So, da partner reported this evening on a high-larious conversation with a colleague at the cocktail hour for “young people who” (ahem) “think about what cities might could look like in…” (say) “ten years or so.”

Said cocktail hour was held at “the baker” restaurant, at the local HQ for A National Bank That Has Been Recently Implicated In the Financial Crisis.

As I was not present — and this is is key to the whole point of the story* — I cannot report on the actual substance of what was said. Instead I shall have to report on the sense of what was said, by one of da partner’s colleagues at A Mid-Size Private Consulting Firm:

“No, I like Sacramento.  No, really, I do.  But as for people that are from here — what do they call themselves, anyway?  Sacramentans?  In any case, what I really want to know is, does anyone actually know these people?  It’s like you have to marry someone to get invited to their parties.”

This was, almost word for word, what was said once by the brother of someone I went to high school with; his sister (my friend, I mean, the one I went to high school with) was (by happenstance) the first person to whom I ever came out of the closet.  The last I heard she had dropped out of Humboldt State and was working as a fry cook for a hunting lodge on the back side of Mt. Whitney.

In any case, this was also, by happenstance, almost word for word what was also said once by the sister of one of my other friends from high school.   To be quite precise about the matter, I believe her words were “your friends are so tight you have to marry into that shit.” 

Needless to say, this is a woman observant about many things, not the least of which include the quickness with which her sister’s friend’s included her in invitations to parties and suchlike.

It was also — by, I am sure, the merest coincidence — a remarkably accurate paraphrase of what was once said by Joan Didion:

“Am implacable insularity is the seal of these towns.  I once met a woman in Dallas, a most charming and attractive woman accustomed to the hospitality and social hypersensitivuty of Texas, who told me that during the four war years her husband had been stationed in Modesto, she had never once been invited inside anyone’s house.  No one in Sacramento would find this story remarkable (”she probably had no rellatives there.” said someone to whom I told it), for the Valley towns understand one another, share a pecular spirit.  They think alike and they look alike.  I can tell Modesto from Merced, but I have visitied there, gone to dances there; besides, there is over the main street of Modoest an arched sign which reads: “Water - Wealth - Contentment - Health.”  There is no such sign in Merced.”

*I am sure that da partner’s colleague would not have said such a thing if I were present.  It helps to have married outside the clan.

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A little background: I work in cubeland.  As in, like the Terry Gilliam-style cubeland where, when you ask somebody where they work, they reply by telling you the code number stencilled onto the concrete pillar nearest their cube (mine is something like 2-B-8, just to give you the flavor). 

One of my co-workers is the community-minded type.  As in, he organizes trips to Smart-n-Final to purchase cheap candy for afternoon snacks.  Or rather, he organized his last trip today, since today was the last full paycheck any of us will receive for the next 18 months.  Regardless, my co-worker — we’ll call him “the Swissman” just for S&G — stores this candy on a nice mid-century wooden side table (with the kind of sleek-and-modish bronze footings that certain faggots I know in Boston would kill for) outside of his cube.  Which is handy for those of us who walk by, on our way to the bathroom, or to a meeting, etc.  I, for instance, find myself partaking of half-handfuls of M&Ms approximately twice a day (twice, I said.  I am trying to get back to my pre-Texasss figure, after all), the better to facilitate re-coding, and aggregating, and chi-squaring, and all of the lovely things I do to try and make the roads safer for the good people of this state.

Because we buy candy in bulk, it sometimes happens that the purchase choices do not precisely coincide with consumption patterns.  Or to say the same thing more plainly, we often end up with boxes of Chewy Lemon Heads, and scads of Bazooka gum, left over.  So the Swissman — being a generous fellow — recently decided to share the gleanings of our candy runs with the other folks who work at A Large State Agency.  So he put the candy, and the table, out in the hallway, with a nice sign saying “free candy to a good home!” tacked to the government-issue temporary wall above.  What happened next was (approximately) as follows:

Civil Servant #1 (CS1): “Dude, they took the table.”

CS2: “What?”

CS1: “They took the table.”

CS2: “The took the table?”

CS1: “They took the table, and left  the candy.”

CS2: “You’re shitting me.”

CS1: “No, I am not shitting you.  Check it out.  They took the table and replaced it with a chair.  And put all the candy on the chair.”

CS2: “You’re shitting me.”

CS1: “No, I am not shitting you.  And if you say ‘you’re shitting me” one more more time I’ll report you to HR for creating a hostile work environment.”

CS2: “Actually, the protocol is to report to your immediate supervisor, then to the enforcement officer.  Who, for the record, is not in HR.”

CS1: “Whatever. I just want my f*cking table back.”

CS3: “What happened?”

CS1 and CS2, in unison: “They took the table.”

CS3: “Why would they do that?  What did your sign say?”

CS1: “It said ‘take the free candy’ not ‘take the free table’.”

CS3: “I can’t believe they would do such a thing.  Hey, (CS4), did you hear what happened?”

CS4 (taking off his headphones): “No.  What what happened?”

CS1, 2, and 3, in unison: “They took the table!”

CS4: “They took the table?  Yo, (CS5), did you hear what happened?”

CS5 (putting on his headphones): “I heard they took the table.”

CS3: “Perhaps we should organize a search party?”

CS1: “Dude!  I want my f*cking table back.  The sign said ‘free candy,’ not ‘free table’.”

CS2: “That was a nice table.”

CS3: “Have you told the branch chief that they took the table?  Maybe he could write a memo to the deputy director?  Because taking tables is definitely not cool.”

CS1: “Dude, I just want my table back.”

CS6: “Helloo, everybody.  And how are things today?”

CS1, 2, 3, and 4 (but not 5): “They took the table!”

CS6: “They took the table?”

CS1, 2, 3, and 4 (but not 5): “They took the table!”

CS6: “Perhaps you should organize reconnaissance mission, to discover new location of this table.  Then perhaps we could negotiate with these thieves for the return of our table.  Because the stealing of a table is, how shall I say, not acceptable.”

(over the cubicle wall separating the “professional” staff from the “support” staff”): CS7: “Have you checked the library?”

CS1, 2, 3, 4, (not 5), and 6: “What?”

CS5 (taking off his headphones): “Check the library.  The table is in the library.”

CS1, 2, 3, 4, and 6: “What?”

Et cetera, ad nauseum.

(oh, and for the record?  The table was, in fact, sequestered in the library. With the candy.  To kill Dr. Lucky from an insulin shock).

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“Kill Doctor Lucky.”

Any game where the currency consists of “spite coins” is feckin’ dope.

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So I went to a conference recently for, um, work.  And it was in, well, a big city somewheres to the east of here along US 50, where there was going to be a MUCH bigger, MUCH more important confab about a week later.  As in, a really big and important event today. 

Anywho, my presentation went well.  It turns out that having 6 years of drama in middle and high school is way better training than toastmasters. 

Just sayin’.

Otherwise, I spent the rest of the conference soaking up the latest findings on…my new discipline.  And I came away with the following observations:

That, firstly, everything you’ve ever heard about interest group politics in (ahem) that city where those sorts of things take place is pretty much true.  My room, for instance, was situated just down the hall from the hospitality suite put up by a trade organization.  They provided oodles of canapes, but more to the point an open bar.  The bar was overseen by a very pretty young thing.  Whose shift ended at 10 or so.  After which the bar was pretty much left open, as far as I could tell.  It was still open when I woke up the next morning and walked past to get breakfast.

For the record, I did not partake of these delights.  Seeing as I now work for the people of this good state, I did not think it was appropriate to spend my time boozing it up with a bunch of I’m sure very nice people who happened to be peddling construction expertise.  I also did not particularly want to drink with a bunch of men talking about the “good old days” when the barmaids stuck around after their official shifts were over to “do a little dance, on the catwalk.  Yeah, on the catwalk.” (can I just say how much I love, love, love that that shit has gone meta?  As in the fact that the bloglinks are now to commentary on the viral videos constructed out of distorted reverence for the original?  We aren’t even bothering to comment on the signified object itself, nor even to semioticons of the signified object, but yet to commentaries on the signified signifier.  In a word, this shit is now Talmudic). 

Where was I?  Ah, yes, the good old days.  When interest group patronage was just out there in the open.  Unlike, say, today.

Oh, and did I mention that I was staying at the Marriot?  The only thing that annoys me almost as much as giving money to Mormons is using taxpayer dollars to give money to Mormons.

Again, just sayin’.

The second thing I noticed at this conference is that engineers — even if they can come up with wunderbar paper titles, simply can’t do math. 

Now, this may be obvious to some of you.  But I should note here some things you might not know about yours truly.  To wit: for the past 15 years, I have labored under the impression that, as a social scientist, I was quite nearly by definition not as good at math as “hard” scientists — such as engineers.  This impression stems partly from the fact that I came within an ace of flunking algebra the first time I took it (in 8th grade — betcha didn’t know that, didja?); partly from the fact that when I took statistics as an undergraduate it was so poorly taught that I literally took a ball-peen hammer to my calculator at the end of the semester and smashed the shit out of that thing; and partly from the fact that when I took statistics again as a graduate student (with a new, fancier, calculator) I had to come to class with (i) two tylenol, (ii) a diet coke, and (iii) a large cookie just so’s I could make it through.  Plus which, when one chooses (as I did) to write a (largely) qualitative dissertation, it tends to leave one with a rather skewed sense of perspective regarding one’s ability to do statistics.

The point of all this is, I went to a very fancy conference with a lot of really well-paid engineers and spent a good portion of a number of sessions sitting in the back of the room frankly slack-jawed (or “gathering gawp-seed” as Vollman might put it) at the bizarre contortions they were doing with their statistics.

Oh, and did I mention that their methodology was for shit?

On a related note: why on earth does anyone do these utterly ridiculous* exercises in “consensus research?” — which, while I’m at it, does any other discipline do this?  It basically involves iterated panels of experts, whose comments are sometimes analyzed according to focus group techniques but are more often simply given surveys (some of which aren’t even open-ended, damnitall).  What does this sort of thing accomplish, really?

I mean, there’s a unit of analysis issue, to start with.  Most of these studies appear to be studying some “thing,” about which they go and gather expert opinion on, instead of analyzing the thing in which they are interested.  This makes for a nice problem that you then studying elite discourse, not the thing itself. 

Then there’s the fact that what this accomplishes is an elaborate exercise in induction.  Which is fine when you’re studying something (a) genuinely new, and (b) the possibility and/or appropriateness of deductive hypothesis testing is difficult.  Both of these things were true when this particular (ahem) methodology was originally developed, to figure out just when in pity’s name we were to do about the threat of nuclear Armageddon. 

However, neither of these conditions holds for the subject of the conference, nor for any of the specific sub-topics to which I heard this method applied (ex: why young men are such shitty drivers, and what we can do about it).  We happen to have plenty of historical and contemporary data, as well as (some) theory.  Even, perhaps, more to the point, we live in a world with plenty of “pre-existing” variation amenable to quasi-experimental analysis, even leaving aside those moments when one might dare to engage in such “rigorous” experimental methods as are allowable within human subjects protocols.

This leaves one to conclude, I assert, that what these iterated expert panels accomplish is not, in fact, the creation of new knowledge.  Nor even the organization of existing disparate ideas.  Rather, what they accomplish is the creation of elite consensus.  Which may or may not be a desirable outcome, in a community of researchers ostensibly committed to the discovery and broadcase communication of new empirical facts and theoretical relationships. 

Or, to put the point in plain language.  Is it better to achieve “elite consensus” around a matter such as graduated driver licenses, even when the elites ignore certain facts on the ground, such as that GDL accomplishes (among other things) the postponement of crash risk to older cohorts and not, in fact, a wholesale reduction in lives lost?  Or is it better to have situations where the elites disagree, leading to such situations as the author experienced today, when Jasper McJackass sounded off on who “experts” can “fund a study to find pretty much anything,” and so “really, it’s all just political correctness?”

Tough question, that.  I’ll leave it for extra credit.

*By “utterly ridiculous” I mean, of course and quite precisely, stupid.

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I will have to reply that, sadly, I was not in Washington DC.

Nor, even more sadly, was I gathered with friends beside a radio, or a television, or a computer, to listen to the inauguration speech that was equal parts repudiation of our most recent incumbent’s moral flatulence and hearkening to the best reserves of American rhetoric.

Instead, I was doing the people’s business, in a sunless conference room in a bizarrely ill-designed building in Natomas where people like this normally confer. 

Grandchild: “Pappa Pimpgnostic, what were you doing when President Obama was inaugurated?”

Me: “Sweetie, on that great and glorious day when this nation first elected a black man to the presidency, your grandaddy was sitting in a room where the Committee on Dental Auxiliaries meets quarterly.   And while I was listening to some jackass sound off about how you can find lots of ‘experts’ to ‘come up with a study that says anything’ and so ‘really it’s all just politics,’ your grandaddy was thinking about a line he had heard somewhere, about measuring out one’s life with coffee spoons.”

Hope all ya’ll have celebrated this great and glorious day in appropriate style.

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Then either:

a.) something is seriously wrong with the dispatching system in the City, or

b.) white racial privilege is dead, dead, dead in San Francisco.

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In my “original” discipline, we like to play a party game.

It’s called “ASA paper title: real? or utter horseshit?”

This is, of course, best experienced as a drinking game.  Extra points are awarded for any title identified with such words as “meta,” “reflexive,” “Foucauldian,” (though _not_ Marxian, Weberian, or Durkheimian), and “participatory.”   Depending on the year, phrases such as “cultural capital” or “human capital,” or “Wacquantian” can either result in positive or negative points, depending on the fad du jour. 

It turns out that this game can be played with other disciplines.  Imagine my surprise upon discovering that I will be sent to Washington DC to a conference containing such (unintentially?) delicious paper titles as “standardized stiffness measures for compaction control,” or or “vibratory roller-measured soil stiffness and resilient modulus testing?”

Apparently engineers really _do_ know how to talk dirty.  Who knew?

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You know you’re an adult, when you can define for your own mother the meaning of the word “t’aint.”

As in “t’aint your balls and t’aint your ass.”

This in response to your father noting (a) how painful it is to sit down for an extended period of time because of the combination of (b) the catheter that (c) they inserted after the seed implantation for (d) the prostate cancer.

I leave it to the reader’s imagination just how, precisely, it might have been necessary to define, for one’s mother, the word “t’aint.”

If you are of a mind to send your regards to my father in this, his time of recovery, you can best do so by showing up on Saturday to vote for the John Burton slate for Democratic Party Chair in the 9th A.D. Democratic Central Committee election, this Saturday the 10th of January at SEIU Local 1000 HQ (my union, beyotches!).

Because, yes, we are that sort of family.  Cancer be _damned_, it’s politics that matters.

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Over all of these tales drifted an odor of absentia*: absence as told, absence by omission, and absence in fact.  It only struck me later that each form of absence constituted both story and family. 

Husband #1 looms large in the Thanksgiving mythology, but always in respect of his absence.  Even in those moments when he returns to the stage, it was always in the context of his initial, horrific departure.   Those stories come from my mother more often than from others, to be sure — upon whom the shadow of his absence fell most sharply, I guess.  But that he departed is brought up early and often.  So, perhaps, to demonstrate that it was in leaving that he made his presence felt, and in leaving that he created space for the entrance of Husband #2 — which is to say, for the appearance of Sons #3 and #4.

Then there is the absence by omission — the absent of the not-even-talked-about.  Husband #3, recently departed, was not discussed at the dinner table.  Partly to spare his widow, to be sure.  But also, in my view, because Thanksgiving is the holiday of who is present, rather than the holiday of who is not (for that we have Memorial Day, right?  Or maybe, as various academics have pointed out, it’s because Americans simply don’t “do” death anymore).  Similarly, son #2 was never mentioned, despite having passed away more than a decade ago; he does not appear in the tale of the flaming arrows, nor in the myth of the errant Volvo — even though he must surely have been present.  Like Branwell Bronte, we know that they were there, just not in the picture as we see it.

Finally, there is absence in fact — absence, in fact, as told in oftentimes hilariously detailed repetition.   These are the characters who are most definitely, palpably, not present.  Such as Husband #2 (the Pentecostal butcher) who spent all of Thanksgiving Friday watching football, in his trailer, not 70 feet from where we played mah-jong.  Or Son #1’s wife (a.k.a. TBYAL, known to introduce herself in public as “yes, I’m the one you’ve heard about”); this year she was hove off somewhere on an island near Seattle with her cats and her birds, her turtle and her rats, her hamsters and her oppossum.  These are the people who by their absence make the family gatherings possible.  Which sounds horrible, and is — until one stops to consider what happens when they do show up.  As TBYAL did, announced but not invited, at my grandmother’s house this Christmas eve.  Why?  Because her daughters were spending it with their biological family — who are evidently so unrepentently nasty to her that she chose instead to spend the feast of our Lord’s nativity with her husband (from whom she resides separated by 1000 miles), her mother-in-law (who is civil to her, because that is the way she was brought up to be), her father (for whom she ostensibly moved those 1000 miles, to be with in his widowhood), and his new wife (to whom TBYAL refers as “that woman”).  

TBYAL was overhead that evening — and I use the passive voice deliberately here, as it would appear that she was talking to the air — to say “Thank God I can have my girls with me next year so that they won’t have to endure another Marie Callendar’s Thanksgiving.”

“That woman” later asked my grandmother point-blank, “So, do you like her?”

We’re seriously considering inviting TBYAL’s father and step-mother to Marie Callendar’s next year.

*Which smells less like hysteria than wisteria.  And like the latter, has a tendency to attract stinging wasps.

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