s here that, with the energy gained from a favorable turn of season and a more active lifestyle, I aim to establish my beachhead.

The web buzzes constantly, perhaps even excessively, with the pet projects and suggestions of productivity bloggers. And it is host to a broader range of useful services than ever. Someone must have told them there was an untapped demographic of web-savvy shut-ins. People who, like myself, have a hard time seeing their way past a measly meal journal, no matter how fiercely independent they may otherwise be; but give them something like Vitabot, and suddenly the whole thing looks simple and friendly, and compliance and retention rates go through the roof.

I’m losing my train of thought a little between tiredness, the DVD menu track looping and somebody talking. I think where I was going with this, though, was that there’s infrastucture in place to be tapped. I once seriously thought about trying to create my “system”, whatever that might be, in code. This, by the way, is one of my primary failings as a computer person. It is called THE LUDICROUS TEMPTATION TO REINVENT THE WHEEL.

Not that I actually fell prey to it, but it was there. It hit someone else first, back when it was just the temptation to invent the wheel, and that person was more organized and determined than I am. Now there’s all kinds of wheels out there to be found and used to advantage. But it wouldn’t get anywhere without motivation and a little insight on how these things work (for me and in general). I’m hoping to get some of that insight from reading (the rest has to come from experience). Motivation is the last puzzle piece, and time will tell if I can muster enough of that by myself. I’m not so proud as to assume so, but it’s in my nature to hold out hope, because I don’t like to feel beholden to more people than necessary.

Huh. I guess I really am changing habits. It’s eleven and I feel exhausted.

Tonight – Memento. Tomorrow – gym!