Finished reading Cryptonomicon, at 1152 pages probably the most massive book I've read since giving up on Robert Jordan's unending Wheel of Time series.

Our teachers at Lowell Elementary — the public grade school where my classmates and I were first sequestered into an anticipatory elite — rewarded the students who read the most pages each month. The top readers in the class got to go out for ice cream, or something, with the teacher. The public library had a similar program during the summer. And then there was the inescapable presence of Book-It, which had partnered with Pizza Hut to give promising students ludicrously undersized pizzas.

Embarrassingly, this reward system (and my inevitable competition with Graham, a Hardy Boys fan) precipitated my long addiction to Boxcar Children books, which I continued to read long after they'd become tedious and easy — just to bolster my page count.

But overall the effects were positive. Because the pages didn't count until you finished the book, I became bullheaded when it comes to reading, refusing to give up on any even remotely promising work of fiction. If I remember correctly, the only novels I've ever quit reading halfway through are Gump and Co. and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

And whenever I finish an especially long book, I feel absurdly satisfied. Part of me still expects some sort of reward for reading so many pages.

That's how I felt after reading Cryptonomicon. Stephenson takes advantage of his space, briefing the reader on whatever interests his narrator and even going so far as to include graphs and charts to illuminate important concepts.

Some guy on the back cover calls this book a mixture of Tom Clancy, [cyberpunk legend] William Gibson, and [droning writer of historical fiction] James Michener. And he's prettymuch right.

I had a reason for blogging this instead of posting the guts as an Amazon.com review. There was a line about fifty pages before the end of the book that floored me. It wasn't a plot twist of any kind, it wasn't a great joke. Just a mundane phrase that had built up a huge store of meaning.

Stephenson spends a thousand pages (imagine that) scribble scribble scribbling and letting everything (or almost everything) come through subtly. And it pays off.

This is different from the proverbial "gun on the wall" rule that every aspiring writer gets beaten into him at some point. Carefully laying out all your metaphors in the first act, like a French movie or any given NYT bestselling author, then repeating them throughout the book (and maybe working in a bunch of them at the end) is just good policy.

Stephenson does it; most good writers do it.

But Joyce, Twain, and (in his only lightweight way) Stephenson went further. They cultivated the words themselves, gave them loaded meanings — not by having some longwinded characters define them, but by simply using the words and noticing how they're used.

Stephenson has carefully picked which words to use where (I've never had to run to the dictionary so many times, in fact. "Epiphyte"? "Gnomon"?) and towards the end of a long book, the built-up connotations (varying by context and by speaker) are delicious.

So this isn't about Stephenson but about me. I've tried to write obliquely (too obliquely, says my Fiction Writing class) and I think I'll keep trying. I've learned that subtlety can (still) jibe with an apparently straightforward storytelling method. And that's exciting.

Well, not that I can think of anything to write about. I just had a dream about aliens and piranha muskies. I wish I could remember it; my summer page total stands steady at zero.

It's become a habit of mine to judge the sentiment in a book by its supposed "honesty." As you would expect, this is basically a Trojan horse that lets me smuggle my gut feelings about a work into what should be an objective critique, just as some of my God-Squad friends used to criticize the "cinematography" of Pleasantville in order to hide their prudish disgust with its immorality.

But I stand by my measurement. There's a difference between "dishonest" syrupy glurge and "honest" earned sentiment. I don't want to be romanticized into feeling something, I don't want to be swayed by blind pity or purple prose.

If this sounds unobjective — and indeed several Fiction Writing students have been baffled by my "honesty" distinction — well, English as a discipline has very few terms that aren't subjective, nowadays. That's my fall-back argument.

And I treat thoughts in the same way as sentiment. I think that we should all be on guard for the intellectually dishonest — the pundits who slam oversimplified versions of their opponents' views, the regurgitated opinions of the unthinking dittoheads on the Right and the protest lemmings on the Left, anyone who disguises his own prejudices as concern for children or the elderly, and the wide acceptance of unproven, unscientific claims.

I consider my growing interest in skepticism one of the better changes I've undergone in the past year. I'm no longer merely wishy-washy on the issues; I'm informed and wishy-washy.

Which is why I've grown to dislike Michael Moore. I dislike him even more than I dislike crazy Ann Coulter, that shrill blond Republican who defended McCarthy.

After watching my beloved Jon Stewart tiptoe around Moore on yesterday's Daily Show (Moore has reportedly announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning), I'm out for hypocrite blood.

Forget the neocon hacks at Moorewatch. Really I'm just waiting for gems like this one: Hitchens, a liberal columnist whom I have different issues with (though I think it's funny that he takes a swipe at Kissinger in every essay of his I've read), presents a reasoned criticism of Moore and his latest film in his latest Slate essay.

There's nothing more satisfying than seeing an intellectually dishonest profiteer exposed for what he is.

The other issue that a respect for intellectual honesty (via Penn and Teller) has given me a strong view of is passive smoking. Numerous smoking bans and annoying commercials, as well as my own school's campuswide crackdown on smoking, are based on shoddy evidence.

I'm not arguing that smoking itself doesn't promote lung cancer — that connection has been well-documented for almost fifty years — but I'm callous enough to allow my fellow students the right to slowly kill themselves as long as they do no harm to me.

And do they do harm? A recent column in Spiked, a review of John Brignell's The Epidemiologists: Have They Got Scares For You, offers the latest response to the unjustified passive-smoking scare:

A topical example of this is passive smoking, and in particular what Brignell calls 'the greatest scientific fraud ever'. In 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency published a meta-study, bringing together many other studies on passive smoking. Unfortunately, the results were negative. It appeared that passive smoking was not a health risk at all. Mere facts could not be allowed to get in the way of a health scare, so some imagination was applied to the problem. One negative study was removed — but the meta-study still produced no statistically significant result.

[Statistical stuff…]

The increased risk of lung cancer they found — 19 per cent — was frankly too small to have been conceivably detected given the methods they used. There are lots of ways in which inaccuracy could have crept into this final result. For example, is it really possible to merge the results of many different studies, all with different methodologies and subjects, accurately?

So it all comes down to honesty. I think I'm in danger of inflating the term's connotations far beyond its humble common usage, but so be it. It's a good term to grab onto.

I'm just shocked at how widely intellectually dishonest types like Moore and most passive smoking advocates are accepted (with some notable exceptions — Roger Ebert has withdrawn his praise of Bowling for Columbine after being informed of some of the more sloppy errors). Then again, the dishonest sentiment of The Majestic was popular too.

I didn't expect critical thinking to make me an outsider. Thank goodness I have cynicism, to keep my raging ego in check.

Though the guys at Spiked are used to dealing with the half-hearted socialism of Blair's government, I think that Brandon Robshaw's proposal could fly even in our (ostensibly) more liberty-minded country. He makes an excellent point.

What's wrong with a national DNA register?

My knee-jerk reaction is to worry about the immigrants. Would people not born in Britain be forced to submit their DNA for police use? If so, then one of the objections that Robshaw skirts through use of the already mandatory heel test for infants would actually stand.

There's an interesting albeit unlikely doomsday scenario on the flip side of this coin. If non-natives were exempted, the relative ease with which they could avoid police detection (theirs being, eventually, the only DNA not on file) could precipitate the development of a highly-sophisticated criminal class.

All non-natives would be suspected of belonging to that class, and obvious foreigners would be both feared and discriminated against. Well-connected plutocrats could hire the real criminals as assassins or thieves.

(Holy etymology! Neal Stephenson was right about "assassins" — it really does come from the Arabic word for "hashish user.")

Anyways, I think it's a solid idea, even if some of its more far-fetched ramifications make me want to go write some sci-fi.

I've been treading water economically for the past week, using my tip money and per-delivery bonuses to cover expenses like patching up The Deathtrap's muffler and buying a pay-as-you-go cell phone.

That ends tomorrow, or maybe Wednesday. I've set limitations on the sort of things I can buy when I have $300, $1000, $2000, etc. in my bank account. Very loose limitations.

In other news, I went mini-golfing with Dylan on Saturday, tied, then saw a late showing of The Day After Tomorrow, which I knew would be bad. Dylan had that particular bee in his bonnet, however, so now I know just how bad it was.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, The Day After Tomorrow would be a much better movie if it didn't take its message so seriously. Why not have Vonnegut's infamous Ice-9 do the same thing? I'd see that movie. Also, there was rampant product placement.

In any case, skeptical environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg and his cadre of noble prize winners turned me off of the Kyoto Protocol once and for all earlier this month, so the film's apocalyptic message is wasted on me.

After the movie we ended up at Amelia's house, which occupies roughly the same pivotal central location between (Dylan's) Garrison and (my) Unorganized Territory as Graham's house does.

We sat around there and talked for an hour or two. Someone handed me a free beer—Michelob Golden Light, the tasty brand Adam introduced me to last week—and I stuck with that as my substance of choice.

I hadn't yet fixed my muffler on Saturday, but the cop who stopped me on the ride home was more concerned with my broken headlight than my egregious noise violation. Odd.

I worked Sunday night and I've got today off. Dylan left for the Cities sometime yesterday. I still haven't figured out what I want to do with all this free time.

Well, actually I suppose I should go help my dad get some computer accessories for his new office. There's nothing like going to Best Buy and spending money that isn't yours.

Later.

So I've been cleaning my room, which to my surprise is filled with ghosts. A lot of memories here, everywhere I look.

I threw away most of the stuff from the box I filled by applying to colleges, but in sorting through everything I realized how arbitrary the decision to go to Lawrence was for me.

I mean, I applied to a dozen colleges. I don't think it was a bad choice, but I just wonder at my audacity, to just choose one college for some spurious reasons.

I think this is the feeling they call "punch-drunk."

In some cases, my hand was forced. Duke, Harvard, Cornell and Northwestern all rejected my application. Rice waitlisted me. Macalaster took the hint after I failed to send the whole application, as did Sarah Lawrence.

I worry that it would be pretentious of me to list the colleges I was accepted to, the colleges I could have lived completely different lives at.

But I'm going to do it anyway. Lawrence is a good school, the equal to most of these as far as my department is concerned, and I'm not trying to self-aggrandize by claiming I could've gone to some better college. I'm just feeling… not regret, but bewilderment.

I just found a list, for instance, of about forty schools, one of my first efforts at narrowing down. Lawrence is crossed off, with the marginal note "Appleton, WI: suburb." Only Sarah Lawrence and Hamline are circled.

Let's see… there were the state schools. I didn't apply to any in-state, figuring that if I was going to go to some huge state school I should at least get to live outside of Minnesota and be anonymous somewhere interesting.

I applied to the University of Houston and the University of Arizona. Maybe others. I actually visited the University of Arizona Honors College, one of the three campus visits I made before deciding and the only visit for which I stayed overnight.

The campus is beautiful, the students were friendly nerds (though the guy who hosted me was antisocial), and for anyone with a high enough PSAT score tuition was free. My parents offered to help pay for my graduate education if I opted for free college there.

I know that Katie Lykins, another Lowell Elementary school alum, accepted that smug guy in admissions' offer. Never seeing snow would have been but one of the many other perks.

I'm not sure it would've been the best decision, even with the aid, but I no longer respect the reasons I had when I rejected Arizona.

Then there were the "good" schools. Vanderbilt, Colgate, Carleton, Gustavus, and Boston College. So many potentialities reduced to dead cats.

Lawrence may fashion itself the "Carleton of the Midwest" but only Carleton College could be said to truly hold that title.

I visited Cahrleton and was put off by the conceited prospies talking about Chaucer (and, I should note, deriding his writing) outside of the class I sat in on.

Also, T.A.s teach some of the classes, which is unacceptable. And our evil valedictorian went there. But none of these should be what they call a "deciding factor."

The stupidiest things put me off of some colleges and on to others. Prof Spurgin, who interviewed me at Lawrence, had an extensive Dickens collection. I hadn't read A Handful of Dust back then. Also, Lawrence sent me an ill-fitting T-shirt and an eraser.

If I'd opened that Vanderbilt letter, ignored because I'd already decided, and seen the bumper sticker? Would my life have changed, forever, because of some 25 cent piece of plastic?

I'm being a bit unfair. These colleges are all good choices, and the only place I could make a decision with any certainty was the realm of the arbitrary.

But still, still…

Hung out at Amelia's last night with her and Dylan, doing whatever it is that young college students in Brainerd do. And too much of it.

After sitting on the porch for an hour or so, exchanging obscure news about even more obscure Brainerdites, we ended up in the T.V. room, watching the first season of Chappelle's Show and eating tasty crackers.

Dylan's is the second cameo by one of my non-Hamlinite childhood friends in the week I've been home. As I've blogged already, I saw Adam last weekend.

I can't remember the last time I've been in the same room with both of them. It's probably been years.

Now, if I can figure out a way to see [my hetero-life-buddy] Larson sometime soon, I'll rack up an impressive three non-Hamlinites in a month and walk away with one of nostalgia's most coveted awards, the Golden L.A.D.

After simultaneously discovering and falling in love with RSS readers (a way to access valuable internet content without a web browser) in my last days at Lawrence, I've decided that this is one bandwagon worth jumping on.

I've syndicated this site, and a feed is now available here or through the tiny little link at the bottom of the righthand column. I'm still fixing the code.

I use RssReader 1.0.72, though I'm sure there are better programs out there. I needed an RSS reader and wanted to be sure that's what I was getting.

One handy feature of an RSS reader is that it can sit in your system tray and pop up with a little message whenever one of the sites you're subscribed to posts new content. That means no more obsessively refreshing ourboldhero.com while you wait for my next narcissistic rant.

This isn't technically my first experience with RSS readers. The Wire, the "place" where the Associated Press, Scripps-Howard News Service, and others post breaking news, uses something similar. I used to sit at my desk in D.C., scanning the news as it was posted on the Wire and feeling very informed. It was somewhat addictive.

Since I'd rather not be buried under hundreds of AP news headlines each day, here are the feeds I subscribe to (and could read, if my parents' computer were capable of running an RSS reader program):

Graham's Blog. BFF, as they say.
http://www.pretentiousblowhard.org/index.rdf

Spiked. A feisty online-only British newsmagazine.
http://www.spiked-online.com/spikedrss.xml

Wired News. For geeks who think they're cool.
http://www.wired.com/news/feeds/rss2/0,2610,,00.xml

Snopes. Urban legends news. Sometimes it isn't lame.
http://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.rss

Word Spy. Tracking our expanding lexicon.
http://www.wordspy.com/rss3.xml

Incidentally, all but two of the websites I visit every day are syndicated. Having one program show me what's been updated (hourly or daily) saves me time.

Not that that matters, of course. No one who values his time would be up this late, blogging. I just think it's neat. Rss readers! Whoo!

A few miles out of Stanley, Wisconsin, a town whose only dubious claim to fame is being located next to Thorp ("Home of the Thorpedo"), my muffler detached itself.

On the side of the highway, I popped my hood and waited for someone to stop and help. Someone with a cell phone.

Since no one ever came, this gave me a while to think about the year.

It was undoubtedly fun. Historic parties like Jubb's birthday and Superheroes (and for Our Bold Hero, my 21st) stand out. Good people, good times, and all that. I'll write more on this later, when I'm more nostalgic. For now, on to the negative.

My biggest regret is that my lapse into self-caricature in the latter half of the year lasted so long. If I can't help being a certain way, I'm fine with that. But I think I'm done exaggerating my negative qualities in the name of some private joke.

I suppose I'm being too vague. Don't take this to mean that I've decided to play that same social game everyone has been playing since middle school. I can't take myself seriously enough to even begin to act "cool", and I think that's a good thing.

I'm referring to my misanthropy. I may be a self-proclaimed introvert, but that doesn't mean I should act like I hate everything that makes me uncomfortable. In fact, I should try to be uncomfortable more often, to prepare Our Bold Hero for his eventual entry into the real world.

What's more, there aren't that many people I dislike, and I can't understand why I ever abandoned my second-term plan to "treat people I like like I liked them." That plan even let me patronize people I despise, a vicious and enjoyable pastime. And, since the people I despise tend towards the dimmer wattages, I don't risk any ugly confrontations.

So that's what I'll do: everything I just said.

Of course, there's only so much you can plan to do (and less you can plan to be) before you have to do something, and I was still out in the sun, waiting for a good Samaritan. I started walking towards town.

After about a hundred yards a man in a pickup picked me up and (later!) dropped me off at the Stanley BP. I called AAA and talked to a vaguely foreign-sounding woman. I explained where I was, and where my car was, and she never quite got that "in town" and "a few miles east of town" were not the same location. The conversation ended with this:

AAA: Again, thank you for calling AAA. A towtruck will come to meet you at your car anytime between… let's see… now and… 40 minutes from now. Have a nice day.

There were no good Samaritans driving east that day. To its credit, however, Hwy 29 goes through some beautiful looking farmland as it nears Stanley. The roadside was hot and dry and littered with fishing lures for some reason, but the view was nice.

Fifty minutes later, as I once again deliberated unpacking Something Wicked This Way Comes, which was at the bottom of a crate somewhere in The Deathtrap, a towtruck whipped past at 65 mph. I was a bit suspicious (I'd been waiting for about 15 minutes and one towtruck had already ignored me) but it was actually mine, my towtruck.

When the driver stepped out, he looked like Santa Claus. I explained the problem and he proceeded to root around his truck for a hanger. All my hangers were plastic, but he had one, and only one, metal hanger. Santa tied the muffler pipe to the bottom of the car so it wouldn't drag and I was on my way, my windows down and my miles-per-gallon ridiculously up.

So I'm home, comfortably settled in a familiar rut. It's good to be somewhere where you don't doubt who you "really" are. I'd like to think I'm too mature for an identity crisis.

News? My mom is still in Italy with her tour group, and in the meantime we're keeping the house in a state of perpetual cleanliness, so she won't think we've been living here while she was away.

I had to rearrange my room in order to get my computer up there, and I'm still wondering if that was the right decision. I can't use the Internet upstairs, so I'll have to start typing up my blogs, saving them on a floppy, and walking all the way downstairs to post them from this, my parents' computer. It could be the most exercise I get this summer.

I start work on Thursday, so life has been pretty relaxing. The highlight so far is drinking beers and watching a realistic '60s detective movie called Bullitt with Adam, who's in town for a few days.

And now the carp are running. I'm going to try to stab one.

On my way home, as soon as I get checked out.

The night began with an ending: my last final, done and done, as they say, in a tiny computer carrel on the third floor of our--at this point--nearly-deserted library.

It was, as I'd both complained and boasted at the English department picnic earlier today (an unusually awkward event; I could only summon up the courage to talk to the two least intimidating professors), a short final. Twenty questions. True or false.

Any mention of my Restoration and 18th Century Comedy final, wherein I confused the author of an 18th century satire with one of 18th century satire's greatest targets, shall be made unnecessary by this brief aside.

The night--if you'll allow me to beat this particular horse--began with an ending. I think I did well, I don't really know. It's hard to tell on a test like that. We'll see.

It didn't really feel like an ending. This, my last final of the year, was one of a number of recent events in my life that didn't feel important enough. My expectations are probably just too high.

I walked back to the room full of this disturbing indifference and played Grand Theft Auto: 3 for an hour or two. I've become addicted. Fundamentally, addiction is when you continue though you don't want to. It's late enough that that feels profound, but I know quite well that it's not.

Sockless Pete retrieved me to watch City of God, a beautiful and unassuming Brazilian film. There was a good group there, and I had to drink about half of one of Jubb's busticators before I figured out how to spill the rest on myself. A narrow escape.

After a lot of adolescent-on-adolescent violence and a pornographic amount of hugs for the people leaving tomorrow morning, us legal adults went to the bar.

Sockless Pete, Jinx, Our Bold Hero, and Beth (who I'll call by her "real name" until I think of something clever) sat around at The Wooden Nickel for an hour or so, crinkling peanuts and telling the sort of tales you tell when you're buzzed.

Jinx had a prior engagement, as Beth soon reminded us, and at 1:20 we trooped back to Lawrence, where, under the auspices of the Seeley G. Mudd Library, Jinx and one of Jubb's bosom buddies "wrastled." The result, as in her two subsequent matches (one against a nimble Our Bold Hero) was a loss for Jinx.

Of the assembled, only three people (I was too cowardly by half) were willing to engage in some fast-paced '80s-style streaking, however short-lived. Sockless Pete, Beth, and Alex (same deal as Beth): may you live in history as you lived, drunkenly, tonight.

Feeling strangely good today, as if I'm the one draining the health from my sick roommates, glorying in it like some giddy Highlander.

I remember a game, incidentally, an RPG I read about in Germany years ago. There were these characters called "psinks," average-looking people who sucked the energy from any unwitting soul who stayed in the same room with them for too long.
I've met some psinks.

Back to all-important me. It's not some compulsive wanderlust, this time. It's more like I'm conscious of the moment, I would say.

I feel like I should be walking around outside in the twilight and the warm air, eating some especially pink cotton candy. Or sitting on top of a building, thinking some especially profound thoughts.

I should be doing something. Something cinematic.

Luckily, I'm obligated to write four more pages tonight, so I won't run the risk of actually doing anything so impulsive (and, frankly, corny). It would be nice, though, to do something "important," just now.

Finished Galactic Pot-Healer, the latest justification for my belief that P.K. Dick was a brilliant mystic but a mediocre writer.

Spent an hour at the video store with Jeremy, a "spiritual" friend of Jonas' who had some interesting/crazy views about the accuracy of the fossil record.

And so it's no wonder that I've been thinking about religion again. I haven't changed my beliefs, however. What I hath said in my heart still stands.

I've just been thinking about the tension between honest nonbelief and seeming belief, which entails certain benefits.

I'm proud to say that I can't see myself pretending to believe something I don't. The most I'm willing to do is skirt the issue of religion, and as long as my parents are willing to play along, I won't have admit that (as a famous author's little brother once wrote) I believe in No-God, and I worship him.

It's intellectually dishonest to do otherwise, but being an idealist here would help only my conscience. What's more, my high-minded behavior (if I were to give, say, a longwinded rant about my beliefs) would be inscrutable, even hurtful, to others.

Which leaves me with two choices and a Machiavellian dilemma.

I could lie, put on a show of piousness. The benefits? My parents would be happy, probably even proud.

There are also undeniable social benefits to myself, which it would be hypocritical of me to ignore. I wouldn't have to continue this irritating silent battle over my church attendance. I could "network," as the extroverts say, with some important potential employers. And as I've said before, I enjoy the pomp and circumstance of a Catholic mass.

As Ann of Stillwater once said of the Lawrence Christians gatherings, I don't have to make this about religion, it can just be a social thing.

The other option is admission. Assuming that the situation did move away from this constant talking-around (really the best possible situation, as far as I'm concerned), I could just say what I believe, or rather don't. I'm not here to debunk, but I can't ignore my own reason, which this God of yours was omnibenevolent enough to give me.

The benefits? A clear conscience. As I said above, I'm an idealist when it comes to certain things, and intellectual honesty is one of them. Affecting piety would be like affecting Republicanism or romanticism; good for a private laugh, but trauma-inducing over long periods.

And that's it. I can't see any other real benefits to anyone besides myself, were I to tell my parents what I think. They can figure it out, if they want to. They choose not to, and I think it's better this way, not talking about it.

Is lying better, then? Not sure. It seems more reasonable, less selfish, than I had originally thought. If pressed I would still probably take the moral high ground and say what I think, but the most likely decision here isn't necessarily the best.

Idealism defeats heartless rationality, for now.

Drank some homemade hard cider last night, which was good, but I drank too much of it, which was bad. There was a lot going on and all I did was get drunk (and throw up, of course) at the very first place I went to.

There are few nights I'm ashamed of, and last night is one of them. Disappointed in myself for putting drinking before fun.

Working on a last (special) issue of The Lawrentian tonight. One essay left to write, two tests left to take. The year winds down. I could—but won't—be done on Monday.

I'm looking forward to going home, actually. Every now and then I play the song "Brainerd, Minnesota" and think about what I'm going to do:

Nothing exciting. I'll work, I'll read, I'll write, I'll fix my laptop and van, I'll watch dozens of movies.

I won't do anything at all, really.

Wow, it'll be boring. But I know that, for the first few weeks or so, I'll enjoy being home.

My seven lofty goals for this summer:

1. Fix laptop
2. Write five chapters for a novel
3. Email "dropped" friends
4. Restore bank accounts to pre-Germany levels
5. Read 1 book a week, or 14 books
6. Acquire "northwoods" skills
7. Learn php web language

And there's some fun stuff that I'll actually do, too.

Had one of my greatest ideas ever last night. Laughed uncontrollably for the first time in a while. Woke no one.

What's the idea? When the time comes, and it will come eventually, you'll know. But don't hold your breath.