playoffs?

Shorter Will Wilkinson:

If it’s about pluralism, it’s about pluralism. It’s as simple as that. It ain’t about that at all. It’s easy to sum it up if you’re just talking about pluralism. We’re sitting here, and I’m supposed to be the franchise player, and we’re talking about pluralism. I mean listen, we’re sitting here talking about pluralism, not justice, not liberal justice, not justice, but we’re talking about pluralism. Not the justice that Rawls and Nozick went out there and died for and wrote every book like it’s their last but we’re talking about pluralism. How silly is that?

told you I’ll be here forever

The conjunction of Trinity Church, the Hancock Tower, the new Hancock building and several other massive structures around Copley Square creates a massive wind tunnel between Clarendon and St James Ave. On clear days, it’s bad; on stormy days it’s terrible. Walking from my office toward Fire & Ice for a quick dinner last week, I leaned into a gale. I pointed my umbrella in a dozen different directions, like a malfunctioning radar dish, to avoid the wind.

One strong gust lifted me onto my toes and then relinquished me with a snap. Looking up, I saw that the shaft of my umbrella had broken in two. What I’d thought was a metal rod with a wooden veneer was, in fact, genuine wood, unable to cope with the vortex of downtown Boston. I was holding a curved umbrella handle that ended in splinters, marching down St James with my first initial held proudly over my head. The ribs and fabric of the umbrella cartwheeled past me.

Sprinting back the way I came, I speared the remains of my umbrella with the splintery end, lest it bounce into an intersection and cause an accident. I tried to fold the top half closed, but the shaft had broken off too high. An umbrella works by affixing its ribs to a single ring around the handle; you open or close the umbrella by sliding this ring up or down. But the handle had broken off below where the ring would stay if the umbrella were closed. So I had no choice but to carry the open umbrella and the broken remains of its handle in my hands until I could find a trash can that would take them. Since the wind had not let up, the umbrella portion (which I was grasping by its freezing metal spindles) would fill its sails and jerk around, like a leashed Dalmatian. All this while I’m waving a jagged wooden rod over my head, for balance, and getting drenched.

I had a beer with dinner.

all of this makes me love you more

The older I get, the more I believe that the secret to staying young is finding excuses to party.

This Friday, I went to the Yelp Elite Event for January at Revolution Fitness, a gym within walking distance of my office. Revolution has done its best to combine the “basement gym” look with the “boutique gym” feel. The layout ranges from intimate studios for the de rigeur yoga and pilates classes to a row of fluorescent-lit weight racks in front of mirrors. And there’s a room off to the back with reinforced rubber walls and a mess of equipment that you can just play with. Like a 150-lb tire to flip end over end, or rings to hang on, or medicine balls that you can fling at the wall while screaming. You’re encouraged to experiment.

Saturday was the Snowflake Social, hosted in Arlington. Friends and locals threw a party to raise money for Haiti, dressing up in formal wear and dancing the night away. I posed for prom photos, slow-danced with several friends and drank at the Elks bar. We retired to a friend’s house afterward to have a few more drinks and chill out until the evening crept up on me.

As grown-ups, we look for reasons to put on nice attire and go out dancing: weddings, family affairs, holiday parties and school reunions. If we brought that same questing sense of experimentation to everything we did, how much quicker would it go, and with what energy? Crank up Shaimus and dance with your baby on your hip while you put away the laundry. Invite half a dozen friends over to write with you. Title the next work meeting that you’re responsible for “Awesome Fiscal Responsibility Fun Times 2010.” Smile at strangers. Adopt antiquarian politeness. Open your face to the world.

(This is more a reminder to myself than the rest of you, but let me know if it works)

eight days a week is not enough to show I care

Browsing through random comics on XKCD the other day uncovered this old gem:

No one should expose me to ideas like this.

As much as I love creative ideas, sweeping gestures and damning the details, I also like tinkering with fiddly numbers to make things come out different. So when someone tells me that 6×28 = 7×24, I start doing some additional factoring. So then I wonder: what other weeks can I make?

The Eight-Day Week: Sleep for six hours, then wake for fifteen.

If you start this by going to bed at midnight on Sunday/Monday, you’ll be up by 6:00 and at work as usual. Next morning, you’ll be up by 3:00 AM, but you can still leave work at 5:00 PM and be in bed by 6:00. Unusual but not unreasonable.

The day-cycle gets a little odd from then on, as you’re up at midnight on the third day – what the pagans would call “Wednesday.” You’ll need to leave work early that day, as you have to be in bed by 3:00 PM. If your boss makes a fuss, tell him you were up at midnight and in work by 1:30 AM. This will be true, albeit unsettling.

Fourth day: up at 9:00 PM, still “Wednesday” to those seven-day slackers. Crank out another fifteen hours of productivity, then pass out at noon. On the fifth day, you’ll wake up at 6:00 PM, do a full night’s work, and then tuck yourself in at 9:00 AM on the dot. I suggest buying some blackout curtains on the ride home.

But now the true benefits of the eight-day week emerge: a three-day weekend! On day six, you’ll wake up at 3:00 PM, just as folks at the office are entering their Friday slump and checking their watches. You can stay up until 6:00 AM, partying with the best of them! Then it’s time for another six hours of sleep, waking up by noon on Saturday – just in time for brunch, most of the stores to be open, and a pleasant weekend. Stay up another fifteen hours and go to bed at 3:00 AM. The ability to party late into the night two nights in a row should impress the few friends you have left. You get 9:00 AM until midnight on Sunday to finish off your week, and then start all over.

I’m not sure what the eight-day week improves over the seven-day standard. But it has to do something.

everything you know is wrong

Jerry Remy, announcer for NESN and the Boston Red Sox, has a local chain of Tcotchkes-style restaurants. This bit of trivia – the existence of the chain and the importance of its owner – lives in a weird limbo between “apropos” and “boring,” depending on the audience. People who live in Boston need hear nothing further than the restaurant’s name before instantly knowing every item on the menu and the decor. People who don’t live in the New England area will nod politely – oh, a sportscaster owns a restaurant; how unlikely – and forget the man’s name once the story ends.

Anyhow, there’s one in Logan Airport right next to the Airtran terminal. It used to be a Legal Seafood and it’s about six months from becoming a Johnny Rocket’s. Every space in an airport that’s zoned commercial oscillates between just having been or just about to be a Johnny Rocket’s, depending on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the airport’s proximity to Chicago. I ordered a hot dog with a Caesar salad (because that makes it okay); I got a 3/4-pound beef log drizzled with cheese, relish, and onions. And the side salad. “That’s a big dick,” said the 50-something man behind me, “I mean, a big dog.” If his stories were to be believed, he was on his way to his third wedding, this time to a 70-year-old woman for money; if not, he was really bad at delivering a joke.

The Departures screen had said my flight was pushed back 30 minutes when I entered Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar and Grille; when I exited, it had changed its mind. I have never seen this happen. I have never seen a plane arrive earlier than announced, especially when it had already been posted late. The takeoff window shrank from 60 minutes to 25 minutes, and I had yet to pass through security, and my pre-printed boarding pass reminded me, in its smug little Helvetica, that the plane shut its doors 10 minutes before departure. Trying not to fume, I slipped into the security line, emptying my pockets of metal and slipping off my shoes.

“Put your shoes flat on the belt!”, a guard would announce from time to time. “Only things that go in the bins are laptops and loose items. Jackets, bags, shoes – flat on the belt.”

Ten minutes before departure, I stepped up to the X-ray machine. I walked through. It beeped. “Do you have anyth–“, the guard asked. “My belt,” I said, backing up and whipping it off like Jet Li vs. Billy Chow (watch all the way to the end).

Passing security, I scooped up my wallet, cell phone, ring, loose change, belt, boarding pass, messenger bag, jacket and backpack and began padding down the halls of the Airtran terminal at a decent clip. I made it about one hundred feet before I realized how comfortable the ground felt. Turning, I made it as far as a 65-year-old TSA screener, his Orville Redenbacher hair fringing his face like a halo. Had I been charging the security gate at a full sprint, screaming “Surely the Party of God will be triumphant!“, he might have tripped me. Maybe. “Are you trying to get out?”, he asked.

“I left my shoes there.”

“Just go get the man in the blue shirt,” he said, blue being the TSA uniform. “He’s the supervisor.”

I flagged the man in the blue shirt down. “I left my shoes on the belt! Brown? Size 13?”

Fortunately, I was the only person to have made that mistake (that hour), so security quickly reunited me with my shoes. I made it to my gate, discovering that my flight had been pushed 30 minutes back.

The next morning, waking up in the family homestead in Maryland, my father suggested we take the dog for a walk. As I put my shoes on – Merona, Target’s in-house brand; brown, leather, worn but sturdy – I noticed an unfamiliar notch in one of the soles. Curious, I turned the shoe over. A ragged slit had been torn in the entire sole from left to right, cutting all the way through the rubber to the very base of the shoe. This wasn’t just a hole in the bottom. This was a rough horizontal line that had cut clean through the sole of the shoe and stopped at the leather. The right shoe had been thinking about snitching; the left shoe had made an example of it.

Am I saying that the TSA, in the twenty seconds that I left my shoes unattended, shredded one of them with a government-issue razor blade? No, but I’ll imply it with all my might.

I don’t spend a lot of time staring at the bottom of my feet, but I would have noticed a tear that size when I put them on in the morning. The only time they were out of my control the entire day was when I put them on a conveyor belt (“flat on the belt! the only things that go in bins are laptops …”) and forgot them. And if I hadn’t thrown these shoes in a closet in Maryland, I’d post a picture to show you. This isn’t a puncture; this isn’t a hole that worried itself wide. This is an even cut that runs between the tarsus and the metatarsals, deep and ragged. My shoes bear the scars of malice aforethought.

By an odd coincidence, these are the second pair of Target shoes to disintegrate catastrophically in 15 months. Am I wrong in suspecting a conspiracy? No. I’m never wrong. Especially not about conspiracies.

fight the horde; sing and cry

Hey, guys. I figured out how to save Iceland’s economy the other day. Just off the top of my head. In case anyone’s curious, or anything; I dunno.

Oh, hi, still here? Okay, good.

Iceland can turn its shattered economy around by transforming the island into a giant server farm.

…

…

… no, wait, come back.

This plan sounds insane, of course. But it makes perfect sense for the following reasons:

1. Power Is Cheap. Iceland gets 99% of its electricity from geothermal energy and dams. When you live on an island made of hot springs and glaciers, it’s hard not to find an easy source of power. Drill a hole into the earth and stop when you hit something boiling.

2. Cold Air Is Cheap. Server farms don’t just need electricity, of course. They also need easy ventilation in order to keep the massive racks of computers cool. Fortunately, temperatures in Iceland get no higher than 55° F on average (10° C). And that’s during the hottest portions of July. Forget climate control in your server room: just vent in some outside air.

3. Real Estate is Cheap. Iceland is one of the least densely populated countries in the world (230th out of 238). The interior of the country looks like the moon – so much so that the Apollo astronauts faked practiced lunar exploration on its rocky surface. Build a warehouse in the hills outside Selfoss for pennies.

4. Lots of Overeducated, Unemployed White Guys. The collapse of Iceland’s banks put a lot of college-educated people back on the job market. A few days of retraining, and voila! All the employees you need. Or better yet: don’t bother retraining them. Let them underbid each other. Sit back and take your pick of the most talented / least demanding.

5. Serviced by International Air Travel. Unlike other cold places where real estate is cheap (e.g., the Arctic Circle), Iceland is served by IcelandAir. Icelandair flies to Boston, New York, Seattle, London, Madrid, Stockholm, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam (as well as a dozen other cities). Basing out of Iceland gives you most of the benefits of a global hub like Heathrow at a sliver of the cost.

6. Not Too Far From The Rest Of The World. Iceland’s only a few hundred miles from the UK, and from there it’s a short hop to mainland Europe. Lay a few fiber trunklines across the North Atlantic and you have a new, reliable connection. The project to lay this trunkline between Iceland and UK should be jointly financed, as a way of mending the bridges burned by the Cod Wars.

So, there’s the business case. Iceland’s a cold, geologically unstable country full of unemployed men: an engineer’s dream. Google or Microsoft could expand their global offerings overnight by buying up the Icelandic interior and turning it into banks of servers.

Questions? Comments? Bids on the initial shares will start at one million dollars euros.

Update: Joel points out that Microsoft and Google looked into building Icelandic server farms in 2007. The problem then, of course, was that 2007 was the peak of Iceland’s investment bubble, when real estate was at its priciest. The plan in 2007 was for Google to buy Icelandic real estate. The plan in 2010 is for Google to buy Iceland.

you’ve got no time for the messenger, got no regard for the things that you don’t understand

• Standing in the checkout line at the grocery store on Sunday, I had a sudden clear vision of a slogan. Red and white on a blue background, like a candidate’s bumper sticker or T-shirt. In bold letters it reads:

  2013
  The Year We Stop Trying

  I have no idea what it means. It does not even exist yet. But I crave it.

• News of David Ortiz’s failed drug test hit Red Sox Nation last week. RJ and I watched the drama unfold on SportsCenter in the break room at work. Chris McKendry asked Tim Kurkjian if this news came as a shock to him.

  RJ: At this point, would any name come as a shock?
  Professor (thinking a moment): Cal Ripken, Jr.
  RJ: … wow. Yeah.
  Professor: If we discover that he was juicing, I’m giving up on baseball. I’ll give it a decade to sort itself out, but I’ll stop watching.

• Back to the grocery store, sorry.

  I like little fruit and gel cups with my lunch. The local grocery store alternates between putting Dole and Del Monte on sale; I’ll buy whichever’s cheapest. I’ve also started using coupons, too. A few weeks ago, I cashed in a coupon for 25 cents off any two packs of Dole fruit cups. As the cashier rung me up, she handed me back another coupon for 50 cents off any three packs.

  I understand the marketing theory behind coupons: create brand loyalty by pushing a user over the marginal hump separating them from a new product. Give them a taste for that soft drink, or that frosted cereal. I don’t spend enough money on groceries to make coupon clipping a good investment of time, and I don’t have a lot of room to stockpile food.

  But fruit and gelatin keep, so I used my “50 cents off three” coupon this past week. The cashier handed me a coupon giving me 75 cents off any purchase of $10 or more, courtesy of the generous folks at Dole. Nice of them. She also handed me a coupon for 75 cents off four packs of fruit cups.

  In some dark basement, the medieval twin to my own Internet marketing agency, a hook-nosed drone studies me through grainy surveillance footage. He sees me tuck the coupon behind a refrigerator magnet as I unload my groceries. His greasy fingers play with a stack of loose buckslips of increasing denomination, culminating in “take $7.50 off any thirty-one packs of fruit cups. Expires December 21, 2012.”

  “Go on,” he whispers. “What’s one more?”

I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons

I decided a little while back to swear off talking politics in this weblog. So far I have yet to regret it.

Even as the economy and health care continue to dominate the news, even as nationally televised race incidents transpire two miles from my front door – I’m not tempted. My blood pressure’s lower. I sleep easier. I smile more often. My posture’s improved.

Of course, I still follow all my favorite political sites – IOZ, Popehat, The Agitator – and comment on major stories. So it’s not perfect. But refusing to talk about politics here gets me one step closer to refusing to care about politics. That’ll get me one card-punch closer to enlightenment. Soon I can cash that in for a hot chocolate and a small muffin.

But a friend asked me last night what I thought of some current political news item. So it couldn’t hurt to make a brief but clear restatement of principles.

I crib my inspiration from noted science-fiction author John Scalzi:

I support the right of same-sex married couples to carry concealed weapons. I hope this explains everything.

In Scalzi’s case it might, but in my case I don’t think it does. Not to detract from Scalzi’s pithy excellence, of course.

So, to the above, add for me the following:

I support the right of released Guantanamo Bay detainees to drive unlicensed taxicabs.

I support the right of uninsured immigrants to pay out of pocket for silicone breast implants.

I support the right of women who’ve had partial-birth abortions to buy Hummvees.

I support the right of global bank executives to smoke pot.

I support the right of animal rights organizations to pay their staff below the minimum wage.

I support the right of Baptist preachers to park their scooters on the sidewalk.

I support the right of Wiccans to spank their children.

I support you. In something, I’m sure.

I think that about covers it.

a highly critical review of the first 1:30 of NBC’s Supertrain

(Why only the first minute-thirty of Supertrain, NBC’s notoriously poor 1979 television drama about a luxury train and the lives of its passengers? Because you’re busy people, for one thing – you don’t have time to waste on an entire two hour pilot when you can dispose of a 30-year-old show in less than two minutes.

But, more importantly, I feel the first 90 seconds of this piece of garbage indicate the flaws that would poison the entire product. In the terrible dialogue, shitty cinematography and ludicrous plot of the pre-credits sequence, you see a synecdoche for the entire nine episode disaster. The part stands in for the whole.

Enough metonymy! Enough preamble! On with the pablum!)

N.B. You have T.C. to thank for this)

A Highly Critical Review of the First 1:30 of NBC’s Supertrain

Seriously. Just watch the first one minute and thirty seconds, then press Pause. I’ll wait.

…

…

… back with us? Right. Here we go:

The Opening Shot: From the very first fade-up from black we’re already in trouble. I don’t know what the photographer wanted to convey about this remarkably cramped board of executives. Are they bold captains of industry, leading us into a future full of supercars and superjets? Are they demons of greed, willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of passengers in the name of profit? Neither. This off-kilter crane shot tells us that these men are mere Legos for the viewer to manipulate and discard at will.

The Opening Monologue: Apparently, the “Federal Department of Transportation” (because Winfield, the CEO, doesn’t even pick up the fucking phone if it’s Municipal or lower) has called Winfield in for help on “the pitiful state of rail passenger travel in this country today.” “As a result,” he slurs, “Trans-Allied Corporation will construct, starting from scratch, the first continental railroad built in this country in seventy-five years.”

The Board reacts visibly, none of them having read the memo or remembered the phone call or even asked Winfield why they got called in.

Winfield soldiers on. “An atom-powered, steam turbine machine,” he explains – revolutionary, of course, since lumber and coal certainly aren’t made of atoms. “Capable of crossing this country in thirty-six hours. And coupling that locomotive to the most luxurious, most comfortable best served train of coaches ever designed.” So, four times slower than a commercial jet-liner and, with all those amenities, at least twice as expensive. Hell of a business plan, Winfield.

I’m Not Done Bitching About The Cinematography: As if to apologize for the awkward crane shot that opened this fiasco, every subsequent shot crams as many faces into the screen as possible. When Winfield speaks, we see his aviator-wearing bodyguard smirking behind him and the sides of at least two other people’s heads. As he outlines the extravagance of his plan (“thirty. six. hours“), the camera pans down the greasy, jowled faces of the Board – I swear, it’s like a buffet of gravel painted to look like ham – in claustrophobic detail. If I could rent out a theater and show this on a big screen without getting sued by Trans-Allied, I would, just for the terror these faces would inflict on a 20-foot scale.

Now See Here: Shockingly enough, this plan to lasso three hundred civilians to a nuclear power plant and rocket it across the country on an untested railroad line has a detractor. He sits at the exact opposite end of the table, as detractors must by law, and waits for a break in the rambling before saying his piece.

“You know what I think, Winfield?” he asks. Then he tells us: “You’re letting your psychotic fascination with railroads [sic] lead you into a suicidal gamble with the future of this company!” Heads nod in agreement.

While I’m glad someone in this wood-lacquered closet has an eye for the bottom line I don’t quite get his objection, for the following reasons:

• Isn’t a fascination with railroads understandable? I hear it was rather common among boys who grew up around the turn of the (last) century – machinery and timetables and vast quantities of freight and all that. Maintaining that hobby into one’s golden years might be a bit eccentric, sure, but I hesitate to call it psychotic.

  (Well, all right, Winfield did murder all those people six years ago. Bringing it up now is bad form, though)

• Wait – what the hell does Trans-Allied Corporation actually do? I assumed for the first minute or so that they were already in the railroad business. But this guy’s objections suggest they aren’t (since a “fascination with railroads” would be tolerable – almost a prerequisite – for the CEO of a railroad company).

  So what is it they make? Nuclear reactors? Steel? Scarves? Whatever the hell it is, why did the Federal Department of Transportation give them permission to build a nuclear train and the four thousand miles of track necessary to run it? “Well, Trans-Allied has next to zero experience in construction projects of a cross-continental scale, having invested vast fortunes in skate keys and pet rocks. But they seem so damn determined!”
  

You Forgot One Thing: My Impending Death: But Winfield’s got a honey of a rejoinder lined up. “So you think it’s a gamble, do you? Well, gentlemen, since I can count my remaining years on the fingers of one hand, from my point of view it’s not much of a gamble at all.”

Okay, hold up:

• That’s your idea of reassurance? “Gentlemen, you raise some interesting objections. But I’m five years from the grave! My ideas are clearly sound.”

• Unless perhaps this is some oblique and cynical reference to the inefficiency of all government contracts! It took twenty-five years to complete the Big Dig (from initial planning to project completion), and that was just one city. Can you imagine how long it would take to build a never-before-seen type of rail line, capable of supporting a nuclear reactor that could travel at over one hundred miles per hour, that would cross a dozen states?

  Winfield must be grinning like a fiend behind that bushy mustache of his. “I’m going to lock us into the biggest boondoggle since Teapot Dome,” he’s saying, “and then die before the first rail gets laid! Hope you like federal prison, dicks!”

• If I ever get the opportunity to tell a room full of people that I can “count my remaining years on the fingers of one hand,” I’m only holding up one finger. And I think you know which one.

The Big Reveal: Having dropped that turd right in the middle of the table, Winfield stumbles around to a covered portrait. “I give you – SUPERTRAIN!” The board oohs and aahs at the gorgeous painting.

Again with the nitpicking:

• “Your objections are irrelevant. I’ve already started this hideously expensive project and called this meeting as a courtesy. And by courtesy, I mean ‘slap in the face with my dick.'”

• The Board’s awfully impressed at a painting. Well! I didn’t think his plan was feasible before, but he’s got some concept art. And check out that bitching frame. I have seen the Supertrain and believe; blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.

Roll opening credits. Cue disco theme song. Enter the Supertrain.

I would urge you to watch the rest of the pilot episode, but I assure you it gets even dumber. Intolerably dumb. The pointless board meeting held in Grandpa’s basement is the high point of the first ninety minutes. You’ve seen everything you need to see – bad camera work, stupid dialogue and a plot that can’t shoot straight. I’m amazed NBC let it go five episodes, much less five months.

come down from your ivory tower

The U.S. posted an 8.5% unemployment estimate about a week ago. And whenever a new batch of layoffs hit the news and the streets, my generation does what it was born to do: think about going to grad school.

Now, I have a lot of friends in grad school, business school or law school currently. I’m sure all of them made excellent, informed choices before signing up for fifty thousand dollars in debt and three years of tedium. However, I know a few people who are on the cusp. Should I go back to school?, they wonder. I had so much fun at college. An advanced degree might make my resume look more attractive. I can ride out the recession behind the walls of l’academe, then emerge with a door-busting CV and some phat paper!

All of that sounds tempting. I know I don’t like the looks of the job market today, and I’m safely employed. But before you commit yourself to a thousand hours of research on subjects you’ll never care about, and another thousand hours of papers no one will ever read, I want to make sure you’ve considered the alternatives.

(Please note: the following does not apply to people who need to go to grad school to continue their chosen career, like med students or adjunct professors. This is only a warning to people who think grad school is a great place to hide from a down economy)

Five Alternatives to Getting an Advanced Degree (Grad School, Business School, Law School, etc)

1. Flee The Country

On average, grad school costs over $30,000 per year. Let’s say $35K, since the data in that article’s at least 4 years old and you’ll be paying for most of that $30K by taking on debt anyway. Law schools and the top tier business schools, of course, cost significantly more.

I'll bet they wish they were writing a 50-page paper right now.

For $35,000 a year, you could backpack across Europe. Move to an exotic city, crash at a cheap hostel for a week, then quiz the locals on a good neighborhood. Lease an apartment there for a month. Visit ancient Roman ruins and the remains of Moorish culture. Learn a different language. Try foreign food. Make friends from another continent. Live a little.

Don’t want to spend that much money? Or maybe breadth of travel’s less of a premium? Then go teach English in Thailand. You pay no more than $3000 to $4000 for airfare and program fees; the school handles the rest. They will put you up for a year, give you local support and provide you with a curriculum. You can make a difference in kids’ lives (if that matters to you) and see a completely different corner of the globe (which should).

Grad school’s probably not going to make you a more interesting person; sorry. Visiting another country will.

2. Get Arrested

Call me a cynic, but I doubt that most of the one hundred and fifty thousand or so students enrolled in law school have a passion for the intricacies of jurisprudence. For one thing, it’s a hard subject to get passionate about. Study the tax code if you don’t believe me.

But let’s say you’re not in it for that mythical six-figure paycheck and you really, truly, in your heart of hearts, have a deep and abiding love for the minutiae of the U.S. penal code and all the local statutes. Really? Really and honestly?

Okay, fine. Get arrested.

This generation's Clarence Darrow.

Nobody knows more about the law than the halfway smart guys who show up on the docket every other month. I’m not talking about the chronic fuckups who’ve dissolved their brains with meth or glue or Sterno. I mean the hustlers – the guys living on the raggedy edge trying to make a dishonest buck. The guys who know half the cops in the city by their first name. The guys who have a dozen sob stories to beg for a few dollars but can always come up with bail money.

I was standing in the Davis Square T station the other day when the infamous Spare Change newspaper scammer tried to foist a used newspaper on me for a dollar. I snapped his picture with my cell phone camera. “That’s identity theft,” he started howling. “You can’t do that!”

“Then go get the security guard,” I told him. “I’ll wait.”

The leathery man continued to spit abuse at me, circling at various erratic distances – sometimes a foot away, sometimes yelling from the other end of the track. But never once did he lay a finger on me. I’d just outed him to everyone within earshot and ruined his game for the rest of the morning. But he knew that as soon as he touched me, that was an assault rap. This guy’s probably stood before enough judges in his life to know the legal limits of any scam he runs.

Think too much of yourself to get arrested for vagrancy or petty theft? That’s fine. You can get arrested for securities fraud, embezzlement, or any of a long list of white-collar crimes. I promise you: you will get more practical knowledge about the law after one indictment than after three years at law school.

3. Start Your Own Business

“Oh, but I’m not trying to hide from a down economy,” you tell me. “And I don’t want to go to grad school. I’m looking for an MBA. I want to put myself at least $50,000 to $100,000 in debt so I can spout terms like ‘six Sigma’ and ‘root cause analysis’ without sounding like a jackass.”

Two things. First, there’s no way you can work the words “six Sigma” into a conversation without sounding like a jackass, unless you’re talking about Mega Man. Second, if you want a practical education about what it takes to manage a business, start your own business.

You can learn how to write a business plan online. You can buy or borrow a nice suit and hit up your local bank for a business loan. That hundred thousand dollar debt you were so comfortable taking on just a few minutes ago? Plow that money into online advertising, then work out of your garage or attic making cold calls.

Cynics love picking on entrepreneurs. They tell you that at least one third of all small businesses fail within the first two years, and that fewer than half survive past four years. This is true. You are almost guaranteed to be broke and jobless in four years. Now, raise your hand if you’ve held a desk job with the same company for longer than four years. Keep your hand up if, at the start of year five, you still liked it.

What’s the worst thing that can happen here? That your business will tank after two years, leaving you eighty thousand dollars in debt and without a job? Oddly, that’s exactly the same place you’d be if you’d gone to business school. Only now, instead of being one of 10,000 identical MBAs flooding the job market, you’d have a wealth of local contacts, a resume full of actual job experience, and an interesting story to tell. “Producing training videos for animal shelters? Huh. What was that like?”

4. Write the Great American Novel

Everybody thinks they can write a novel, just like everybody thinks they can talk about economics. As someone with degrees in English and Economics, I find this monumentally offensive. I spent years of my life slaving over meaningless papers just to get the necessary accreditation to say, “the eyes on the billboard in The Great Gatsby are a symbol, ma-a-n” or “I find the entire discipline of Keynesian macroeconomics to be bullshit, and thus won’t bother discussing it.”

That’s not something just any moron can do.

Clearly not the work of an English major

However, history suggests that you don’t need a degree in English to write a novel that people will like. I’m sure there are a few obscure authors who managed to pull it off. Hell, maybe people wrote novels before the existence of B.A. degrees, or in languages other than English (though nothing comes to mind at the moment). And if you’re willing to leap into the risky world of entrepreneurship (#3) or going to jail (#2), nothing’s stopping you from the daunting endeavor of writing a manuscript about People Coming To Terms With Things.

So: what does it take to write a novel? Answer: at least 50,000 words, though 60,000 is probably safer. If you get to the end of your masterpiece and find that you only have 50,000, then go back and stick in an adjective every fifth word. Give some consideration to plot, theme, vividness of imagery and the changing motivations of your characters, but don’t get too hung up on it.

Let’s give ourselves a whole year to write this novel, rather than trying to cram it into a month that already has a major American travel holiday in it. There’s 52 weeks in a year, but let’s give ourselves 2 weeks vacation (just like a real office job!). 50,000 words in 50 weeks means 1,000 words a week. That’s either 1 hour of writing on a given weekday, or 200 words five days a week. I’m even giving you the weekends off.

Don’t get the impression that you can spend the rest of the day loafing around Walden Pond, though. Even if you only spend half an hour every day writing those 200 words, you’ll still need to devote plenty of time to:

• Cold-calling agents;
  
• Filling editors’ slushpiles;
  
• Posting cat pictures on your blog;
  
• Walking to the nearest coffeeshop with your laptop, ordering a non-dairy latte with a double shot of espresso, checking Gawker, and then walking home;
  
• Bitching on the Huffington Post about how little respect America has for the humanities disciplines
  

Unfortunately, publishing companies don’t pay very generous advances for unsolicited manuscripts by first-timers, so you’ll be living off savings or going into debt. But, had you gone to grad school, you would have written at least 150,000 words of research papers, grant applications and pleading e-mails to professors that no one would ever read. Plus you’d be eighty thousand dollars in debt. Now, you’ll be eighty thousand dollars in debt, but you’ll have written at least three novels! And one of them’s bound to be good.

5. Sit On Your Couch, Smoke Weed and Play Video Games

This is a hard one to justify. Traveling abroad enriches your outlook. Getting arrested gives you excellent stories and builds your negotiation skills. Starting your own business puts a bold new face on your resume. Writing a novel puts you in the company of struggling authors worldwide. In all of these cases, you’re trading grad school for something fulfilling.

But staying at home and playing video games all day? Especially once you see the crap that Sony’s coming out with?

The folks at the unemployment office prefer that you at least lie about your attempts to find a new job. And it’ll be hard to return to the job market with an empty year on your resume. So, if you pursue this path, you’ll want to come up with a good cover story. Taking care of a sick relative, perhaps. Or “finding yourself.” Maybe you joined the Peace Corps! They don’t keep records, do they?

Given the pathetic spectacle of a grown human being sitting in their pajamas at 3:30 in the afternoon, the remains of a burrito sprinkled over their T-shirt while they look for something to occupy them between new episodes of Days and reruns of Seinfeld … wouldn’t grad school be a more attractive option?

No.

courtesy of PhD Comics, so you KNOW it's true!

First, nobody cares what you did in grad school. The next employer you interview with – unless they’re an academic – won’t really care about the hours you spent researching some obscure point of Macedonian culture just to finish your Art History paper. And the academic employers won’t want to hire you anyway. Universities already overflow with warm bodies.

Second, there’s nothing that says that a human must constantly strive to improve their status in the eyes of society. We frown on sponges and slackers, but it’s not (yet) a crime. Let’s say you spend a month, or a year, or ten years, pursuing the cheap and visceral thrills of daytime TV and the nighttime club scene. You end up just as bald, choleric and (eventually) dead as the guy who started a family! But you had a better time along the way. And who’s hurt by it?

(Some people start to feel twinges of dissatisfaction after month 3 of a slacker lifestyle. If this happens to you, then consider it your body telling you to wake up and start being productive again. If it never does, then congratulations – you’re no worse than a good 40% of this country)

You’ve already committed yourself to waking up three years from now over $90K in debt and unemployed. Why not enjoy the intervening time? Think how good you’ll be at Gears of War 2 with a thousand days of practice!

. . .

There are, of course, dozens of good reasons to go to grad school. I’m sure you’ve already thought of a couple. But if you’re that scared of e-mailing strange businesses on Craigslist – and it’s horrifying, I know – then don’t run off to academia just yet. There are alternatives. There’s always hope.