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Lan, the Vietnamese lady who cuts my hair at the Great Clips on Miramonte, always asks me about my love life, but she was especially insistent today.

To wit:

“No girlfriend yet?”

“Nope.”

A moment later:

“You’re 24 years old?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, you have six years.”

“So 30 is the deadline?”

“30 is your mom’s deadline. Maybe your deadline could be 35.”

And then:

“Seen any movies recently?”

“No. I want to see Avatar though.”

“That’s why you need a girlfriend — someone to go to the movies with!”

And finally, near the end of the haircut:

“When’s your birthday?”

“July.”

“July when?”

“21st.”

“July 21st?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe by then, you’ll have a girlfriend.”

Bloggers and journalists the world over have spent much of the last few weeks recapping the Aughts, the decade that is now but a memory. (Yes, I know it’s not really a new decade, but that seems to be a silly battle to fight at this stage. If we are happy to refer to previous decades by their tens place — the Twenties, the Sixties, the Eighties — and blithely attach any number of assumptions about culture and historical context to those labels, it seems disingenuous to complain now that the boundaries of these decades are wrongly defined.)

I thought about finding some way to bring my own perspective to the discussion, but I found that there was very little to say that hasn’t already been said. Instead, I decided to look ahead to what I’d like to see happen in the next ten years, not in the world at large, but rather in my own life.

As a matter of principle, I never make New Year’s resolutions. I don’t take them seriously because they don’t work, and they don’t work because I don’t take them seriously. But a decade is different from a year; while I might get lazy, lose focus, make bad choices, and so on during any given year, I’d like to think that ten years is a period over which millions of everyday decisions should, in aggregate, produce high-level results that I’m happy with. So it seems like a useful exercise to to think through this variation of that classic, loathsome job interview question, “where do you see yourself in ten years?”

With that, here are my ten New Decade’s resolutions:

1. Get married.
2. Have children.
3. Own a home.
4. Become a passably decent cook.
5. Develop and maintain a habit of exercising three times a week. (This is the only item on this list that I don’t actually want to do, but I don’t think I have a choice.)
6. Become a good and then an excellent public speaker.
7. Write professionally.
8. Work in the television industry, even if only briefly (perhaps an internship or some such).
9. Make something significant happen in the workplace that could not have happened if I were not there.
10. Teach fifty people something that matters.

Like most such resolutions, these are a mix of things I know I will do, things I hope I will do but sound hard, and things I want to do but probably won’t happen. Any ideas on how to accomplish any of these things are welcome.

Jammix is a social dance event at Stanford University, usually held on the second Friday of every month during the academic year. “Social dance” here refers to a style of dance evangelized by noted dance historian Richard Powers, who teaches a popular series of courses at Stanford entitled, “Social Dances of North America.” The term encompasses not only a particular set of dance forms — generally including swing, waltz, salsa, cha cha, club two-step, polka, hustle, tango, and even the occasional one-step or schottische — but also a philosophy of dance that encourages experimentation, adaptation, and a focus on partner experience rather than adherence to rules of form, structure, and style. (I’ve published some reflections on this philosophy before.) Consequently, although many of the dances taught by Powers are strongly related to ballroom styles — indeed, when mentioning this interest to people outside the Stanford community, I always refer to it as ballroom dance — he tends to draw a sharp (if potentially false) distinction between his flexible, fluid approach and the prescriptive approach purportedly espoused by most ballroom studios.

If Social Dance I is the adventurous Stanford student’s introduction to traditional couples dancing, Jammix is his or her final exam. Its format is simple: Richard plays a song in Roble Dance Studio (usually calling out a suggested dance), people find partners, they dance, and the cycle starts again. The series of couples dances, for which the tunes are mostly contemporary, is punctuated by a variety of traditions, including a Bohemian National Polka, a midnight cross-step waltz mixer, and a delightful ’70s-style line dance to Wild Cherry‘s “Play That Funky Music.” But simple as it may sound, Jammix is also one of the most complex social situations I’ve ever encountered.

To illustrate this complexity, I’ll describe my own perspective as a male lead who searches the room at the beginning of each song for a female follow to dance with. The first assessment I need to make when evaluating a potential partner is whether she even wants to dance this song at all; she might be taking a break, or she might be catching up with a friend, or she might just hate Latin dances. Body language cues like leaning against the wall or “cheating out” during a conversation can help you decode the intent of all the people standing around the edge of the room.

If a prospective partner looks like she wants to dance, the next question is whether I am actually eligible to ask her. The most obvious consideration here is whether she has come to Jammix with a boyfriend or date with whom she intends to dance exclusively (a situation that, for some reason, seems increasingly common). A related and even more common situation occurs when a group of friends arrives together; these groups rarely intend explicitly to stick to their own, but it can nevertheless be very intimidating to approach a group of strangers or almost-strangers and ask one of them to leave the group and dance. (It’s especially confusing if the group is, say, three women I don’t know; which one, if any, should I ask? What unspoken and undesirable messages could I be sending to the girls that I didn’t ask?) And of course, if she’s already walking toward a partner or clearly looking for someone specific (or, for that matter, pretending to look for someone so she can avoid me), she’s out of contention.

Another constraint on eligibility comes from the fact that, like every community, the social dance community is stratified and cliquey. There is unquestionably an “inner circle” comprised of the most skilled and experienced dancers (and also a few intermediate dancers whose connection to the group is primarily social). They generally seem like perfectly friendly, open people, and none has ever treated with me with anything but respect, but they still tend to dance almost exclusively with each other, and asking a member of this inner circle for a dance feels equivalent to sitting down at the cool kids’ table in the school cafeteria. (Never mind that not a single person in a room full of lindy hoppers is, objectively, a “cool kid.”) A fair number of otherwise viable partners are thus eliminated because I am neither self-assured enough to approach a member of the social dance elite nor socially adept and committed enough to join its ranks.

We then come to questions more directly related to the identity of the potential partner. Do I know her? (I’ve been going to these things for the better part of four years, but I still know almost nobody, which is confusing and frustrating, to say the least.) Is she too good a dancer for me? Not good enough, or more commonly, unlikely to know this particular dance? Have I danced with her so recently that it would be awkward to ask again? (My wholly uncorroborated rule of thumb is that asking the same person more than twice in an evening, unless she is a friend, reeks of desperation or ulterior motives.) Did my last dance with her go poorly? There ought to be a statute of limitations on this last one, because even two good dancers can have an awful dance now and again, but under the premise that most bad dances are my fault, I never ask someone for another dance on the same night after having a bad or even mediocre dance of any style with her. I’ll often extend that avoidance for months or even years.

Believe it or not, I could actually write more, but I think you get the idea. I imagine that most readers’ reaction to this analysis, and perhaps even most Jammix-goers’, will be that I am overthinking the entire situation. These readers would argue that none of these things really matter, and that I would enjoy Jammix far more if I would just forget about all of it and, well, just dance.

These things are true. But I simply don’t believe that I am the only one who thinks as I’ve described. I’ve seen it in far too many faces: the surreptitious scouting of potential partners during a break in the action, the strategic jockeying for position, the studious avoidance of eye contact between two people standing right next to each other whose eyes are examining what seems like every other person in the room. It’s a veritable minefield for everyone, but Jammix is probably toughest for novice-to-intermediate women, who have the unenviable challenge of making themselves noticeable enough to be asked to dance by strangers (assuming they aren’t comfortable with taking the initiative) but not so noticeable that they attract patently undesirable partners.

For my part, it’s not that I’m afraid of rejection, per se; most women at Jammix are far too kind for that, and the culture of the event doesn’t seem to encourage it anyway. The worst I’ve ever gotten is, “thanks, but I’m going to sit this one out,” and I’ve never seen any woman accept a dance after declining an offer from me in this way, so I do take these at face value. What I’m really afraid of is the grudging acceptance, the “oh, uhh, sure,” perhaps accompanied by a disappointed glance in a preferred partner’s direction, apparently borne out of some perverse combination of obligation, indifference, and pity. This reluctant acquiescence, however carefully masked, stings far worse than any “no” possibly could.

So what are the ultimate results of all this analysis? Do I actually enjoy Jammix, or is it just another source of stress in an already-stressful life?

Well, I’d say that the most common case, the 70% case, is the middle ground. At most Jammixes, I dance every waltz (my most comfortable dance, by far), plus one or two dances of most other styles at some point during the night. This amounts to perhaps 40-50% of available dances and leaves me feeling like I had a solid night, one appreciably better than sitting in my room and blogging (hah), but nothing to write home about.

The top 10% of Jammixes are the ones where I really get into it, find a great set of partners, feel confident about trying out some new figures I’ve learned, and so on. On these nights, I’m on the dance floor 75% of the time or more, enjoying even the dances I’m usually too insecure to try (like salsa or tango) or the ones I generally think are too dumb to bother with (like schottische). I get home on these nights feeling energized and great about myself.

Finally, the bottom 20%, of which Friday night was a great example, really suck. On these nights, I struggle to find partners even for the waltzes, and I hardly do any of the other dances at all. This is the sort of night where I end up alone for the last waltz. I spend 80-90% of the time loitering at the edge of the room, wondering why I am there at all, what delusion might have led me to believe that I belonged there. My emotions after such a night tend towards exhaustion, depression, and self-recrimination.

I can usually tell within the first twenty minutes which of these three buckets a particular Jammix is going to fall into. Like most such outings, Jammix has a distinct sense of momentum, and you can feel it in your bones when it isn’t going your way. As a result, one question I’ve asked myself is why I don’t simply get the hell out when I can feel the situation (and my mood) heading south.

One reason is that it can feel even worse to quit than to have a bad experience, but I think this is ultimately pretty silly. I’ve realized of late that cutting your losses when you’re not enjoying yourself is usually an act of maturity and self-awareness rather than one of weakness. Another reason is the hope that the momentum of an evening can be turned; this is rare, but it does happen.

The biggest reason of all, however, is that even the most depressing of nights can be rendered worthwhile by a single moment, such as the question I received on Friday from a particularly experienced dancer who approached me at about a quarter to midnight:

“I remember you’re an awesome dancer. Would you like to waltz?”

Schoolchildren, like everyone, have love-hate relationships with a lot of things. They love lunchtime but hate what their mom packed them for lunch. They love recess but hate the stress of waiting to get picked in kickball. They love winter break but hate the last weekend before school starts up again.

One of the many classroom traditions with which I personally had a love-hate relationship was Teach-In. A quick search demonstrated to me that this word apparently means something entirely different in Orange County, FL, than in the rest of the world, so I should probably explain.

In my experience, Teach-In was a day when you’d have a guest speaker or two who’d tell you about what they do for a living. The idea was that exposure to successful professionals would get us thinking about our future career aspirations and would also help us understand how hard work now might pay off later. Often, the speaker was a classmate’s mom or dad, though it was sometimes just a volunteer community member. The reason I (and probably many others) had a love-hate relationship with Teach-In was that I loved getting out of yet another tedious lesson, but the guest speaker’s presentation was usually far more tedious than class would have been, and I hated that.

My most memorable Teach-In was in seventh grade, in Mr. Michalak’s advanced math class. The speaker was Jamie’s dad, and he was a computer programmer (I don’t remember where, but probably at some defense contractor). Jamie’s Dad (I don’t remember her last name, so this is about all I can call him) was a balding, brown-haired man with a mustache and a modest paunch that pressed against the patterned polo shirt tucked into his faded blue jeans. He was jovial and approachable, and he had a message for us that day.

The message began like this:

“So, who’s the smartest kid in the class?”

Each pair of eyes that flashed to me was like a missile designed by the company Jamie’s Dad probably worked for, carrying a warhead of awkwardness and embarrassment. Several classmates pointed unambiguously. I looked down at my desk, and then up at him.

“All right, I guess it’s you!” Jamie’s Dad smiled. I shifted in my seat. “What’s your name?”

“Uh…Prabhu.” I would be much older before I would finally learn to introduce myself without pausing apprehensively as though I were trying to remember my own name. (Somehow, in my entire youth, I only got called out on this once; it was by, of all people, a birthday party host at Discovery Zone, whose voice, whether real or affected, sounded exactly like Wakko Warner’s as he guffawed, “is your name so hard that you actually have to think about it?”)

“Prabhu?” Jamie’s Dad repeated.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, Prabhu. What I’d like you to do is get out a pencil and a piece of paper and add up all the numbers from 1 to 100. And while you’re doing that, I’m going to write a computer program that does the same thing. And let’s see who finishes first, okay?”

“…okay,” I mumbled in response. Meanwhile, my eleven-year-old mind raced. I knew how to do this in a way that had nothing to do with adding up numbers one after the other, which was obviously a dead end. There was a formula. My dad had shown it to me. I just had to remember it.

“Okay, go!” Jamie’s Dad’s fingers moved to his laptop computer, which was connected to a fancy little projector that made his screen visible to the entire class. (Such things were far from commonplace in 1996-97.) I’m not sure, but I think he might’ve been using Visual Basic.

As he started to type, I stared blankly at the piece of notebook paper sitting on my desk, its wide-ruled taunts daring me to fail. I couldn’t remember the damn formula. I picked up my pencil hesitantly, my neck burning red as I tried to forget that everyone in the class was looking at me.

It’s n times…something. n times…what would make sense here? n times…what was it that Dad showed me? We did this, like, just a few months ago. n times…something over 2. How could I forget? n times…(n-1)? What the hell’s wrong with me? Over 2?

I wrote this down. My neighbor leaned toward me, peering at my paper, presumably trying to understand what on earth I was doing, because I sure as hell wasn’t doing any addition. Okay, I guess I should go with this. Well, 100 times (100-1) over 2, uh, 100 times 99, over 2, uh… It’s very hard to remember in retrospect why I found this calculation even remotely difficult — never mind the fact that the formula behind it was wrong — but about all I can say is that I only had about sixty seconds for this entire train of thought, and I was hand-shakingly, mouth-dryingly, eardrum-poundingly nervous.

“Okay, done!” Jamie’s Dad exclaimed. I hadn’t finished calculating anything. I don’t remember ever actually looking at the screen, but I assume that whatever he wrote was functionally equivalent to

int n=0;
for(int i=1; i<=100; i++)
   n += i;
print(n);

“How far did you get?” he asked.

I stared at the tile floor. “I, um, I, well, I didn’t actually start adding, ’cause I, uh, I was, uh, trying to remember the algebraic formula…” I trailed off, sinking down in my chair, desperate to disappear into oblivion. I could have sworn I heard a collective sigh of disappointment from the rest of the class, who I imagine were hoping to see exactly how high this particular Icarus could fly.

Jamie’s Dad’s face donned a brief look of confusion, but he nevertheless rescued his demonstration with aplomb. “Oh, okay, well, I think the guy in the last class got to about 14 or so. And this is what make computers really powerful: they allow us to do things much faster than we could do with our own brains…”

And the moment passed. I honestly don’t remember a word of the rest of the lecture, but its first three minutes have endured in my memory.

One reason this failure sticks with me is how close I was to succeeding. More important, though, is how compelling success would have been. Stanford professor of innovation and entrepreneurship Tina Seelig has a saying: “Never miss an opportunity to be fabulous.” I’ve missed quite a few opportunities to be fabulous in my life, for reasons ranging from not even showing up to, well, not actually being fabulous. But in terms of the sheer gap between what I could have demonstrated in that moment (that I was faster than a goddamn computer) and what I actually did (that I couldn’t perform under pressure), it’s hard to top that day in Mr. Michalak’s class. It’s a very rare thing in life to have the chance to do something so completely beyond the expectations of your peers, and to come so close to doing it. In my own adolescent universe, whose governing truths were Kepler’s Laws of Solitary Narcissism and the Grand Unified Theory of Self-Absorption, I’d missed not just the opportunity to be fabulous, but the opportunity to be legendary.

Of course, the truth is that nobody in that room gave a damn that I didn’t get the answer, nor would they have really given a damn had I gotten it immediately. I’m fairly certain that not a single one of my classmates (few of whom I’m still in touch with) remembers this incident; neither, I can only assume, does Jamie’s Dad. More to the point, the fact that my dad had randomly taught me this formula one day actually says nothing about my being “fabulous” at all. It only says that my dad is. Everyone who’s taken any math beyond Algebra I has probably seen that anyway; and many mathematically inclined adults know without thinking that the answer to the particular problem Jamie’s Dad posed is 5050. It may be true that achievement is at least partially a function of context, but it seems disingenuous to regard happening to know a formula that others don’t as anything other than, well, happening. (Yes, it is, in principle, possible for a smart person to reason out this formula without having learnt it formally, but I was very, very far from that.)

Still, I can’t help but wonder: what if I’d come up with the answer? Certainly, some people would have been impressed. And Jamie’s Dad probably would’ve been thrown for a bit of a loop, as I would’ve sent his carefully choreographed presentation off the rails. But how fabulous could fabulous have really been? Would I have been the talk of the school? Would I have gotten a special award of some kind? Invitations to advanced math tutoring at the local university? Would tales of my ingenious exploits have swept across the land like the stories of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed, making me a veritable folk hero for nerds everywhere?

Hah. It’s fun to daydream about, but ultimately, I think it’s fairly clear that the only thing in my life that would’ve been different in any way would be this blog post. And I’m pretty sure this post is a far more interesting read than it would’ve been had I succeeded, so I suppose all’s well that end’s well.

It’s an overcast Presidents’ Day 2005. I’m on my way to the Packard building to work with my group on an EE108B lab assignment (something to do with pipelining in CPU design, or something). I’m running late for our 1 PM meeting, but I’m not in as much of a hurry as I probably should be.

As I pass by the Varian building, having nearly arrived at my destination, two little girls approach me on their bikes. The older one has brown hair and is dressed in pink from head to toe (even her bike is pink). I’d guess this girl is about seven. The younger one, presumably her sister, is still on training wheels, her blonde hair twirling out from under her slightly askew helmet. She looks maybe four.

I stop walking. The little sister looks through me, gasping, with her brilliant, electric blue eyes. Her alabaster face is stained with fresh tears.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!” says the big sister.

“Hi, is everything okay?” I try to appear nonthreatening, suddenly self-conscious about the goatee I would shave off a month or two later. The girl nevertheless speaks with the unflinching confidence of someone who doesn’t yet understand how dangerous the world can be.

“Do you know where the Peet’s Coffee is? Our mom works there, and we were biking outside, and we got lost.”

I pause. We’re far enough west on campus that I’m not 100% sure where they might have come from. “There’s two different Peet’s Coffees here. Do you know which one your mom works at?”

“No,” says Big Sis. The four-year-old whimpers.

“Okay, well, do you know your mom’s phone number?”

“No, but I know my dad’s.”

“Great! If you can tell me his number, I’ll call him, and we’ll figure out where you need to go. Does that sound okay?”

“Yeah!” She tells me his number, and I dial it.

“Okay, what are your names?”

“My name’s Elizabeth, and this is my sister Gracie.”

“And what’s your dad’s name?”

“Mark.”

I hit “Send” on my phone and listen to it ring. I’m not sure what I’m going to do if he doesn’t pick up, besides just try both Peet’s Coffees. Someone finally answers.

“Hello, Mark speaking.” He must be working today too.

“Hi Mark, my name is Prabhu — I’m a student at Stanford University, and I’m here with your daughters, Elizabeth and Gracie, who, I guess, got lost while they were playing outside?”

“Oh, no!” Mark exclaims, though he doesn’t sound as terrified as I expected. “Are they all right?”

“Yeah, they’re fine! Elizabeth mentioned that their mom works at Peet’s Coffee, but there’s two on campus, and I wasn’t sure which one, so I wasn’t sure where to take them. Do you know which Peet’s it is?”

“It’s the one at Tresidder.” Mark says Tresidder like he knows the place exists but hasn’t actually been there himself.

“Okay, great. I’d be happy to take them there, if that’s okay with you.”

“Yes, absolutely, that’d be wonderful.”

“And maybe you could give their mom a call?” I’m not sure why this, of all things, is on my mind, but I carefully avoid the phrase, “your wife,” for fear that the girls’ parents could be divorced. “Just to let her know that we’re on our way, and we should be there in maybe ten or fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll do that right now.”

“Okay, thanks. We’ll head over now, then.”

“Thank you so much for your help.”

I hang up, wondering how the girls even got this far from Tresidder in the first place. That’s a pretty long trek to make without realizing something is wrong.

“Okay, girls, I’m going to take you back to your mom now, okay?”

Elizabeth smiles and nods. Gracie, still sniffling, wipes her eyes, nods, and mumbles, “okay.”

I try calling Akshay to let him know I’ll be even later to our lab meeting than expected, but then I remember that none of us can get any reception in that stupid building anyway. We start walking.

As we pass by the Quad along Escondido Mall, Elizabeth walks her bike, and we make pleasant conversation. I still can’t understand how she is so comfortable with me. Gracie, meanwhile, pedals ahead, alternately cautious and speedy. She calls back to us, “Lizzie, I think I see it!” She, of course, sees nothing.

“Gracie, why don’t you walk your bike so you don’t get too far ahead of us?” I ask, fully aware that Gracie will ignore me as a matter of course. I understand now how these girls got lost. One of the scary consequences of children’s storied emotional resilience is that they don’t really learn from the bad things that happen to them. Gracie probably biked out ahead of her sister, excited to explore the world, and Lizzie had no choice but to follow; pretty soon, they were nowhere near where they started. Yet Gracie seems to have forgotten this recent trauma entirely; even the slightest nudge in the right direction from me has given her the misplaced confidence to explore again, striking out on her own with abandon.

“That girl is so crazy,” observes Lizzie, grinning and circling her left index finger next to her temple. I readily agree.

We round the corner at the Clock Tower, and the bookstore is in sight. I quicken my pace a little to try and keep up with Gracie, who is biking even farther ahead now that her surroundings look more familiar. Pretty soon, their mom, who has been standing outside in her Peet’s polo, waiting anxiously for her daughters to appear, sees Gracie and starts walking toward us.

It takes Lizzie and me a minute to catch up after Gracie and Mom reunite. The woman hugs her daughters, kneeling, and then looks up at me. She stands and takes my two hands in hers.

“Thank you so much for bringing my girls back.” Mom, a woman in her thirties, looks at me with a mixture of fatigue and relief.

“It was no problem at all.”

“I work at the Peet’s over there.” She points. “Can I buy you lunch or something?”

I look at my watch. “Well, actually, I’m running pretty late for a meeting, so I should probably get going.”

“Oh, okay,” she says, a bit disappointed. “Well, maybe you could stop by later for a cup of coffee.”

“Sure,” I reply. (I regret now that I never went back for that coffee; it’s a missed opportunity to have made a new friend.)

Mom looks me in the eye. “Do you have kids?”

“Not yet, no,” I reply, amused that this even seems possible.

“Well, you will someday. And the universe works in mysterious ways, but one thing I do know is, what goes around comes around.” I nod. “One day, they’ll need help like my girls did today, and God will send someone to protect them.”

I don’t know what to say. This is a lofty sentiment indeed. “Thanks, I appreciate that.”

I try to say bye to the girls, but Gracie is too busy clinging to her mother to pay any attention, and Lizzie seems to have acquired a new shyness in her mom’s presence. I bid Mom farewell and begin the long walk back to Packard.

*             *             *

There are a lot of things to be thankful for in this story. I’m thankful that Lizzie and Gracie happened to run into me, instead of someone that might not have helped them, or worse, might have hurt them. I’m thankful that, despite whatever coaching they might have received to be wary of strangers, the girls somehow decided that they could trust me. I’m thankful that Elizabeth was such a smart little girl: smart enough to ask for the Peet’s Coffee, smart enough to know her dad’s phone number by heart.

Most of all, I’m thankful that Gracie had Lizzie looking out for her. Without Elizabeth’s attentiveness, her instinct to follow her sister no matter where she went, this story could have turned out very differently. The charity of strangers comes and goes, but the love and care of a sister lasts forever.

Happy Thanksgiving.

In all the controversy surrounding country artist Taylor Swift‘s recent “Best Female Video” honor at the MTV Video Music Awards, during which rapper Kanye West infamously preempted Swift’s acceptance speech to declare that “Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time,” there seems to have been precious little conversation about Swift herself, let alone the song that won her the award, “You Belong with Me.” Even on her turn as Saturday Night Live‘s celebrity guest host, her endearing, self-deprecating monologue said more about West and about her highly publicized telephone breakup with teen pop star Joe Jonas than about music.

It’s too bad, because Swift, who turns twenty next month, is on her way to building a history-making musical career. Her 2006 eponymous debut album has spent longer on the Billboard 200 album chart than any other album released this decade, also surpassing the previous decade’s 151-week run of Shania Twain‘s wildly popular Come on Over, still the best-selling album of all time by a female musician (and the gold standard for country crossover success). Meanwhile, “You Belong with Me” was the second country song ever to reach #1 on Billboard‘s Mainstream Top 40 song chart (the magazine’s primary pop-focused chart), preceded only by Swift’s own “Love Story.” And after her sophomore album, Fearless, was re-released in its platinum edition earlier this month, Swift found herself with nine singles on the Billboard Hot 100 (their main song chart) in a single week, more than any female artist ever.

Given these tremendous accomplishments, it’s especially disappointing that the VMA incident is at this point far better known than the video that won the award in the first place. So it seems worth our time to take a second (or in many cases, a first) look at this year’s Best Female Video.

Clearly, this is a fun, catchy song to which a lot of us can relate. “You Belong with Me” is also not very “country” for a country song, and so its appeal to pop listeners is unsurprising. (Of course, as with most country crossover hits, there’s also a pop remix that gets plenty of radio play, but it honestly isn’t that different.) “Me” is certainly far less country than the songs of country’s most recent pre-Taylor crossover star, American Idol winner Carrie Underwood. This is hardly surprising, given that Swift hails not from the South but rather from the small but decidedly northern town of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. (Underwood, meanwhile, grew up in Checotah, Oklahoma, which just sounds country.)

Indeed, if not for the occasional twang of the steel guitar and the way Swift enunciates a few words here and there (“ea-ee-sayyy”), this song might just as well have been recorded by, say, Michelle Branch circa 2001. What “You Belong with Me” takes most from its country roots is its structure; like any good country song, it tells a story, and a good one at that. It’s the kind of story that leaves you feeling unquestionably better at the end than you did at the beginning.

In all honesty, though, what I noticed when I first heard this song was this:

She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts
She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers

Having practically been born and raised on the proverbial bleachers, I don’t mind saying that Swift’s lyrical characterization of herself as the Invisible Woman is at best clueless and at worst downright disingenuous. She is just too pretty. The video’s costume director tries to bring some context to these lines, but a pair of big glasses and a baggy t-shirt can’t hide Swift’s beauty. I’m really not sure whether I am supposed to believe that she underwent some kind of magical ugly-duckling transformation in her adolescence, but it is a testament to Swift’s earnestness that “You Belong to Me” doesn’t suffer from a complete lack of credibility.

It turns out that I am not the only one with this opinion. In case you missed it, take a closer look at these shots from the video:

As you can see, the video’s titular “me” is played by Swift, while “she” is played by — you guessed it — none other than Swift again, this time sporting a brunette wig and a less frumpy wardrobe.

The favorable interpretation of this casting decision is that Swift and her director wanted to send a message that the same girl can be both a lovable “me” and a loathsome “she,” but what matters is how you act rather than how you look. The appeal of this sentiment might even be why VMA voters decided to grant the moonman to this video over Kanye’s clearly expressed preference (which, by the way, did win Video of the Year). But for all we know, the truth is that someone realized it would be very hard to find a girl who was dramatically prettier than Swift — prettier enough to make her seem like she belonged on the bleachers — and so they blurted out in yet another frustrated casting meeting, “screw it, let’s just have her do both parts.”

As she ages and is forced to develop a more mature appeal, Swift will face an interesting challenge. It seems that her most forthright songwriting (yes, she writes or co-writes all her work) comes from her Plain-Jane, girl-next-door persona, but it’s far from clear that adult audiences, generally more aware than than their teen and tween counterparts, will continue to go along with this little lie. Thus, unless she experiences a radical change in sensibility, Swift may find herself clinging to her traditional younger base longer than it is able to sustain her. (This, by the way, is the opposite of the problem Miley Cyrus needs to solve: she seems eager to build a more grownup image but isn’t really pretty enough to make the transition to fans who will evaluate her appearance along a grownup yardstick.)

So, do I think “You Belong with Me” is good enough to be named the Best Female Video of the Year? Well, I’m a sap, so I like it a hell of a lot better than “Single Ladies” (to be honest, I hate that song), and I find the other nominees forgettable. As a short film, “Me” is engaging and well-produced. It’s missing one element that many of the best pop videos showcase — choreography — but I’m happy to give that up for a cute story. So I guess you could say that Taylor gets my vote, if that counts for anything.

I just have one question: how does a girl who wears nothing but t-shirts and sneakers make a last-minute decision to go to prom and then manage to show up with the prettiest dress?

This season marks the fifteenth anniversary of the critically acclaimed but ratings-challenged television drama, My So-Called Life. Critics and TV aficionados alike still refer to Life with a certain awe, the kind of reverence typically reserved for a long-lost significant other that could have been The One. I recently finished watching the series’ entire nineteen-episode run on Hulu, having decided to check it out because I was curious whether it would live up to the hype.

At first glance, it’s not hard to understand why MSCL was canceled. The biggest problem was that ABC, which indecisively waited to schedule the show for a full year after seeing the pilot (which they loved), chose to introduce it in the fall of 1994 on Thursday nights at 8 PM, directly opposite another modest freshman show called Friends. Much better shows than this one would have crumbled under the weekly onslaught of Chandler, Joey, Ross, Phoebe, Monica, and Rachel.

Even leaving this ultimately insurmountable challenge aside, however, it’s unclear whether audiences were ready for what MSCL had to offer. It was a teen drama in an era before that genre really existed as such, making it hard to schedule, hard to market, and hard to appreciate. The closest analogue at the time was The Wonder Years, which had ended its run in the spring of 1993. But unlike its popular predecessor, My So-Called Life didn’t simply want to take baby boomers back to their experiences growing up in the 60s; it aimed to speak directly to teenagers right now about the experience of being a teenager today, while also returning older viewers to their long-buried passions and insecurities.

Meanwhile, Life was also very different from the show that would, sadly, become the prototype for the modern teen drama: Beverly Hills, 90210. Indeed, its creators have described it as something of an anti-90210, an attempt to tell the true story of adolescence instead of the glossy Rodeo Drive version. Even now, with what amounts to an entire broadcast network’s worth of teen dramas programmed every season, we don’t have a single one anywhere on the schedule that aspires to the same kind of arresting honesty that was MSCL‘s raison d’être. (The only show of comparable candor today, Friday Night Lights, has faced similar struggles to find an audience. It’s no surprise to discover that Jason Katims, FNL‘s head writer, worked on My So-Called Life early in his career.)

But these circumstantial considerations, while they provide a partial explanation for the show’s cancellation, do not speak to its quality. For all the nostalgia surrounding it, was My So-Called Life actually good television?

MSCL‘s single greatest strength lay in Claire Danes’ brilliant performance as Angela Chase, the series’ 15-year-old protagonist, which earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama Series. I have never seen such a singularly accurate portrayal of the teenage experience’s fundamental contradiction: the desperation to be noticed and yet also to be invisible. Danes clearly benefited from being the same age as Angela during filming; she seems to have drawn on feelings about her own adolescence to know exactly when to employ understatement and when to resort to histrionics, exactly how long to hold an awkward moment, exactly how hard to laugh or to cry.

For proof, just watch Danes in the very last scene of the entire series (which isn’t really a spoiler, but consider this fair warning). It’s marvelous to watch the panoply of emotions cross Angela’s face in these three minutes or so.

Unlike her dramatically challenged counterparts of today, Danes brought an earnest credibility to the role that elevated the entire show, giving it a penetrating, intensely personal quality. Many of the other MSCL actors did solid jobs, but it’s hard to stand out next to Danes; the one exception is Wilson Cruz, who played Angela’s gay and sometimes-homeless friend, Rickie Vasquez, with conviction and grace, at a time when gay characters in primetime were anything but ordinary.

Of course, good actors are powerless without good writing. Showrunner Winnie Holzman reportedly went “undercover” in high schools and wrote make-believe diary entries to orient herself in the teenage psyche and vernacular. As a result, the show’s dialogue carries a sense of authenticity that can probably only be fully appreciated by true children of the 90s; more than probably any teen drama I’ve seen, I can watch My So-Called Life and say with confidence, “people actually talked like this.” (Early appearances of Angela’s unbelievably silent love interest, Jordan Catalano, and the sometimes over-the-top ramblings of friend Rayanne Graff are notable exceptions.)

Equally incisive are the depictions of Angela’s relationship with her parents. I love the scene in “On the Wagon” in which Patty and Graham watch, dumbfounded, as the habitually reticent Angela saunters into the kitchen, abruptly divulges all kinds of details about what’s bothering her, and then walks away as though this were an everyday occurrence. (“It’s okay. She’ll ignore you for another month just to make up for it.”)

While many of the show’s characters seem cookie-cutter at first — the socially inept brainiac, the wild girl with abandonment issues, and so on — they are written with remarkable sensitivity and perceptiveness, making them real and complicated. Even the adults in the show develop into characters we care about, flawed and fascinating, after starting out as mere stand-ins for authority and the establishment.

To be clear, MSCL was not without its missteps; it faltered in the ways that any new, risky drama should be expected to do, as the writers and the actors all work to find their voices. The Halloween and Christmas episodes, for example, both dabbled oddly in the supernatural, with the latter showcasing a young homeless girl who turned out to be, like, an angel, or something. The show also struggled a bit when it veered into lesson-of-the-week territory, with episodes on censorship, teen sex, substance abuse, and other weighty subjects often seeming too preachy for their own good.

Perhaps the broadest potential criticism of Life is that it was simply too melodramatic, too absorbed in its own gravity to be relevant. It’s certainly true that the show makes a big deal out of small things, seemingly turning every chance hallway encounter into a moment, laden with subtext and innuendo. But you know what? That’s exactly what it’s like to be a teenager. Time does seem to slow down, and the rest of the scene does shift out of focus, when you make deliberately-accidental eye contact with your crush on the way to homeroom. MSCL, whether by luck or by skill, manages to capture perfectly the sheer intensity of these adolescent obsessions, making it hard to call the show’s studied solemnity anything other than magnificently true-to-life.

After all, this is what good drama does. It takes us to a place and makes that place real. In this, My So-Called Life was a tremendous achievement. It was a show with remarkable creative potential and emotional resonance that died long before its time, a victim of a confluence of unfavorable circumstances. (Danes, whose agents hoped to steer her toward a film career, clearly played a part in the show’s cancellation, but her expression of doubt was merely a nail in the coffin of an already troubled show, not the main reason as some scapegoaters have alleged.) Indeed, Ted Harbert, ABC’s head of programming at the time, has called not fighting harder to save Life “[his] biggest mistake at ABC.” The show made history even in its cancellation, becoming what appears to be the first show ever to earn a serious Internet-organized plea for its life.

As always, it’s hard to say whether My So-Called Life would have stepped it up or tripped over itself, had it been given the chance of a sophomore season. What is clear, however, is that its failure had far-reaching consequences. It set the stage for a modern teen drama genre that would inherit its defining sensibilities not from the unwavering honesty of Three Rivers, Pennsylvania, but rather from the unabashed hedonism of Beverly Hills, 90210.

And that, like, totally sucks.

So, I decided to try my hand at — what do you call it — podcasting? Audio blogging?

Well, whatever it is, here it is:

(I have no idea if the embedded media player I’m using will work correctly in an RSS feed — you may have to click through to the site. Alternatively, you can download an mp3 here.)

Obviously, the worst aspect is the quality of the recording — but I suspect this is probably the best I can do with a $9 mic from Fry’s and the built-in sound card on my laptop.

Other comments, though, are more than welcome! I’m not sure this experiment turned out particularly well, but it was fun to try, and certainly a pleasure to honor the fortieth anniversary of Sesame Street.

I’ve been a Star Wars fan a long time, but the peak of my obsession was probably between 1996 and 1999. (It was hard to sustain after I met Jar Jar Binks.) It’s difficult to describe, or even to remember in retrospect, exactly how immersed I was in that galaxy far, far away. I quoted the films often and seemingly at random. I engaged in Star Wars trivia contests with my friends at lunch. I read Star Wars novels voraciously — fiercely careful, of course, to read them in the canonical sequence — and even got into arguments on the Internet (the kind where you find yourself citing your IQ as proof of your argument’s superiority) about the relative quality of these novels.

Perhaps nothing captures the depth of my fascination more than the fact that I played the Star Wars Customizable Card Game. In my defense, I was never a serious player — for example, I never attended a tournament, and I played far more often with my brother than with anyone else. I also never sank the kind of money into it that was required to build a genuinely competitive deck. (If you don’t know how customizable card games such as SWCCG, or its vastly more popular cousin, Magic: The Gathering, are played, you’re probably better off. The fact that I played any CCG other than Magic suggests that I wasn’t satisfied with just any nerdy pursuit; I had to assiduously avoid the one that was most popular among my fellow geeks.) I basically had the starter set (or, to be more precise, the Introductory Two-Player Game) and a fairly small collection of additional cards from booster packs I’d bought. I also traded with a couple of friends.

Trading in a customizable card game is similar to trading any other type of collectible card; many of us grew up trading baseball or basketball cards and remember that what you wanted was essentially the following:
1) a card you like or think is “cool”
2) a card that is unusually rare
3) a card that is unusually valuable (usually correlated to #2)

If you collect any of these types of cards, what you basically do is convince your parents to buy you packs upon packs of them, searching persistently for the one that will satisfy the above criteria, at which point you declare that it was “totally worth it.” Your other (and perhaps preferred) option is to find some idiot kid who will trade you their awesome card for a modest number of cards that you convince him are equally awesome but are actually worthless. (This is how I parted ways in fifth grade with my Nolan Ryan, the only decent card I ever acquired in the short time I dabbled in Major League Baseball.) We might, in adult parlance, refer to the aforementioned idiot kid as an “arbitrage opportunity.”

It’s basically the same with CCGs, except that there is an additional dimension: value in gameplay (usually correlated to #2 and #3 above). This value can be measured in many ways, some of which include (abstractly) offensive power, defensive power, and the ability to radically disrupt the flow of a game (for example, by redistributing resources or changing what your opponent is permitted to do). As I mentioned, I never played Magic, but even I knew that the Black Lotus was one of the best (in all the senses I’ve outlined) cards you could get, even if I didn’t understand why.

Being a financially sensible preteen, I never took the quest for the rarest SWCCG cards as far as some people, but I did buy the occasional booster pack to see if I could strike it rich (which in practice meant finding a card of a character whose name you actually know: Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and so on).

I remember when the Dagobah expansion set, christened after the remote, swampy planet that a little green man named Yoda called home, was released in the spring of 1997. I was in seventh grade and, like all seventh-graders, couldn’t wait. After much cajoling, I convinced my mom to take me to Sci-Fi City, the go-to comics and collectibles shop in Orlando, to play the Sunday afternoon booster pack lottery. Since the place was in another part of town, I offered to pick up a couple of packs for my friend Drew and deliver them to him at school on Monday. And so it was that I returned home with four Dagobah booster packs in a small plastic shopping bag.

I opened my two packs immediately. I did the usual thing; like a battered victim of domestic violence covering for his abuser, I told myself that some of these cards were actually pretty good, that it would probably work out better next time, that Princess Leia really did love me after all. I called Drew — in those days, I actually used the telephone to talk to people other than my parents — and let him know what I’d gotten. I then asked him:

“Want me to open your packs, to see what you got?”

“No, thanks, I’ll just take a look at them tomorrow.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, man, don’t worry about it.”

“Alright.”

You can guess what happened next. After an appropriately brief bout of conscience, I picked up one of the remaining packs and began, carefully, to open it. I pulled the nine cards from the plastic wrapper and looked through them slowly.

Nothing remarkable, as far as I could tell. I slipped the cards back into the wrapper. I picked up the second pack and opened it, just as delicately as I had the first.

I looked at the top card. Nothing interesting. I moved it to the back of the pile.

I looked at the second card. Again, forgettable. Behind it went.

And holy shit. There he was. Yoda. Power 2, Ability 7. The greatest Jedi Master in the goddamn galaxy.

I had a very bad feeling about this.

My mind raced, trying vainly to catch up to my pulse. What the hell was I supposed to do now? He told me not to open his packs, and this was probably exactly why. Now I had this once-in-a-lifetime card, a Yoda, for Christ’s sake, and I was supposed to give it to someone else! How could I have come so close, yet so far?

I honestly don’t remember it, but somehow, I must have come to a decision. I picked up the phone and called Drew again.

“Hey.”

“Hey. So guess what?”

“What?”

“So, uh, I opened the other packs…”

“Wait, why? I told you not to do that.”

“I was curious.”

“But I told you not to.”

“Well…one of them had a Yoda.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and well, I was thinking, technically, since I bought these packs, they’re kinda mine.”

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, or any of the multiple conversations we had on this topic over the next couple of days. The final outcome was that I gave Drew the Yoda and some of the other cards that had come in his packs, in exchange for the rest of those cards, as well as some cards from his personal collection. I remember negotiating on exactly what cards he would need to give me to fairly compensate me for the Yoda.

In other words, I traded him his own card.

I can say with conviction that this is, by far, the most unethical thing I have ever done in my life, and hopefully the most unethical thing I will ever do. Astonishingly, it did not ruin my friendship with Drew. But what shocks me most in retrospect is how easy it was to convince myself that this course of action was reasonable. Of course the cards were technically mine! Trading him the Yoda was doing him a favor! I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

These kinds of rationalizations dominated my thoughts in the following days, but, looking back, they were probably only on the surface. What lay underneath, I imagine, was a classic sense of pre-teen victimhood. Why was it that other kids always got the great cards? Shouldn’t I get a great card every now and then, too? On some level, I must have decided that actually keeping the Yoda for myself would simply be too much; but extracting payment for it was like levying my own karmic tax against the universe for giving me such rotten luck. After all, if that pack had just been one of the first two I’d opened, it would have been as though I’d gotten a Yoda, not him.

I’m not sure, but I don’t think this victim mentality is the most common motivation for these types of unethical acts — more commonly, such acts are perpetrated by people who feel that they are somehow special, that they deserve more than the common man, that the fact that they are clever enough to get away with something entitles them to the rewards, however sordid, of the thing they got away with. I’ve seen all these explanations cited for the wildly immoral behavior of men like Enron‘s Jeffrey Skilling and Adelphia‘s John Rigas.

I certainly don’t think that I am anything like them, nor was I at age 11. What this story does show, however, is that it is very easy for good people to do bad things if they aren’t careful. It only takes one brief, irrevocable moment of weakness or confusion. Life offers us plenty of temptations to abandon or temporarily forget our principles, and it’s up to us to try not to.

No. Do. Or do not. There is no try.

It was June of 2002. I had just graduated from high school, and I was at an essay contest winners’ week sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace, a small policy think tank of sorts, established by Congress twenty-five years ago to explore questions around peacebuilding and conflict resolution. I had submitted an essay the previous winter entitled, “American Peacekeeping: Duty or Folly?” (My essay, to be clear, argued the former.) Having been selected as the winner for the state of Florida, I’d come to Washington, along with my fellow state winners, to participate in a week filled with educational activities, including a three-day simulation exercise (in which I was to play then-CIA director George Tenet).

On our first full day in town, we had an introductory lecture from one Jeffrey Helsing, who I see is currently the deputy director of the Institute’s education program (and was back then, too, most likely). After a few initial remarks, Dr. Helsing asked us to pair up with the person sitting next to us for an old-fashioned thumb war (please, Wikipedia, do not delete this article). The rules were the usual; in addition, we had a time limit (something like a minute or two) in which we could play as many rounds as we could get in. The goal for each person, as you might expect, was to rack up as many points as possible.

I remember being paired with a guy named Will. We didn’t really know each other, so there was that uncomfortable tentativeness of a couple of boys who didn’t know exactly how hard we were supposed to be trying and didn’t want to be the one who tried too hard. Will was bigger than me, though, so I think he scored three or four points, while I managed only one.

After our time had expired, Dr. Helsing did the usual thing a moderator does to quickly get a sense of how an exercise went: he asked for a show of hands.

“Raise your hand if you got at least one point.”

Most hands went up.

“Okay, now keep your hands up if you had at least two points.”

Some hands dropped. Dr. Helsing continued.

“Three points? Four? Five? Six?”

Only a few hands remained, though I didn’t pay much attention to whose.

Dr. Helsing pointed at a particularly big fellow in the front and asked him, “how many points did you have?”

“Uh, eight.”

“Eight? Wow, you really went for it.” We all laughed.

“Okay, who else? What about you, young lady?”

A soft voice came from toward the back of the room.

“Seventeen.”

I turned in my chair.

“Seventeen?” Dr. Helsing repeated. “Seventeen??”

The girl, brown-haired and slight, certainly didn’t look like a thumb wrestling champion. She now had everyone’s full attention.

She looked sheepishly at her partner, looked back, and said simply:

“We both had seventeen.”

The room was silent. Dr. Helsing reiterated unnecessarily: “they both had seventeen.”

To be honest, I don’t remember any of the rest of the discussion. But, as trite as this sounds, I’ll never forget this moment. The truth is that the demonstration was, perhaps inadvertently, rigged; I later learned that this girl, Angela, was the daughter of a well-known (at least in this crowd) scholar in the field of international conflict resolution. So she had almost certainly seen this exercise many times before, and she knew exactly what to do and what the exercise was supposed to teach (though I never did ask her about it). And I imagine Dr. Helsing knew in advance that his little icebreaker would be even more illustrative than usual.

Despite these little cheats in the situation, I still find it a tremendously compelling lesson, even in retrospect. It shows how trapped we all are in our traditional modes of thought. Someone tells us to fight, and we fight, because that’s what we expect to do. If we just sat for a minute and thought about it, we’d realize there has to be a better way.

This is true for far more than thumb wrestling, and for far more than the international conflicts that the thumb wrestling was supposed to represent. We are perennial prisoners of our own assumptions. Every time we approach a task thinking we’ve done this same thing a thousand times, or meet a new person and think they’re just like people we already know, or have to make a decision and think we should just be consistent with a previous decision, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to do something new, to experience something exciting and different, to achieve something unexpected.

I learned something very important from Angela that day (and from her partner, too, who I presume readily accepted Angela’s recommendation rather than worry about what we were “supposed” to do). I learned that we humans are, despite our habitual slavishness to established norms, capable of remarkable ingenuity and strength of spirit. All we have to do is stop listening to ourselves long enough to actually listen to ourselves.