So this entry is really an agglomeration of a bunch of stuff that's been floating in my head the past few days. Pick and choose from the smorgasbord of Sumana!

Air hockey. When I played against Steve on Tuesday after lunch, I beat him 7-4. But it was close at a few moments! He considered it a very respectable showing. It reminded me that for a great deal of last semester, my weblog entries often seemed to consist of only "lesson plans and hockey scores."

Racial profiling. So now it's happened to one of my friends. Anirvan reported rather clear evidence that officials at four out of five security checkpoints stopped him -- a brown bearded man -- much longer than they did a practically identical Taiwanese man when they flew to and from some spot in Canada recently. I have mixed feelings. It's demeaning. It's also slightly rational. As Michael Kinsley noted, if all we know about the terrorists is their physical appearance, should we really bar ourselves from using that in preventing future hijackings? Then again, given the heightened secutiry measures, will they try to hijack again, or will it be some other method that we aren't expecting? (The elsewhere-in-Slate "we must make the unthinkable evil thinkable to get inside the minds of terrorists" argument by William Saletan.)

A bunch of Russian-related stuff. How should a family decide what to watch on TV? The answers revealed us as very different people. In my Russian class, Cinzia said that people should take turns, easy-going Sean agreed, I facetiously argued that *I* should pick the program (my putative spouse preferring to read), Makiko said that the husband should decide, and Jeff recommended having two television sets, backing it up with an anecdote from a wacky friend. That's our class in a nutshell. Well, there was the time when we talked about people we admire, and I mentioned my old English teacher Sam Hatch, and Sean talked about a musician friend of his, and Makiko talked about Mother Teresa, and Jeff talked about God. Perhaps that's a better nutshell, but it doesn't include Cinzia, since she was absent that day.

Russian children's cartoons. That's what we've been watching. I love them. They have this absurdist sensibility that I've been missing in children's programming for ages.

Almost all of us in the class have some prior experience in French. The most common words for which we accidentally use the French are "with" and "and" and "but." However, on Monday, I think, Jeff said "Apres" for "after" and didn't know how it had happened.

Zhenia, my Russian instructor, is still sick. The FBI just put out a warning that said, in effect, "we're expecting another big terrorist attack, but we don't know when or where. Just soon." Some NBC employee in New York just tested positive for anthrax. It would be paranoid to connect the dots and conclude that Zhenia has come down with B. anthracis, right?

Wednesday.

TV. I watched The West Wing and Enterprise. Both could have been better and could have been worse. That afternoon, I had expounded to a few of my Russian Imperial History classmates on the merits and failings of each show, touching heavily on Enterprise. I theorized that:

• In this show, the writers have separated out the Counselor Troi characteristics and given sexiness to the Vulcan woman and emotional uselessness to the translator.
• If Earth is like the USA, and it's just starting out in interplanetary politics and Vulcan's always trying to tone down Terran exploratory/interventionist reflexes, then perhaps Earth : USA :: Vulcan : Europe. This one needs a little work, but I think that it's potentially a model with explanatory power.

West Wing was certainly better in the season opener per se, the opener qua opener, than it was last week in its Very Special Terrorist Attack episode that writer/producer Aaron Sorkin wrote in something like a day. As one commentator put it a week ago, "Can we get Sorkin back on crack? This is horrible."

Poor CJ. This show trumps the book Spin Cycle (which was one of my great splurges my freshman year) (I wonder where that book is. Did I loan it to someone? Is it in Stockton, along with the Lost Jacket that Garrison Keillor autographed to me three years ago?) for making a citizen sympathetic to a White House press secretary's job.

We can work it out. I took a shower after handball. It almost made me late for Russian, but goodness that feels nice. It reminds me of a year ago, when on Tuesdays and Thursdays I would shower after judo and tromp off to Steve Weber's excellent International Relations lecture. I think I liked that semester. Funny, I can't recall what I was taking, aside from IR, judo, and Russian. Oh, yes, American Political Theory with Michael Rogin, and I liked his lectures in that class so much that I took the 1939 Through Films class with him and Professor Moran the next semester, and that wasn't nearly as good. I am glad that I got to see all those movies, though. I feel more cultured now.

My closer friends who work out regularly number about three. The two white ones do yoga. The Indian one does not. This amuses me.

Russian history. Professor Reginald Zelnik, the Imperial Russian History professor, is great. He lectures at exactly the right pace, he has this low-key sense of humor, and he makes this material interesting when a lot of lecturers could mess it up. He's a craftsman -- not showy, not bombastic, just producing reliably good work. I admire his lectures for the same reason that Leonard admires the work of Stephen King: reliable craftsmanship.

Thursday.

First blood donation, ever. Exactly a month after the terrorist attacks in New York and D.C., my blood donation appointment arrived. Via the radio in the donation room, we heard Bush's press conference. Not very relaxing, to me -- I talked on the phone to distract myself from the process. (I wonder if they'll find my blood useful -- is there still a shortage? -- or tasty.)

Because I was donating blood, I missed a free showing of a Russian-language film, Mirror. Oh, well. I fell asleep during the one last week, anyway.

Social psychology. Elliot Aronson wrote an outstanding sociology textbook, The Social Animal, which you could almost certainly find on Bookfinder and which clarifies my thoughts on psychology and sociology every time I pick it up. Reading this book may be the best thing to come out of my Political Psychology class this semester. Not only does Aronson convincingly explain causes of and possible solutions to such phenomena as self-justification, aggression, and prejudice, he also gives out how-tos on liking, being liked, making relationships more authentic, and persuasion! This is a terrific book, folks, and I'm not even selling it. (I am, however, composing a note of gratitude to send to Dr. Aronson, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.)

Dr. Aronson mentions the "chillingly manipulative" title How to Make Friends and Influence People (the classic self-help text by Dale Carnegie). I read that book my sophomore year of high school, because my journalism teacher, Mr. Woo, advised me to. I hadn't gotten a page editor position on the newspaper, he and the editor-in-chief said, because I lacked "people skills." And so I got a position that they made up to use my proofreading skills -- "Copy Editor" -- and I trotted off to the school library and borrowed the book and read this book that he had recommended. I don't know whether it helped at all, although I suspect it did, if only in articulating lots of those little rules of social engagement that I'd never learned. I'd never learned them because my family had moved around a lot when I was young, and I'd eventually shut myself off and withdrawn and read books and watched TV while other kids were out there learning social skills.

Once upon a time, I justified my maverick attitude by arguing that friends only hold one back. My analogy was: it always takes longer to make a decision and to get going and to get somewhere with more people rather than fewer. This implied that I was actually avoiding making friendships. In retrospect, that was probably a lot of sour grapes. I probably couldn't have made enough friends to slow me down even if I'd wanted to.

My own tendency to make sour-grapes rationalizations is something about which Aronson, and this Political Psychology class in general, are helping me learn.

And that convoluted sentence structure is the sort of thing that's absolutely fine in Russian but which I find suboptimal in English. Gotta stop that.

Candleholder glass. More than a year ago -- almost two years ago! -- I assisted my father and mother in performing a wedding in Tilden Park here in Berkeley. The happy couple was Lori and Himanshu. Everybody got some knickknack to take home: a red candle in a small glass cup, a sticker on the side reminding one of the blessed occasion.

I only started using the candleholder a few months ago. A few times I've had a wick burning rather close to the glass. I replaced the candle when it burned down all the way. When areas of the glass discolored, I thought it was just soot.

A few nights ago, as a candle burned in this holder, the glass cracked loudly and a piece of it fell off. Fractures remain. I blew out the candle and marveled at the beautiful crack in the dark glass. It looks like obsidian. I think it's the most beautiful thing I've seen this week.

Nobel, info asymmetry, parking space. So one of the three Economics Nobel laureates this year is a UC Berkeley economics prof. This trio worked on the problem of information asymmetry in markets. Hurrah! That's the term I've been using for years to describe what happens to people with weblogs. Seth is forever running into people who know far more about him than he does about them. Me, for instance, before I started keeping a weblog. It hasn't jarred me yet that someone knows far more about me from a weblog than I do about her. Usually I just get jarred because I have a bad memory for meeting people and I think it's the first time we've met when actually we've had three classes together or something.

Oh, and the Daily Californian reassures me that the new laureate will receive the free lifetime parking space, as per campus custom. No kidding. If you look around LeConte and other such buildings, you will see permanent signs marked "Reserved parking for NL." It took me more than a year to get it.

Comedy Night! The Heuristic Squelch is holding a Comedy Night on Tuesday, 23 October, at Blake's on Telegraph. I intend on going and doing open-mic stand-up. It'll be a great relief from my Political Psychology midterm earlier that day.

The two TAs. Two graduate students teach discussion sections for my Political Psychology course. I only have to go to one, but I attend one by each teaching assistant (TA -- but the preferred term is GSI, Graduate Student Instructor). One is by-the-book and very peppy, thoroughly dissects the readings, makes comprehensive handouts, and encourages discussion. The other drawls out a stand-up routine that clearly, systematically, and hilariously covers all the material that the professor covers less well in lecture. Thursday might become my favorite day of the week.

Guy Noir analogies. I'm trying to come up with Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler-style analogies for weather and for beautiful, troubled dames. It reminds me of the "Funniest Similes Written By Students" page that I found at the now-defunct laughpage.com and showed to Angel Ayon and Karl Neuharth and the like back in high school. Angel and I still laugh about it.

Wow, all I had to Google was "hummingbirds analogies" and I got it. Google keeps impressing me.

Doonesbury. The recent strips have made me laugh.

The Onion as unreliable narrator. I recently realized that unreliable narration is the trick, the gimmick, behind most of the fake editorials in The Onion. [Fast voiceover: Other works employing the device of the unreliable narrator include The Raven by Poe and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.]

Fresh Robots. Tonight I intend on showing Leonard the magic and beauty that is the Fresh Robots, a San Francisco-based comedy troupe. I found out about them because I met Sunil through Dan, and then Sunil met my sister, and then he invited a bunch of his friends to see them perform at a San Francisco comedy club, and that's where I met holeburning and Aaron and remet Laura (now Nandini's housemate) and met Lia, whom I introduced to Leonard and with whom Leonard watched the remastered Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And it was a terrific show, even besides the six-degrees business.

Which reminds me, one last link or two: A good "Why don't I know anyone who died in the Sept. 11 attacks?" Slate piece linked to a neat six-degrees meditation. I wonder if I'm like Lois Weisberg. Alexei and my sister and my parents are the Lois-y people I know. On Tuesday, I asked Alexei whether he had ever clocked the length of time he can walk on campus without recognizing someone. Yes, he said -- about two minutes. Oi!

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Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/12/15031/428