HSLI Photos Are Online!

Ciao, Tutti!

All photos from the High School Law Institute graduation are now online! You can find them by clicking on this link. Don't forget, I took each and every picture (the other photographers didn't think they needed to bring cameras, for some reason I cannot even begin to fathom...). Enjoy!

-Sam goldsmith

HSLI Graduation

Ciao, Tutti!

Today was the final day of the High School Law Institute, the day of a massive mock trial competition - NYU vs. Columbia - and the distribution of graduation diplomas. It was an action-packed celebratory day, and I caught most of it with my camera. Check it out!


The crowded scene at breakfast



A section teacher briefing his students for the trial



NYU section 1 with their diplomas (I don't have any pictures of section 3 because that was my section and I was on stage with them)



Megan Cunningham of the HSLI board, introducing our speaker



Craig Levine, our guest speaker (also featured on the photo at the top of the post)



The "know your rights" posters in the hallway

-Sam goldsmith

Welcome To October

Welcome to October
I welcome you with a rainstorm
Things are getting colder
So you should all stay indoors
Welcome to a new month
I welcome you with a deadline
Say hello to shortcuts
Because you no longer have time

...

Welcome to October
I welcome you with a schedule
First regrets are over
There's no more need to retool
Welcome to the first day
I welcome you with a sleepwalk
Say hello to pouring rain
And there's no more need for the small talk

Lyrics for DEAR

Ciao, tutti!

Four items of business:

1) I have to make a correction for last post. Two corrections, actually. My mother gave me an impassioned call making clear the point that she had, in fact, made gnocchi successfully by herself. And she made it for 20 people for a passover dinner. So here are the two corrections: a) Mom did make gnocchi by herself before I could, and b) She actually is competitive about it.

2) It turns out that I have a concert with Flaming Fire earlier than I expected. Yesterday I discovered that we are playing a show on... tomorrow, actually. Welcome to October, Sam! The venue is Coco66, which means absolutely nothing to me. But if you know something about it, like where it is and how to get there, then come by around 9 pm and you'll get to see my debut as a Flaming Fire member and as a bassist, as well as hear one of our new tunes, 4th of July. Check it out. Here's the official email:

The Official Email (yes, that shaking you're feeling is definitely fear)

Hey!

We're playing a surprise show (to us, even) tomorrow at Coco66 at 9 PM in Greenpoint. This'll be our first gig with our new amazing bass player Sam Goldsmith who is stellar, we like him a lot. He just turned 21, so say happy birthday. Other bands include our good pals from Memphis, Esque, as well as Free Blood and Papercuts. We'll debut a new song we've been working on for a couple months called "4th of July," and it sounds great, thanks to incredible arrangements by Stirling Krusing and Justina Flash. I'm really, really happy about it.

Hey, Leon & Brian Dewan just sold a Dewantaron instrument to some gentleman from Magnetic Fields. So now, everyone's gonna sound like Flaming Fire. Darn it! Congrats, Leon and Brian!

In other news, Flaming Fire is very close to signing a deal with a Brooklyn arts organization to do a month-long installation from mid November to mid December! Would you like to be a part of this? If so, please email me. We need lots of help, and promise it'll be fun and very entertaining. It'll be part Disneyworld, part temple of (insert your idea here).

Look forward to a new website thanks to FF percussionist/genius Chris Theise, that we promise to update a lot more than our current one...

Oh, we have new red tshirts for sale! They look like the one above, are American Apparel, are available in either gold and black , and in man or woman styles (girl sleeves pictured, just in case you weren't sure from Amanda's boyish figure). If you'd like one, please paypal katehambrecht@hotmail.com $15, and let us know what size and color. We've sold more than half at recent shows, so I encourage you get one now, before we start to run out of certain styles/sizes.

Lauren Weinstein and Tim Hodler now have a beautiful baby girl named Ramona Salley Hodler. She is very purdy, and we're all in love with her.

And finally, band friend Gabe Galvin is mixing our album this month! He's bunkered down in a tenement basement somewhere in manhattan, and has resolved to not leave the house till he finishes the album before November 1! Go get 'em Gabe! He'll be sending us some new rough mixes each week, which we'll be sharing with you guys soon...look for something new on the website next week.

See you tomorrow!

Love,
Patrick

End Official Email

Patrick, for those of you who don't know, is the singer dude with the magnificent Kyp Malone-like beard in the picture I posted in the last update. Just so you can put a face to the literary/email voice.

3) I will be participating in the High School Law Institute again this year, where I will kill my Saturday mornings (aka. Friday nights) by team-teaching Constitutional law to high schoolers with students at the NYU Law School. That starts in two days, right after the gig, so I won't get to stay after with the band and enjoy my 21-ness. (Well, it's okay! Because I got to have a shot with them after practice on Wednesday, so I guess you can say I really did celebrate. And I didn't even get drunk! Just a little happier.)

I know a couple of the teachers I'm working with from before, and they're both good people, although I'm the only undergrad in the group with prior experience with the HSLI. On top of that, the law student I was working with last year is now the president of the program. Life is sweet as Halloween candy. On the other hand, I guess I have to read the Constitution again.

4) As of right now, I have no plans for a recital date. Stop asking. It only makes me worry.

Come to the show tomorrow if you can! And even if you can't, too. Couldn't hurt.

-Sam goldsmith

You walk the silent stairs
That you never saw
Then you realize

Happiness Comes in the Form Of Mix-Ups and Rants

Ciao, Tutti!

Yeah, there's a lot to talk about. It shouldn't be a problem for a talkative guy like me, so if you find one, let me know.

Bad joke. Heh! Please forgive me, I only slept for about four hours last night.

Those pictures I said I'd talk about but never did




I am a member of an themed residency floor called "starving artists," a group of people that like to see art together and not starve together. Those of you who know me know my anti-social tendencies. So when the floor announced a free lunch of dim sum and a trip to Governor's Island, I figured I would go have the dim sum because it's delicious and then I could say I've done something with the floor and not have to deal with any other obligations. I'm such a wonderful person, aren't I? Please, don't answer that. I even brought reading to do, expecting a crowd of people that I could disappear in.

So I was quite surprised and downcast when I was the only resident who showed up at the meeting point. It was me, the RA (Barrie), the faculty affiliate (Chris) who looks younger than me, his wife, and his mother. Crap. There was no escaping conversation this time. I told them all I brought my backpack for my water bottle to sit in. On top of it all, dim sum was so crowded that we couldn't get a table, so we had to go somewhere else. Curse this good weather that brings people out of their houses!

Chris's mother took us to a Japanese restaurant she knew of instead and taught us how to eat there. Yes, I had to be taught. Because this was different than anything I had ever done before, even Korean barbecue. We were served three bowls of broth set on hot electric burners built into the table. We were given small trays loaded with different raw vegetables, noodles, and uncooked meats. I watched Chris's mother to see what the cue was. The idea was to cook the vegetables and proteins in the soup, then remove them with strainers and put them, cooked and saturated with the flavor of the soup, into our bowls. Afterward, she explained, the soups would have absorbed the flavors of everything we cooked inside and we could drink them.

It was delicious.

And fun.

Actually, anything bad I have to say about the trip basically ends there. We would put little fish bits in our strainers to keep them from being lost in the broth, then eat them a minute later, already fully cooked. There was a ton of food and we barely finished, if you could call it that. There was still a lot of food left in the bowls in the end. I was glad I hadn't eaten breakfast that day, originally anticipating a long dim sum and instead being happy I didn't. And to top it all off, a nice, cool red bean milkshake.

After that we bade farewell to Chris's mother and took off for Governor's Island on the free ferry. Not sleeping had caught up to me and I took a power nap, but I did not miss the view of each of the four Manhattan Waterfalls on their last day in operation. I think I've got some pictures of those, too... Yeah, I do, but you have to look carefully. There are three in this picture. The fourth is at the top of this section.



Anyhoo, Barrie and I rented bikes and rode around the island and I forgot how to break by pedaling backwards. We didn't have very much time on the island because of our long lunch, but there were some pretty views. Unfortunately I couldn't get a good picture of the Statue of Liberty because of where the sun was in the sky. We returned on Manhattan and went to the ice cream factory in Chinatown, so just when my stomach stopped feeling numb I was shoving more food down.

So it was worth it in the end. And beginning. I'm just a grumpy person, but if you push me the right way things work out in the end.

Last Friday I bumped into Barrie again just as she was about to take the floor out to a deli for dinner, so I decided to forgo dining hall food and follow. For some reason these excursions don't get much of a following. Could it be that everyone else on the floor is as anti-social as I am? Either way, I got to repeat the tradition of eating too much, this case being about a pound of meat shoved between two slivers of bread eaten under a sign pointing out where Harry met Sally. We talked about people getting arrested for graffiti as I watched my clock to make sure I wasn't late for my roommate's concert.

So, there you have it. That's what those pictures are about. Do I get to talk about what pisses me off yet?

Happiness Chronicles

This title should be taken sarcastically. I am really thinking of three things that are really pissing me off right now, and none of them are about the election! Wow, fancy that! Obama's lead must be getting to me.

1) Laundry at 2nd Street Residence. You all don't want to hear about this, but I have to say something about NYU nickle and diming us like they're an airline company or something. I am fine with paying $1.75 a load, 3.50 total, assuming you do colors and whites together. That is honest highway robbery (actually I've heard that price isn't so bad). But we also have to buy these strange cards in order to use the machines, and, guess what, the cards won't let you buy an amount divisible by 1.75. So no matter what we will be paying more than we will actually be using.

Why they can't just let us use quarters is beyond me. Actually, it's not. They make more money this way. And it pisses me off.

Let me tell you how much NYU needs the extra money. We received an email at the beginning of the year saying that NYU had the goal of raising a million dollars each day for the past seven years - and they surpassed it! We've got the highest tuition and are located in the highest cost of living in just about anywhere in the world. I don't have the numbers to prove it, but I don't really need them. Meanwhile Ivy League schools are giving full rides to students whose families make less than $100,000 in a year. NYU instead insists of raising tuition and cutting merit scholarships, a policy they announced last year while I was in Florence. No one else seems to get mad about this. They're all used to it.

Seriously, why does NYU need this money so much? For my $350 per night hotel room in New Orleans? For John Sexton's yacht? Obviously it's not going to a better jazz building with anything resembling soundproofing or enough practice rooms for all of us that are open 24 hours each day.

Anyway, the point is that if they want to take my money they shouldn't resort to dirty little tricks like stealing my laundry money.

2) University of California Press. I was reading Paul Farmer's book, "Pathologies of Power," for my class, only to discover that pages 155-202 had been left out and pages 203-250 had been printed twice. Unfortunately for me, this meant that the introduction to the analysis portion of the book was left out, and I was left to read the end without anything contextualizing to help me out. very frustrating.

After class the professor and another student with my issue went to the bookstore to replace the texts, which was surprisingly easily done, but I had to leave my copy of the book with all my notes so that the school could send it to the publisher and demand their money back. So now I am left fifty pages behind in the reading and without notes. Oh, and the first draft of the paper is due Tuesday.

Now, please, a moment of silence for my notes.

3) I still can't sleep very well. I won't complain too much because I feel fine and because if I complain too much people will start to worry, or, even worse, start to offer advice. It's just annoying how I could wake up at 5:45 every day last summer no sweat and now I have to drag myself out of bed at 9:00. Something's wrong with this picture.

General Housekeeping... Stuff

I figured you'd all appreciate a blog about something other than the election. Here are a few grab bag items I would like to mention:

1) In general music has slowed down for me, but I have started a band with my friends from Florence Megan and Jordan (I have mentioned this before) and it is really coming along. Megan and I are contributing a lot of music and we each play basically all the instruments we need as well as sing. That's right, folks, I can sing, and I can sing a lot better than I sang LCD Soundsystem's "New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down" at my show last month. And I even know how to write lyrics, too! Keep an eye out for us because I'm about to prove all this as soon as we get the chance.

2) Nanowrimo, short for National Novel Writing Month, is coming up this November. In short, it is like a game where people try to write 50,000 words of fiction during the space of one month. This boils down to about 1667 words per day, which is about 5 and a half pages double spaced. For me, this takes about an hour each day. I succeeded easily two years ago and failed last year when my computer crashed and I lost 30,000 words.

As you probably already know, last January I started writing a trilogy, the first book of which I just finished the first draft to (476 pages, 145,000 words). My plan is to continue this novelling spree come November, but until then I am left with nothing to do but edit and write short fiction.

What does this all mean? First of all, when we get to November I will probably not post many blogs. My writing mind will be elsewhere. If you see a blog it means I have either given up or, much more likely, am far ahead of the game. Secondly, I have started writing short fiction again in my excited anticipation of November. So you can expect a couple blogs in the near future to be stories I've written. Just to vary things up a little bit for you guys.

3) Vote. Please.

4) The High School Law Institute, the organization I teach Constitutional law in, has been going rather well. One of my team teachers is the head of the ConLaw curriculum, and between him and the other law student who went to Teach for America, we have a pretty formidable team. I am getting better on being able to tell where I fit in the discussions, especially when there is something historical to bring up.

I do have the one problem of the kid who is much better than me at this. I come into class last Saturday and he asks me what I thought of the ruling in Ohio over the weekend. I told him I hadn't seen it, what was it? It had something to do with voter fraud and ACORN (by the way, speaking of ACORN, my Power and Poverty professor just spent a great deal of time praising their research on poverty and race issues in America), and we launched into a discussion before class about why registering Mickey Mouse did not mean that Mickey Mouse was actually going to go to the polls and vote. Voter fraud from ACORN's shenanigans: 0. But this kid knew his stuff. He's probably more qualified to teach the class than I am.

Okay, time for a nap.

-Sam goldsmith

What I Did Not See

Ciao, Tutti!

I should be doing homework right now instead of blogging, but some important political event just happened and I feel the urge to blog about it. I'll probably fall behind in school work and graduate into a lousy job in a failing economy and...

Well, let's just say I've been down on myself for not working hard enough lately. Life has been distracting me. Let me count the ways.

1) Me and a couple of friends from the Florence program got together this weekend to play music. We're going to be, I say hopefully, an indie band. We all play guitar and piano, and we all sing. No bass player or drummer, but there is a MicroKorg that can play bass for us. We don't need bass and drums anyway. We immediately connected at the jam session. We met at 8:00, none of us having eaten dinner yet, expecting a short, hour long rehearsal and catch-up after. Instead we found ourselves eating Italian food in a diner at 1:00 in the morning. We were starving and tired but couldn't stop playing. So, just a heads up, you may hear a lot more of my voice on CD in the coming however-long-it-takes-for-us-to-get-something-recorded.



2) I am still horribly unqualified to teach Constitutional law, but I have to anyway. Thanks to a scheduling confusion, team teaching the first day was done by seven people, four of whom were in the law school. Needless to say, I didn't have much of a role. However, I did notice a few things, like how smart the students were. I totally underestimated them, not just for their critical thinking capacities but also for their incredible retention of basic facts (dates, names, clauses, etc.). I also noticed a place for me in the class, a historical niche that the law students were conveniently overlooking. Historical context is something me and my other undergraduate team teacher can help out with while the law students unload their database of rote law information. Together we will be unstoppable! Anyway, I'll be reading the constitution a few times, if I can get away from obsessing about life, as well as some court cases and reviewing revolutionary history.



3) TV on the Radio plays in Brooklyn a week from today, but the only apparent way to buy tickets is through their site, and I don't want to become a member and receive a bunch of random emails about concerts in Oslo and the like. Well, I did anyway, only to find out that the pre-sale is sold out. I have to find some other way to get to the show. Does anyone have experience with this, by the way?

P.S. I will be seeing Of Montreal on Friday night, but it won't be the same...



4) I am still terrified of Sarah Palin. This may be a part of me not sleeping well, along with eating dinner at 1:00 after jamming for too long. Now, as you all remember, I'm scared of her incompetence (I've watched the Couric interviews now...) and I'm scared of how everyone perceives her performances. But now I have a new fear: how people in the jazz department at NYU make fun of her. It is gross. People use the acronym MILF to describe her, which I probably am not allowed to spell out, and they talk about performing acts which, well, I probably can't spell out either. Is it any wonder that I have trouble sleeping! Perhaps there was a good reason only old white men used to run for president. This whole thing reminds me of the good old days when making a sexual joke about Nanci Pelosi was an unforgivable act.

5) The second presidential debate was tonight, a town-hall style format that McCain is particularly comfortable in. I have to say, I didn't quite know what to expect. Luckily I had watched the first debate, and there wasn't all that much different tonight, even considering the new economic situation. This is what I did not see or hear: any mention of either Ayers or Rev. Wright; any personal attacks at all; any new policies, save for McCain's new housing approach to the dismal housing market; a constant linking between McCain and Bush; or a gaff of any kind. This being the case, I don't think there was a clear "winner" or "loser." This was not a debate that would earn anyone major points.

Of course that's what I'll say. You all know who my guy is. But, if the truth be told, I actually thought John McCain actually came out on top tonight (town-hall, not like we expected anything different, right?). There was one example when the clock-watching Tom Brokaw asked a question, I think about energy plans (this is why I'm a blogger, not a journalist), about mid-way through. Both of the candidates answered with the same substance. Something about decreasing US dependence on foreign oil. Obama went first, and he's answered this question plenty of times before and he had his script to go by. This being one of the sole issues the two candidates agree on, they answered fairly similarly, but McCain's answer made much more sense. He spoke more slowly and he used language that was far less technical, and he physically reached out to the audience. There was something in his speaking that I could identify with, even if I can't stand the guy. Obama, on the other hand, as one TV analyst from PBS said afterward, elicits no emotion from the audience during a debate, much different than watching the man orate. I hate to say it like this, but McCain was simply better at conveying his opinions to the world than Obama was. Problem is I don't agree with any of his opinions. Obama was obviously better when answering the questions after McCain rather than being the ice-breaker. He needed time to prepare. I could even see his speech relaxing in the middle of answering a question, like I could hear his mind working out an answer as he said catch phrases he had rehearsed beforehand. I know he's not a great debater like Denzel Washington, but I was a bit dissapointed in this.

The only time I thought Obama actually outperformed McCain, and this is a surprise, was in foreign policy, near the end (Obama did get better as the night went on. He needed to relax!). McCain made the assertion, as he had before, that Obama could not simply announce that he was going to invade Pakistan. He invoked Theodore Roosevelt's famous adage, "Speak softly and carry a big stick," asserting that Obama only spoke loudly. Obama returned with the reference, as usual, to McCain's support of the war in Iraq ("Bomb, bomb, bomb!") and his comment that the US could simply "muddle through" Afghanistan. Basically a summation of McCain's foreign policy gaffs. McCain should have been prepared for this sort of attack, but for some reason he wasn't. It was his vaguest point in the entire debate, the only one where his response had nothing specific or insightful in any way. He repeated Obama's gaff (that he had just cleared up) and tried to emphasize Obama's inexperience and naivete. He actually looked tense on stage and struggled finding words.

It's a good thing that point came near the end of the debate because otherwise I'm fairly certain McCain would have been considered the winner of the debate for sure, especially considering his fairly effective attacks on Obama's economic policy, making a dent in what has evolved into one of Obama's strongest positions.

Well, the red light is flashing. I suppose that means I'm out of time.

6) Midterm season approaches. And I have two essays due in the same class (!) a week from tomorrow. The day after the TV on the Radio concert where, I assume, I will not eat dinner until 1:00 in the morning again, thus not sleeping at night. Again. But hopefully the papers will be done by then. Regardless, being a double major in history is much harder than I ever thought it would be. It makes me glad I'm antisocial, I don't play an instrument that gets me many gigs, and I don't have a long-distance relationship anymore. I'll bet my parents are sad they don't get to hear me call every other day anymore.

7) Of course I have time to call my folks every day, but that time ends up being taken up by the difference in time zones as well as, shall we say, other obsessions. I suppose I will call this obsession, "plot." I just love stories that are about things (so therefore not "The Namesake," no matter how well it was written). Stories, novels, TV shows, movies, people's lives, cartoons, you name it. Plus I like to make things up that have plots, too, like short stories and novels. It happens every November too, and may even stop my blogging for quite a while. But, ooh, is it worth it! So, sorry, Mom and Dad!

Sigh! It's so hard when I've got so many exciting or terrifying things in my life distracting me from living! I mean, I do have to do schoolwork at some point, don't I? I suppose this is the price I pay for having so many interests I want to investigate. That's a nice way of saying I'm indecisive and like to dream up fantasies. Which is a mean way of saying I have a lot of interests I want to investigate.

Until next whenever-I-need-another-distraction-from-homework-or-there-is-another-debate,

-Sam goldsmith

5 Things That Scare Me

Ciao, Tutti!

I am writing today, after just writing yesterday, for a few reasons. First and foremost, I watched the debate yesterday after posting, and, needless to say, I have a lot more to write. You may even be able to tell where this is going from the title of today's blog. I also figured the subject will allow me an opportunity to touch on some things I wasn't able to last week because of the Avatar thing (you didn't actually read that, did you?). We need to get that stuff out of the way and let the important stuff come in.

I do have issue with this title, though. I really did not want to talk about fear, to be honest. It's been a key Republican tactic to manipulate our fears and scare us away from the democrats and our own consciousnesses, in turn creating more cynicism. Either way, I did not want to give in to fear, but I fear that I have failed. The plan worked. I'm scared s***less. To find out why, well, you'll have to keep reading.

The 5 Things That Scare Me That Could Actually Happen



5) The 2008-2009 Sports seasons.

Even though I am specifically referring to basketball, I am talking about all of them. Even hockey. Every team I have any connection with seems to be going down. A's and Giants out of the playoffs, Tigers wasting their money on has-beens, Cubs about to be swept... again... I may have to root for the Devil Rays. That's sad. In football there hasn't been much to root for in at least a decade, and this year is no exception. Hopefully Brady's injury will keep New England out of contention this year. At least I don't care about football very much. The NCAA basketball and football teams from all four colleges I pay attention to, Cal, Stanford, MSU, and UM, don't seem to have anything special going for them, though I must admit I am not as avid a college fan as a pro fan. But the NBA has the worst of it all. The Warriors are out their star from last year and his back-up for the start of the season, and they were only able to replace him with Corey Magette, who is okay. The team will do well, but not well enough to make the playoffs in the power-packed west. And, finally, I sing my swan song for the Pistons team I feel like I've grown up with. After announcing each player except for Stucky was up for trade, Dumars couldn't pull anything together but an over sized contract for a proven nobody, and we all know Detroit has no more need for anyone named "Kwame." You are looking at the most unmotivated team in basketball. For the third year in a row. It will be painful to watch.



4) Needles.

I dread needles. This is an irrational fear. I can't even blame the Republicans for this one.



3) Movie Adaptations.

This is not just about Avatar. This is about every good book or TV show or comic book out there that someone looked at and hastily made a movie that just didn't work. Here are two perfect examples: "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Golden Compass." There are other examples I don't need to get into. What terrible wastes of good ideas these two movies were! However, things did not have to be like this. Three examples of movie adaptations that went amazingly well: "Lord of the Rings," "No Country for Old Men," and "The Princess Bride" (confession: I didn't actually like "No Country" that much). We all know how well Batman has been doing and how poorly the Fantastic Four went, and, on the subject of superheroes, no one can quite realize that the Hulk should just be put down for a while. The main point is that it is possible to do a great adaptation or fail miserably. When you take a medium that already exists, you have the weight of all the fans on your shoulders.

There are two adaptations I am talking about, one I talked about at length last week (correction: while unconfirmed, I heard that the Avatar movie coming out in 2010 is the first in a trilogy. That changes my "advice" from last week a little). I am also referring to, of course, "Soon I Will Be Invincible," former UC Berkeley English graduate student Austin Grossman's movie adaptation of his amazingly written novel. If the movie is half as good as the book it should be fine. But the problem is that we expect so much more now that the standards are set so high. Perhaps this isn't a problem but simply a risk. I've heard risk-taking isn't a good move in this economy. Speaking of the economy, that should be on this list. What did I write "needles" for? Who cares about that?



2) Teaching Constitutional Law

Yes, I forgot to mention this yesterday. Every Saturday morning, starting tomorrow, I will team teach a class of about 20 high-school upperclassmen about the constitution and important Supreme Court cases. I am completely unqualified for this job and I just got the teaching manual yesterday. However, I do know a thing or two (three at most) about the constitution, which makes me more qualified than some of the other undergraduate students teaching in the program. Plus I'll have two law students to help out, so it should be fine. Emphasis on the third to last word in that sentence. Should. I am still quite a bit scared about this, not knowing what the class will be like, not knowing how much charge I should take, how much the team teachers know, and so on and so forth. Basically, I'm scared. It's the Republicans' fault.

As the Onion says: "Undergraduate Student Under Graduate Student."

Whatever that means.



1) John McCain's Running Mate.

This is the real reason I wanted to blog today, and this is the real reason I am terrified.

First, some clarification: Since Sarah Palin was selected to be McCain's running mate on the day I flew back to Detroit, I have never seen Sarah Palin or any comedian looking like her speak. I never saw the famous SNL skit with Tina Fey and I never saw the equally famous interview with two of my least favorite people in the world, Katie Couric and Sarah Palin. I never even saw John Stewart or Stephen Colbert talk about her. I researched her stances on the New York Times as news stories about her came out, skipping over the dumb scandals that reporters began to dig up. I found out her stance and was already pretty scared of that. It was all I wanted to know, as I said yesterday. I refused to let her become important to me until this debate. Yesterday was basically my introduction to Sarah Palin.

I have to me make myself more clear. I am not actually most scared of Sarah Palin herself. She might be somewhere in my top 100. I am not even scared enough of her policies to put them on this list. I don't like them and I think the world would be in a terrible place if they were implemented, but they were always there, in some politician or another. It didn't have to be about her. The fact that she stands for everything I stand against, it seems, is scary, but not why I write today.

I am not even writing about how scared I am that she could actually become vice president. Not just that! A year from now we could all be under a Sarah Palin presidency! That is truly terrifying, much more than needles. More than bad movie adaptations, too. If M Night Shyamalan took time to campaign for Obama and won him the election and his trilogy suffered because of that, I would forgive him in a heartbeat. Same for you, Austin Grossmam.

But that is not why I write. You see, I watched the debate in horror. I had never seen Sarah Palin before since she was nominated, don't forget. Her policies scared me, yes, but not nearly as much as what was obviously lacking. That is, any knowledge about anything she was talking about. She had her positions and all she was doing was stating them and using incendiary language, trying every once in a while to inset her two or three memorized facts to support her side. It was obvious when there was a question she had rehearsed for because she would wink at the camera and pull out her smile and "normal person's" accent from the fingertip-land of America. Otherwise she would freeze up and start spewing catch phrases and diverting the question (yes, I know, not answering questions is an important aspect of debates). No matter what she had to stick to her limited political vocabulary and very limited political knowledge and repeat her empty speech constantly.

I could not look at this like an undecided voter, no matter how hard I tried. But I could look at it like someone who was undecided about Sarah Palin. And, as someone who had never seen her before, I could not believe how badly Biden out-debated her. I had to ask my friends if Biden was really that good a debater or if she was just making him look good. It was a massacre. Every time she said something Biden always could come back with at least a satisfactory answer (though never quite the best answer), while Palin never gave an answer to Biden's challenges that was even remotely convincing. All she had was her Alaskan charm and her catch phrases. I swear, she said "team of mavericks" so many times I thought she was talking about Dirk Nowitzki and Mark Cuban.

I got a pretty bad impression of her. I'm not exactly a fair judge, but it was obvious she was terrible. I also don't like McCain's super right-wing policy, but this doesn't change the fact that I think he debates on a higher level than Obama. It was blatantly obvious that Biden blew Palin out of the water.

Now for the scary part: after the debate the commentators on ABC said their initial reaction was that it was about EVEN! They said an undecided voter probably would not have been able to tell who won. They said Palin did great at portraying herself as a common person and attacking Obama while Biden showed incredible calm and restraint. The New York Times called it a "recovery performance" and that she "exceeded her expectations." Sarah Palin said she thought "things went very well last night." I couldn't believe it; I still can't believe it. Did they watch the same debate as me?

The problem was that they all had watched the devastating interviews with Katie Couric and heard all of her gaffs, which I was filled in on by my friends and family after the debate. She did so poorly before that everyone thought she did WELL yesterday, even though she definitively lost the debate in my mind and my mind only. The only reason it was a so-called tie was because she didn't gaff. Everyone was expecting her to make a huge, career-ending blunder, and because she didn't the debate was a tie.

Excuse me while I go curse out a window for a moment.

So I guess number 0) of the things that scare me is all of you! What's wrong with you all? How come our standards have become so low that we can accept this travesty? The New York Knicks could improve their record and still be the worst team in basketball, and would disgruntled Knicks fans say it was a successful season? If yesterday's debate shows Sarah Palin at her best, then we are in serious trouble, people! Not f***ing up is not good enough for our vice president! Just because we all expected to see her fall down like it was a boxing math or something doesn't mean she tied or did well. Let's get this straight:

She did well by her standards AND ONLY HER STANDARDS. She isn't even on the same playing field as John McCain, Joe Biden, or the uninspiring debater Barack Obama. She's barely even at student council level. I am fine with considering it a success FOR HER. The McCain campaign did not collapse with the economy yesterday, as some expected it might. That is a success FOR HER. That's a success? Listen, people, this woman could possibly be president in a year, and we need better than not screwing up.

Hey, but she seems like a nice person to have a beer with. I'll bet she's more coherent when she's drunk.

Please email me and tell me why this shouldn't scare me so much. But only do so if you really, truly think I shouldn't be scared about all this. Especially the needles. And the economy. Why didn't I write about the economy?

I think more cursing out of windows is necessary here.

-Sam goldsmith