I know a singer-songwriter who thinks handshakes are stupid and refuses to do them.

I’ve never thought they were stupid, necessarily, but I’ve noticed that, in the music world, handshakes are done very often (and very creatively), and it’s taking some getting used to.

When I was in the high-tech marketing world, handshakes were done upon initial meeting and not again. Men and women would use handshakes when introducing themselves or getting introduced. Of course, it was the standard, bland, square, “white” handshake– nobody dared do anything fancier or “hipper”.

I also noticed that engineers and technical people were a lot less enthusiastic about handshakes and tended to want to get them out of the way, and salespeople a lot more enthusiastic about them and seemed to consider them a lot more important. Being part of the “nerd” tribe myself, I’ve never been much for handshakes, but found them useful as a tool to help remember someone’s name when meeting them. I got used to that, and it seemed comfortable.

Then I spent 7 years almost exclusively in the world of stay-at-home moms. I noticed that full-time moms don’t shake hands, even when meeting for the first time. The few (and proud!) of my fellow stay-at-home dads followed the mom’s convention; I don’t think I shook anyone’s hand for years unless it was someone’s husband I was meeting for the first time– following the business convention. So I’d gotten unaccustomed to shaking hands, and also formed the opinion that it was a “guy thing” that remained in the business world as a result of it having been male-dominated for so much of its history.

Then I got involved briefly in politics, and it was back to the business convention: handshakes when you meet someone, and men and women used them. And they tended to be executed with the “salesperson” level of enthusiasm, but again, only on meeting someone.

And, now that I’ve gotten back into the music world, it’s a lot more touchy-feely. Everyone shakes hands, and hugs, at the beginning and end of each rehearsal or gig, upon each casual meeting, even if you’ve just been working together the night before, and often in creative ways– hand slaps, soul handshakes, bumping knuckles, and sometimes combinations thereof.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s because– unlike much of the business world which is more gender balanced– music remains largely a boy’s club. Maybe musicians are just more physical, warmer, and emotive. Maybe it’s because music is a lot more like sales or politics: it’s a people thing. Maybe it’s due to the strong influence of African-American culture in the music world. I have noticed that my use of the square, businesslike “white” handshake seems out of place and even gets odd looks occasionally, so I’m trying to loosen up and get used to the other variations. It’s definitely a different way of doing things, and that songwriter who dislikes handshakes is really swimming against the tide.

Instead of the good old Keynesianism we need– long-term government investment in projects to make the nation energy independent, a masive overhaul of the nation’s public transportation system and electricial grid, dramatic public works and incentives to remake the country from suburban sprawl to small towns and cities surrounded by productive farmland, incubating green businesses, and other things that need to be done anyway and which private industry can’t or won’t do–, each of us gets a couple hundred bucks in the mail and are told to… GO SHOPPING!

“Sure, I know you’re malnourished and need hearty, filling, nutritious food, over the long term, in order to return to healthful self-sufficiency… so here’s a little candy bar right now with lots of sugar. Be sure to eat it right away.”

Pathetic. Insulting. Completely backwards. So out of touch as to be condescending without even trying to be. Marie Antoinette calls out from the balcony in Crawford, Texas, “let them eat stimulus checks”.

I read with humor the recent backroom negotiations Obama is having with Clinton’s donors and supporters. I view it as a great test of his leadership and diplomacy. If he’s able to get the big-dollar Clinton supporters on board, and unify the Democrats (isn’t that like herding cats?) then I think it’ll show that he’s got what it takes to unify the whole country, and negotiate with world leaders and corporate honchos and heads of state.

After volunteering in the schools, I noticed that girls do not perform nearly as well at math as boys do. It’s a statistically-significant difference, at least in the small samples I’ve been working with.

After studying it a bit more, I’m convinced that it is entirely cultural and has nothing to do with biology. Correlation does not infer causality.

There is, however, something that boys are definitely culturally (and perhaps biologically) predisposed to, that girls aren’t, and which more than adequately explains their proficiency at math: team sports, particularly the pro-level spectator variety.

If you are a kindergardener or first-grader who loves watching NBA basketball, you are counting by 2’s and 3’s up to and often over 100, nearly every night. You are also calculating differences between scores, on the fly, every few seconds. If you love NFL football, you as a young child are adding by 7’s, 3’s, 2’s, and 1’s, all day every Sunday and as late on Monday night as your parents will let you stay up. If you love baseball, you are adding and subtracting every night too, and also calculating percentages and ratios. Plus every morning in the newspaper you are poring over columns of numbers. Eagerly. Out of pure love of the game.

Anything you do a lot of, and love doing, you will become skilled at. I knew a few girls when I was a schoolkid who were very good at math– they also enjoyed playing a lot of card games.

My daughter does not like sports, or card games, but she is very competitive, and it drove her nuts that the boys were so far ahead of her at math. After finding some math games that she enjoyed, she worked on it and now she’s completing assignments at pretty close to their level. I hated sports as a kid, and still do, and I was always way behind the other boys at math (and still am). I didn’t develop any proficiency at math until the Apple ][ was invented and I got one and started programming computers. A few years ago, when playing around with embedded programming and device drivers, I could add and subtract in base 16, and to this day I can still rattle off powers of 2 from 0 to 65536.

A friend here in the Bay Area bought a house in Bulgaria as an investment a few years ago, knowing that they were about to be admitted into the EU and the price of property would go up dramatically. He was right; it did. He’s considering selling it to pay off his Bay Area house with the profits.

Why would he stay here? Why not move to Bulgaria when the shit hits the fan here?

He said, when the shit hits the fan, this will BE Bulgaria. No need to move, there will be tons of work here, more than there will be there.

Huh?

What he meant was, cheap wages are kind of like strange loop. If your country falls apart, and your currency devalues, then you are more attractive as an employee for global corporate capital, because you’re working cheaper.

Living here, he reckons, with tons of work that Euro-based corporations are eager to pay for with worth-less-than-toilet-paper dollars, while living in a paid-off house, will be a better deal than living in Bulgaria, which will be much more affluent by comparison, and with fewer jobs available.

When I see crap like this, I keep thinking of the old adage:

Be nice to your kids. Someday they’ll choose which nursing home you get to die in.

Within only a decade or two, those "loiterers" will be lawyers, doctors, senators, CEO’s, and congressmembers. And I’m sure those "mosquito" waves will still be echoing in their ears when it comes time for them to vote on, say, whether to continue to fund Social Security for you short-sighted morons.

It’s a well-known phenomenon that when someone finally gets out of a miserable, bad, dysfunctional long-term relationship, their “rebound” partner tends to be the most wildly polar opposite of the person they were stuck with.

This is true in politics too. It’s all human nature, it’s all relationships, after all.

After suffering through the paranoid, vindictive, mean-spirited, power-hungry Nixon, who did we elect? The most honest, friendly, smiling, soft-spoken, reassuring, and soft-hearted person in politics at the time: Jimmy Carter.

Today, after 8 years of small-minded, petty, aggressive, negative, parochial, and divisive Bush, I will predict that we will elect, in a landslide this November, the most hopeful, relentlessly optimistic, inclusive, uplifting figure that has strode into the political arena in the last 40 years: Barack Obama.

I wasn’t a huge Obama fan to start with (Kucinich was my man, then Edwards as a second), but I’m sold now. The guy is like a dream come true. Finally, waking from our 8-year-long nightmare, someone who can pull this nation together in hope and positive energy. He’s such a huge relief after dealing with Bush, he brings tears to people’s eyes.

Earlier on, I though Clinton was a shoo-in becuase so many people (myself included) had become nostalgic for the peaceful, prosperous Clinton years. Life was so much better then! I predicted that people would pull the “Clinton” lever just because of that, and many perhaps are doing exactly that this primary season.

But Obama isn’t just better than Bush, or a return to the better days of the Clinton administration. Obama is the complete opposite of Bush in almost every possible way, and with a vision and optimism to propel us forward. That’s very, very compelling.

I think Obama could turn the country around through sheer force of charisma, optimism and “yes we can” inspirational spirit. I think Clinton could do it too, being the technocrat she is, and especially with her hubby hanging around the Oval Office and knowing probably better than anyone else how the machinery of government works and how to operate it.

Either way, we win. But right now, my money’s on Obama. I think he reaches people in their hearts, and that’s where votes come from.

I find it interesting how much blogging has changed over the last 6 or 7 years.

I think the “dear-diary”-style narcissistic blogging of the LiveJournal variety– publicly venting personal inner dialogue (um, like this blog for example)–, is dead. Nobody wants to read that shit anymore.

But what’s taken the world by storm, is the “Citizen Journalist” and “Town Meeting” style of blogging– like DailyKos. Millions of comments, hundreds of thousands of members, it’s impressive.

Blogging has grown up from being a purely ecocentric, individualistic expression, to being a form of civic discourse, information exchange, activism, and force for social change.

Ironically, I’m going in the opposite direction, and it’s fine with me to be going somewhere that everyone else is leaving.

I haven’t done much with individual expression and have instead spent a lot of time on political blogs in the civic square. I’ve had enough of that, and now I’m more interested in ranting about my own personal thoughts.

One of the more annoying tasks I have to deal with, is managing people’s expectations.

I always make a point of warning people, ahead of time, that I suck.

I have learned to do this through a lifetime of hard experience. I also have learned to play it a lot cooler when starting any new thing.

The problem is that I tend to enjoy learning new things and jumping into totally new fields. I can hide my enthusiasm for a little while but not too long. After a while it comes through. And then, despite all my warnings, people decide that I’m much better than I am. They mistake enthusiasm for comptence, or even aptitude, when I have neither. As soon as I start to get a clue what I’m doing, the inevitable disaster is set to follow. Because then everyone’s expectations start to rise. Even though I told them I couldn’t meet them.

And then, finally, every time, the awful moment eventually comes when they realize, hey, this guy sucks. He has no idea what he’s doing. He shouldn’t be doing this. He’s totally wrong for this. What were we thinking?

It annoys me every time this happens, because, I warned them. I suck. I’m not meant for this. I can’t really do this; I’m just faking it because I happen to be good at faking it. And I told everyone I was faking it. But every time they are surprised. Stop being surprised! And don’t dare be disappointed either. I told you I suck.

One of the nice side-effects of the world moving so fast, is that if you’re the kind of person who tends to be way ahead of their time, a fast-moving world presents the chance that your “time” may come while you are still alive, and even young enough to enjoy it and benefit from it.