Listen to the Rain

A couple weeks ago, greyselke texted me out of nowhere after years--the last time I saw her was when I went to Philadelphia in 2015--and said that she and her family were going on a road trip that would lead them through Chicago and were we free to meet up? We were, and so yesterday the planned day arrived.

sashagee and Laila and I arrived just a little late at Yolk in the South Loop and we waited. And we waited, and we waited, and forty-five minutes later greyselke and family arrived--they were staying up in Skokie and had driven into the city and then taken the L but slightly misjudged the time. Fortunately, despite the larger crowds showing up, 9:45 a.m. was still early enough for brunch that they were able to seat us in a few minutes. I sat with Laila on my right and greyselke's elder daughter on my left, and we caught up over salmon on salad (me) and red velvet French toast (greyselke's elder daughter and sashagee). I was a little worried about Laila around new people, but she's still young enough that it's all the same to her--and later on she really took to greyselke's daughters.

After brunch, we walked over to the Field Museum and met one of greyselke's family friends there, a man whose wife runs the Women and Children First bookstore in Andersonville, along with his two-year-old daughter. She was more talkative than Laila but less active--we were chasing Laila all over the place and trying to prevent her from climbing onto the dinosaur exhibits, but the other girl mostly wanted to be carried. Laila was happy to run around while sashagee chased after her and greyselke talked about our lives:

Me: "So, you work for the hashtag deep state?"
greyselke: "Well, they have health care."

until Laila ran back and wanted me to pick her up, then sashagee got a break. But in the end, it was greyselke's daughters that came to the rescue--they, especially the older one, really took to Laila, holding her hands as she walked between them and arranging a nest where they all sat in each other's laps. Even though Laila couldn't talk to them very well, or maybe because she couldn't so she was pure cute. Regardless, they all had a lovely time in the Pleistocene megafauna section until it grew too late and we had to go home to put Laila to bed for her nap, with a promise to meet up again later in Andersonville.

Laila went to bed late but she woke up early, so when we texted greyselke's family they hadn't arrived yet. We got Laila changed and snacked and walked down to Andersonville, and after a brief pop into Ándale Market for the Carolyn's Krisps cookies that Laila tried and loved at the farmer's market a couple weeks ago, we entered the bookstore and were followed a couple minutes later by greyselke and company! We all hung out in the children's book section and greyselke's daughters read mostly quietly while Laila ran around trying to pull basically all the books off the shelves, and when the store had ten minutes to closing, sashagee picked out a fold-open book for Laila and we bought it and went outside, followed a bit later by greyselke's family friend. His daughter and wife were going home to spend some time together but he came with us to dinner--technically, it was sashagee and I coming with them to dinner--and they followed our suggestion of vegan tacos, especially because it was literally a block away. The only interruption to our meal came when Laila was being rambunctious and I offered to go take her outside so she could run around. greyselke's younger daughter immediately asked if she could come, and I said sure, and then her elder daughter asked if she could come, and, well, the more the merrier, so we all went outside and they ran around and played with gravel near the trees and held Laila's hands as they walked until we were told that the food had come. greyselke's younger daughter didn't originally want to go back, but food drew her in.

I got the vegan chimichanga and it was delicious. greyselke's older daughter got the enchiladas, but she wasn't a big fan of spicy food. Laila got a couple tacos, and a bunch of people got various flavors of horchata. We ate our food, and drank our dranks, and went out to ice cream afterwards and at last had to say goodbye. But we got greyselke's home address so we can at last send her nengajō and hopefully visit her in the future, and she told us if we go to Philadelphia to visit everyone (as we plan to do), to let her know.

Laila got hugs from greyselke's daughters. In the end, they really liked meeting her, and it was lovely to see them all too.

A friend came over last night and I made hiyashi sōmen and wakame and cucumber sunomono with dashimaki on the side. After eating--she said it was all delicious, and the dashimaki is better than my previous attempts--we played more Robo Rally. The game was thrown somewhat into confusion when after a few turns we realized that lasers weren't some special power that required cards to use; every robot shot lasers in front of them during the turn's laser phase. That made the game much more frantic as we started blasting each other repeatedly while moving through conveyor belts. I won eventually, thanks to an extendable arm and a very lucky hand.

Yesterday also I was supposed to meet with someone from Penn's Alumni Outreach office, but she never showed. She was the one who reached out to me, too. Oh well. I wasn't going to give them money anyway.

Lately, I've been watching a show called さぼリーマン甘太朗 (Saborīman Kantarō, it's on Netflix), which is hard to translate because it's a pun. It's obviously based on "salaryman," but with サボる (saboru, "To slack off, to be truant") mixed in. The whole show is full of stuff like that, and part of the reason I'm watching is to see how much of it I can pick up. Like, at the end of every episode, Kantarō talks about his next dessert he's going to eat with the words 神のみぞ知る (kami nomi zo shiru, "G-d only knows"). But this is one sound off from 甘味のみぞ知る (kanmi nomi zo shiru, "Only sweets know"). I watched a few episodes on Monday with veryroundbird and faypire and the central conflict in episode four was based on how 桃 (momo, "peach") and 股 (momo, "thigh") are pronounced the same.

It's definitely ridiculous, and probably funded by dessert shops in Tokyo the same way that Yurukyan was funded by tourism companies. But I like watching shows about food and spotting the puns is good Japanese practice, even if Kantarō himself speaks in a weirdly archaic way. No one nowadays ever says "kanmi."

ACEN is this weekend and I'm a bit nervous. I had kind of forgotten it for months at a time, and even considered not going. But it's my one chance a year to see some people in person, and it'll be a good time. And as is my custom, I'll probably write like 10,000 words about it, so you'll hear all about what happened.

​Last weekend was t3chnomag3’s wedding, so we spent it in Seattle. Here’s how it went:

( Vacation and celebration )

I was tempted not to even write a post about this since so much of it is reminiscing and catching up with friends, but I do go back and read my old posts occasionally. It'll have value for me even if it's boring for everyone else.

Friday
Nothing much exciting happened on Friday. We went to the airport after work, waited for our plane, got on ten minutes late, sat on the runway for half an hour, then took off. About the only memorable thing was the pilot subjecting us to a credit card advertisement halfway through the flight. Is that a thing now, or did we encounter a special case? I really hope it's not a trend that I somehow managed to miss before now...

We landed only fifteen minutes late, ran and got our bag, made it to the train with five minutes to spare, and headed out to our hotel, where we promptly went to sleep.

Saturday
After waking up early (accounting for time change), we lounged around for a couple hours and ate some Kind bars after discovering that the hotel wanted $13 for an omelette, plus $5 if you wanted any meat on it. We didn't eat much, though, because just after eleven we headed out to meet up with spacialk, her husband Damionw, and another couple at Reading Terminal Market for lunch.

I'd been to Reading Terminal Market once before, when I was in university, I was honestly really provincial and almost never got off campus. Now that it was within ten minutes' walk of our hotel, I thought it was a great time to go back and take schoolpsychnerd along! I forgot how incredibly crowded it gets at any time close to when most people have meals, though, and while we managed to get seats and make our way through the crush, it was pretty claustrophobic. After schoolpsychnerd and I picked up Indian food, we ate it and chatted for about half an hour before we moved to the basement of the Bellevue, where there was a food court that was essentially empty. We stayed there until it was time for spacialk's nail appointment, then we all parted ways.

schoolpsychnerd and went out and kept walking on to South Street, a part of Philadelphia filled with a lot of quirky and fun shops. Most of the ones that I remember going to in university were still there--shops like Mineralistic, Armed and Dangerous, Garland of Letters, and Hats in the Belfry. Even Digital Ferret CDs, where I bought most of the music that shaped my college music tastes, is still around, though I only know that after checking the internet because they moved and changed their name. We popped into most of those, checked out the Wooden Shoe (an anarchist bookstore), Atomic City Comics (which had an X-Men arcade cabinet in it! But we didn't have any quarters...) and a thrift shop before it was time to walk over to tweetjoshtweet's apartment.

It was a big longer than I thought--Philadelphia blocks are shorter than Chicago ones, but 15 blocks is still a hike--but we made it with enough time before dinner that we had plenty time to chat. We sat down, ate some veggies and spicy dip, and played a game called We Didn't Playtest This at All. Each game took about 2-3 minutes before someone (or no one, in one case) won, and tweetjoshtweet told us that his board gaming friends will often use it to decide who goes first in the real games (so to speak) that they're playing. After a couple hours, we had to make it to our dinner appointment, so we said goodbye and set out for the subway.

After buying tokens--SEPTA still uses them to my bemusement and schoolpsychnerd's astonishment--we got on the Blue .line and headed out to West Philadelphia to meet up with daveax for dinner. gurami and greyselke couldn't make it, but schoolpsychnerd and I got a tour of his old Philadelphia row house, a century old and in great condition, filled with books and pretty much the model of what I want my house to look like someday. After that, we grabbed the wine, got into the car, and headed out to Sapori Trattoria.

daveax had known the owner for over twenty years, but friendship can't magic up empty tables, so we arrived at a packed restaurant and waited forty-five minutes for a table. When we finally sat down, though, it quickly proved itself worth every second. I didn't take pictures of all the food, to his chagrin, but here is secondo:



And here's the full list:

• Antipaste: Salad with grilled octopus and farro; Tomino cheese wrapped in speck and grilled, with balsamic vinegar on the side; Pork/fennel/provolone sausage with lentils on polenta.


• Primi: Fettuccine with pork and veal; Tagliatelle with tomato and veal ragú; Risotto scoglio with clams, mussels, shrimp, and calamari.


• Secondi: Front: Orata (cooked whole, shown after deboning) with EVOO sauce; Left rear: Veal Stew, mashed potatoes with mascarpone; Right rear: deboned rabbit rolled with prosciutto and herbs, butternut squash and fennel on the side.


• Dessert: Tiramisu, profiteroles, Sicilian ricotta with orange peel.


• Alcohol: 2011 Roero Arneis, Tintero (Langhe); 2011 Valpolicella Ripasso, Secoli (Veneto); 2014 Brachetto d'Acqui, Banfi Rosa Regale (Alba); Cioccolatto cello (owner's private make); Grappa Affinata Gewürztraminer, Marzadro (Alto Adige).

We ended up staying for hours in classic Continental dinner fashion, drinking wine with the owner, another man our friend met outside while on a smoke break, and some of the waitstaff. By the time we left, it was after midnight and nearly everyone had long since closed up and cleaned the restaurant out. It was one of the best meals I've had in a long time and a real example of the benefits of being a regular.

After that, we drove back, daveax dropped us off at our hotel, and went to sleep.

Sunday
We didn't have anything to do Sunday morning and only had to get to lunch at noon, so we lounged around for a bit on Sunday until we decided it was time to head out. We somewhat misjudged the time, though, and ended up on Penn's campus half an hour early. With so much free time, we walked around a bit and I pointed out some places to schoolpsychnerd, like the English department at Bennett (now Fisher-Bennett) Hall, the parking lot where the unnamed food truck that I always used to get spaghetti and meatballs from before Professor Potok's Irish lit class was, Locust Walk, the bizarre new anti-plagiarism signs everywhere ("Nursing--you wouldn't share needles. Don't share your work."), and the LOVE sign. Of course, that led to touristing:



It took twenty minutes to get a picture because of all the other people who were doing the same thing, and by the time we finally did it was almost noon, so we headed over to Houston Hall and Pari Cafe Creperie, formerly a food truck over by the gym and now a takeout place in the building. After some confusion where I couldn't remember exactly where it was, I followed my nose upstairs and we snuck up behind jdcohen.

While we were waiting for greyselke and her husband and daughter to arrive, jdcohen told us about his new job as an attorney for the city of Philadelphia and the bone-chilling terror he now feels when he sees the phrase "any and all records pertaining to." We swapped stories for a while--mostly jdcohen and schoolpsychnerd, as I deliberately chose a boring job--until the others arrived, and then we got crepes. Huge crepes. I remembered them being as big as my outstretched hand, and they were exactly the same as I remembered, just with more varieties. I got a gyro crepe with feta spread, which didn't exist when I was an undergrad.

We finished our crepes and chatted while greyselke's daughter picked all the strawberries and Nutella out of her crepe, and when she was finished when took a tour of the campus. Much of it was as I remembered, including the brutalist high rise dorms that I spent three years in, but there were some changes. The old movie theatre where we watched The Fellowship of the Ring had vanished along with the entire block it was on, replaced with some shops and a black and silver apartment complex that looked like it should also be a moon colony. We stopped for gelato in one of those shops, and I found a treasure on one of the shelves that I was really tempted to steal:



After eating gelato, we walked over to see if the Indian buffet place we ate at so often was still open (it was) and walked by the Chili's we ate at so often, which is now an Asian fusion place called Tarka. greyselke's daughter was loaded with sugar, and demanded that she be allowed to walk everywhere. She lasted a few blocks until her parents put her back in the stroller, and she was hugely unhappy about that for about five minutes until she was out like a light and stayed asleep as we went down to the new riverwalk on the east side of the Schuylkill. According to jdcohen, they wanted to put a riverwalk there but the railroad didn't want anyone walking too near their tracks, so their response was, "Sure, we'll just build it on the river, then."

We walked up and down the river a bit, then greyselke had to leave, so we all said our goodbyes and jdcohen, schoolpsychnerd and I walked the dozen blocks to his apartment past lovely row houses and cute shops. Once we got there and said hello to his wife, we settled down with glasses of grape/cherry juice blend (we bought that basically by the case in university) and loaded up Soul Calibur II to determine whether the soul still burned.

And it did! The situation was pretty much the same as it was a decade ago. jdcohen is better than me and I'm better than schoolpsychnerd, but all of us are close enough that no match was a total stomping unless one of us discovered a long-forgotten cheesy move again. We played that for an hour, remembering old times but with much less yelling nowadays, while jdcohen's wife did some work, then we shut it down and chatted for a bit until it was almost time for our dinner reservations, so we headed out to Brauhaus Schmitz.

I hadn't realized how much I missed German food until I got there. The last time I had it was over a year ago when we were in D.C., and much to my disappointment, there's no German restaurant that's convenient to our apartment in Chicago, so I pretty much dove face-first into the communal cheese plate and the roast beef, sauerkraut, red wine vinegared cabbage, and potato dumplings I ordered. After a delicious and satisfying meal, we said our goodbyes to jdcohen and headed back to our hotel where, other than the people in the next room deciding to sing an aria at 11:30 in the evening, nothing of note happened.

Monday
Unlike the other two days, we got up early and headed straight out because we wanted to get tickets for a tour at Independence Hall. They had some available for 10:40, do we picked them up,and walked over to the Liberty Bell. I remember coming to see it right after they built the current enclosure, but it had been a much more bare-bones affair then. Now there are displays all over about freedom and liberty and, somewhat to my surprise, how slavery of Africans and genocide of Native Americans doesn't have much to do with either of those. There was even a mention of how when the crack in the bell first appeared, it ran right through the word "liberty" on the bell itself. Poetic.

After some photos of the bell, we headed over to Independence Hall, where we got a tour from a ranger that I would best describe as quirky. She showed us around the lower floor, where the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution were all debated and signed, and then led us up to the upper floor and let us look around for a bit until the next tour group had to make it through. After that we still had a bit of time before we were meeting a friend for lunch, so we bought some peppermint tea and went to Washington Square, where some small children were running in circles around the fountain, before heading over to Campo's for cheesesteaks.

We ate as our friend told us about blacking out while waiting for a student to show up for a lesson, and then after we were done we parted ways. He went back home to finish recovering, and we headed over to our hotel to drop some stuff off and sit down for a moment before walking over to the Constitution Center north of Independence Hall. It was new the last year I was in university, and greyselke and I went soon after it was opened, but now they had a huge display of American history and various interactive elements to go along with it. For example, here's president-elect schoolpsychnerd at her inauguration:



There were "no photos" signs everywhere, but the employee standing nearby is the one who asked if we wanted to be sworn in and told me the best place to take a picture, so I had official sanction.

After looking around upstairs, we went to to an exhibit of Jacques Lowe photography on the Kennedy family. The exhibit portrayed it as the first real attempt at photographic mass media management--portraying Kennedy as athletic when he actually had back problems, the whole "Camelot" thing, etc. There was also a neat section about how they created the photos from restoration work on other prints, since the negatives were stored in a vault in the World Trade Center.

Around 4 p.m. we left the Constitution Center and walked to Elfreth's Alley, the oldest continuously-inhabited street in North America and one that's mostly in original condition, barring electrification and installation of other modern conveniences. There was a museum, but I had been led to believe it wasn't open January through March when it turned out it was just closed on Mondays. schoolpsychnerd did get this picture of me while I wasn't looking, though:



Dinner that night was at Morimoto, which also opened the last year I was in university and which I hadn't gotten to go to before. schoolpsychnerd described the decor as like being inside a cyberpunk movie, with low colored lighting and a funky soundtrack and curvilinear white furniture, but the meal brought me back to the sushi we used to get at the sushi shop in Chiyoda. We ordered the bone marrow appetizer, schoolpsychnerd got a roll, and I got the chef's selection. They still put too much rice on their nigiri--the fish should be draped over all the sides, not flush with the rice underneath--but the taste was exactly what I had been hoping for at basically every sushi restaurant I've been to since I came back to America. It was exquisite. Absolutely worth the money if you're ever in Philadelphia.

After we were finished with dessert, we took a brief detour to a CVS to pick up some things and then headed back to the hotel to sleep and get ready for our early flight.

Tuesday
Not much this day for the same reason as Friday. We woke up and, having packed the night before, threw on some clothes and went down to wait for our shuttle bus. While on board, we chatted with the only other occupant besides the driver, a crisis management specialist who bonded with schoolpsychnerd over interventions and told us about her sudden decision to take a trip to Thailand.

Then we got to the airport, got on the plane, and came home.


It was really fun! It was the first vacation we took post-Japan--we've gone other places before, but it's been for an event, like a wedding or one of schoolpsychnerd's conferences. This is the first time we've just been somewhere to go since the last time we went to Tokyo, and if you count times we went by ourselves, it's the first time since we went to Singapore. And we'll probably be back, since we have a lot of friends there and there's a lot we didn't get to see. We missed eating at the City Tavern, or visiting Penn's archeological museum, or going to the Art Museum and running up the steps, or eating dim sum in Chinatown, which admittedly we can do in Chicago but we spent the entire last year of our undergrad days talking about going to dim sum and we never did it.

It was a great trip and I'll be glad to go back. Hopefully sooner than ten years down the line!

Half-Life is 15 Years Old Today

I missed out on the Half-Life bandwagon when it first came out. At that point, I think I was mostly playing Master of Magic or Diablo I or Civilization II as well as various Sierra adventure games, and I'm not even sure I knew about it until later. I had definitely heard about it before I went to university, but I had been trained by games like Doom, Blake Stone, Ken's Labyrinth, Rise of the Triad, Thor's Hammer, etc., etc., that FPSes were basically free and that I could get plenty of fun out of them without paying, so why would I buy one?

That attitude lasted me until I got a shiny new computer and moved away to university, into a dorm room in Hill House, and went through freshman orientation week with the other people on my floor. I don't remember his name, but one of the people who lived really close to my room eventually offered me a burned CD with the words "Half-Life" on it and told me to try it, and that I'd probably like it. So it took it back to my room, installed it later, and gave it a try.

I still remember the sense of anticipation I had on the train ride. How I felt walking about and watching the NPCs after the solitary experiences the other FPSes I had played were. I played a bit of Strife, which actually did have characters who weren't trying to shoot you the whole time in its hub area, but it wasn't like this. And then came unforeseen consequences:

Watch on YouTube

I still get goosebumps when Gordon is stuck in the darkness between dimensions and the only sounds are his breathing and the beating of his heart.

From that moment on, I was hooked. Say what you like about Half-Life introducing the era of narrative-heavy shooters, but it certainly never went as far as the worst excesses of the modern era. One of the points of pride was that even during nominal cut-scenes, like the monorail ride at during the intro sequence, you still retain full control over Gordon. You can bounce around that monorail car like Tigger on speed if you want, and indeed I've done that several times, but that first time, I just took it all in. I even came to Xen without any preconceptions and actually liked it a lot, so I was really surprised when I heard about how much it was maligned. Maybe it was just that I managed to make an incredibly lucky jump where I missed a platform, flew around the island in some kind of crazy orbit and landed in a cave on the lower area, skipping the rest of the jumps and about half the level. :p

I remember the Blast Pit, and hearing that damn tentacle banging around while I slowly crept along trying to stay out of its notice. I remember the first time I saw a headcrab zombie and the sounds they made while I tried to dodge their hideous claws. I remember the soldiers killing scientists, and the black ops ninjas killing the soldiers, and the aliens killing everyone. I remember launching the satellite to stabilze the portal connection to Xen, and the desperate run through the portal to take the fight to the invading aliens and stop the foothold scenario from overwhelming the world.

And I still think the G-Man's real name starts with N and ends with yarlathotep.

After I beat the game, I went out on the web to learn more about it and discovered the fantastic mod scene for it. I downloaded Counter-Strike and played it during its early days, when there was a variety of popular map and game types and before everything was All Shooting, No AWP, de_dust all the time. I remember hiding under a bridge with the VIP we were escorting, trying to figure out where the terrorists were and where we should go, and not wanting to head up the ramp flanked by crates because it was open territory. I also remember coming back later and finding one server that seemed to end up the way I remember Counter-Strike ever after--the two sides would spawn, they would all charge into one corridor in the center of the map, guns and grenades blazing, and 90% of the players would die in the first 30 seconds. The remaining 10 minutes were the last few people hunting each other down. I was almost always one of those people, and occasionally the last one remaining, because really, who wants to sit around and do nothing for nine minutes? A lot of people, apparently.

I moved on to Team Fortress, where I loved playing the engineer because of the sentry gun and the EMP grenades, and I'm still a little annoyed that grenades aren't in Team Fortress 2. That was almost entirely 2Fort, but there I didn't mind it. After all, playing an engineer is all about camping, so a map designed for ridiculous stalemates played to my desire to hide and have my gun murder all those damn [OTHER_COLOR] guys perfectly.

I played a lot of generic Half-Life deathmatch against my friends, too, though the main memories I have are of a map that was an old gothic house, searching for each other amid the rooms and staircases, dropping snarks from balconies, mutually agreeing to ban the gluon gun because it was basically a death sentence for anyone it was turned on...

What I really loved playing, though, was Natural Selection. This was the first game I really played that had asymmetric sides, since Warcraft III didn't come out until 2002 (though I was in the beta--sort of): one side are the humans, who wear armor and use guns like you'd expect humans to, and the other side are aliens are half-based on the Zerg and half-based on the Xenomorphs. Aliens start out as Skulks and can evolve into different forms, whereas humans can get new equipment. Humans also have a commander that gives build and movement orders, whereas aliens are all autonomous and have a hive mind that lets any of them tell where humans are if any one of them can see the humans. What this meant was that most of the time, aliens were more likely to win because they were designed to work even when the players didn't talk to each other, but humans did really well with an effective commander.

The main moment I remember from my hours of Natural Selection was when I spawned into a game in progress where the humans were holed up in their starting room, which was heavily fortified. Wave after wave of aliens came pouring into the room, but the multiple turrets and humans with heavy machine guns always managed to hold them off until, finally the assault stopped. We stood around, looking nervously throughout the room, waiting for something. Then we heard a banging sound out in the hallway.

"Please don't let it be an Onos," someone said over voice chat.

A moment later, a three-meter tall, two-ton armored monster burst into the room, pulping one of the humans who was standing near a turret. As screams and yells of "ONOOS!!" filled the voice chat, we all started firing at the monster that was demolishing our turrets. Unfortunately, we were so intent on the Onos that we didn't think to pay attention to the rest of the aliens, and as more turrets fell, they flooded into the room and started attacking the humans. I didn't even have time to respawn before the teleporters were taken out and the match was over.

Next to Unreal Tournament 1999 (which I should also do a retrospective on at some point), Half-Life is the FPS that I spent the most time with, and one of the ones I have the fondest memories of. Even when the memory is getting pulped by a giant tentacle, or frantically running as uriany drops a ton of snarks down the tunnel I'm hiding in, or lying sideways on the floor watching an alien monster destroy the entire base. Next to Morrowind, it's one of my favorite games. There aren't many other games I've played that I've gotten as many hours of pure fun out of as Half-Life, and to this day a headcrab sits above my desk, perched on my metal skull, watching me.

There's a part of me that's still there in that test chamber, waiting for Freeman to show up for the experiment. A small part, after all these years, but I'm not sure it'll ever leave.

So I went to the doctor, after the latest thing he tried, and he basically said I might just have to live with it, and that he could try stronger medicines, but they'd all have side effects. Since my problem now isn't really much more than annoying, trading it for an equal side effect from a medicine won't put me ahead at all. He also suggested trying an herbal suppliment and seeing if that does anything. Nothing else has worked, so I guess it's worth a try.

Clinton spoke at Rachel's graduation, and while I don't think he did as good a job as Bono did at mine, it was a pretty nice speech. Mostly about how you shouldn't let differences blind you to your common humanity, and how political differences don't have to be big enough to prevent people from working together to do good. Sort of related to the fundamental attribution error, which is my problem when thinking about politics if I'm not careful (simply, I do bad things because of bad circumstances, other people do bad things because they're morally flawed). Pictures were taken, but I don't have access to any of them currently. They're probably on Facebook.