Dr. Sour Puss

So despite spending most of my free time this winter training for a marathon, I did manage to get up to Stevens Pass last week. Stevens is 2 hours away in the Cascade mountains. We're having record snow this year. I went up with three of my best friends: Kim, Darius, and Kevin. Darius got a helmet cam for Christmas and we had some fun with it. Kim, Me, and Kevin Sometimes I just can't believe they serve alcohol at ski slopes. Especially to a guy like me who clearly looks like he's going to hurt himself out there. Marathon training update: I just finished my first half-marathon! And it felt really good! Check me out here.

So I had no idea what to expect. The 43rd district of the Washington State Democratic Party is known for being very active. I remembered going to the caucus in 2004 and to various meetings all held to strategize ways of unseating He Who Cannot Be Named. I was impressed and energized that so many in my own community were as outraged as me and it made me glad to call a place like Wallingford home. But this was 2008. I had my own fairly strong preference for presidential candidates and I knew Obama had a shot here; still, I hadn't seen any local polls, there were only a few posters around town for Obama, and I knew that the possibility of America's first woman president would galvanize a large segment of potential Democratic caucus-goers. My first clue came on Friday night. "Did you hear about the rally? Fil tried to go and couldn't even get near Queen Anne." "The same thing happened with my coworker, he said people were so packed outside that you could not move...

I just saw the film The Namesake , after having read the book last year. It is an incredibly moving story of an Indian man who comes to America as a graduate student and raises his family here where they struggle to balance their own cultural identity with the pressures of assimilating into the United States. The thing that is so remarkable about the story is actually that it is so unremarkable, having been repeated tens of thousands of times by many different Indian families, including my own adopted one. I think Mira Nair, the director (who also directed Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala, among other films) did it justice. She has such a way of capturing on film whatever it is that makes India such a beautiful, complex place. And she does this by portraying scenes on the street with a realism that is at once ordinary but also astonishing. So I finished reading the book Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts on the plane back from India. It's this mostly true story, ...