philly summer weekend yay

this time on friday, just about everything in the world was getting me down. lots of my friends were not going to be in new haven for the holiday weekend (hence i had no holiday-weekend plans), sandra day o'connor had retired, my house was a mess and i was feeling benbraddocklike ('just a little worried about my future'). suddenly, early friday evening, it occurred to me that i could just get the fuck out of dodge, if i was feeling ornery.

and so that's what i did. luckily for me, alyssa also had no holiday weekend plans. i braved the live 8 crowds and showed up at her door early saturday afternoon, at which time we commenced three full days of lengthy, important and nourishing conversation, excellent meals and independence-celebrating. with ross and louisa we spent afternoon & evening at the swarthmore abode of gabe, being fed blue margaritas and insanely good food, and made it back to philly just in time for the fireworks.

all of the things that were getting me down, with the exception of lack of plans, are still true, and still irritating, but i feel much better -- though also, on balance, more outraged. al and i went to see enron: the smartest guys in the room on saturday night. despite some pretty serious problems with appropriate voiceover-image pairings [NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT SHOW ME EXTENSIVE NAKED STRIPPER FOOTAGE JUST BECAUSE SOME GUY WENT TO A STRIP CLUB. WE KNOW WHAT THAT LOOKS LIKE.], the movie did exactly what it was supposed to do, and did it well.

unless you're looking for sheer tearjerking capability, enron is far more effective than fahrenheit 9.11, mostly because the case it builds is so well-documented. there are emails, recordings, memoranda and seriously ill-gotten profits rather than, say, a load of circumstance and correlation. in fact, this is part of why the movie is so upsetting. you sit there and think, these things happen. these people made these things happen. nobody remembers this any more. it's all true, and these white collar thugs stole billions of dollars from average americans, and the market did NOT self-regulate...and here we are, just a few years later, still engaged in our national love affair with the rapacious rich.