Autumn is upon us.
I had a late breakfast/early lunch at La Note with Hunter. It feels very self-consciously adult to be catching up with old friends on a lunch date. We discussed our lives in flux, the friends who move in and out of our spheres, cohabitation, flying. I imagine him somewhere exotic in a few years, piloting around to save lives, sending friends elsewhere letters rich with near-incomprehensible metaphors mixed with arcane po-mo and ancient Greek metaphors.
Last night's bab5 was election-themed. It seemed to encapsulate all the problems with democracy at once. Half the crowd was perfectly happy to cheerfully debate measures the entire room already had formed an opinion on, the other half was epitomized by Jill's question, "So what are all the right answers?" Most of the propositions were clearly pandering to the masses, and sounded perfectly reasonable until you read the fine print and discovered the fatal flaws. Other ones brought up difficult moral quandaries: "Is it really worth $6 billion to send a great big 'fuck you' to Washington?" How many voters bother to even have the sort of discussion we had last night? (I certainly hadn't until now.) How many of us really have the expertise and time to deeply research the issues enough to make an informed decision? And really, how the heck am I supposed to know who's most qualified to serve on the Berkeley school board?
I submitted my very first fellowship application. I'm not quite sure what to think about the whole process. I certainly felt silly filling out the page asking for my exact location and contact info for every time period between now and April so they could schedule a last-minute interview, since the last entry is "Jan 15 - May ?: Budapest, Hungary".
Tonight Douglas has offered to fly me from Oakland to Santa Cruz to go to a party. So exciting.