Civilization IV and Age of Empires III (or AoE 3 in geekspeak) were recently released and I’d like to give them both a spin. But I know if I do that, work on the book will grind to a halt. Because it’s impossible to play “a little” of either game. When you sit down to play one of these games, you can actually feel hours of your life being sucked out of you. It feels kind of weird at first, but you get used to it. Hmm…maybe if I just play on weekends…no, no, I must not give in. But once the book is done, I’m going to take a month or two off of any writing project and get my game on (but don’t worry, blogging will continue).

It’s great to see Democrats playing hardball with the Republicans. Today’s strategic decision by Minority Leader Reid to call for a closed-door Senate session refocuses the media’s (and the public’s) attention on the war, just when the Bush administration was hoping to take back control of the news cycle. I’m beginning to admire Reid’s skills as a tactician. The focus on Iraq comes at an appropriate time, given the fact that October was an especially bloody month for American forces stationed there. The Republicans will undoubtedly try to portray this as a Democratic “trick” or “stunt,” but I think most people are beginning to feel like they were bamboozled into this war. And the Democrats are learning how to use that public frustration to their advantage.

The other day, I was going through some of my e-mail archives. I’m something of a digital pack rat and I tend to save e-mails that I think I might want to read again someday. My archive goes back to 1998 (it would go back further, but I seem to remember some kind of system crash that caused me to lose a bunch of older messages) and going through it has evoked a mixture of nostalgia and embarrassment. There are the tentative e-mail exchanges with potential employers while I was still a law student, the back-and-forth between my brother and I as we planned for a trip to Los Angeles, the silly little newsgroup flame wars I got into as a way of proving how intelligent and clever I was, the messages from the med student on whom I had a galaxy-sized crush (and my carefully composed and wincingly overearnest replies), the random correspondence with friends and family as we made plans for a dinner or a weekend visit or a marathon evening of gaming on my computer, the messages from friends and colleagues I haven’t seen or thought of in years.
When I’m gone, I like to think that my e-mail archive will be the best available record as to what kind of person I was. It does a pretty good job of recounting the transitory ephemera of my adult life, as well as illustrating the more immutable passions and eccentricities that made me…well, me. Maybe some distant descendant will collect all of this crap and make a school report out of it or something.

I have tickets to see The Go! Team at First Avenue, so I’ll try posting a longer entry later. But before I go:
Is it wrong to grin and maniacally rub your hands while reading the news?

The Village Voice had a recent article on disability studies and how the field is gradually gaining recognition in colleges and universities. I’m not sure why the Voice treats this a new development. There have been several well-known scholars who have written extensively on disability theory for many years. I have mixed feelings about identity studies in general; there seems to be a lot of time spent navel-gazing while not really engaging with society in an effort to create change. But a desire for a better society that is grounded in the theory and history of a group’s oppression can be a powerful thing. Since people with disabilities inhabit every circle of society, it would make more sense for disability not to exist as a separate academic ghetto, but instead it should infiltrate other fields such as literature, the social sciences, etc. Others might disagree with me, but we spend so much time fighting for inclusion that it seems counterintuitive to create a wall around our own academic playground.