No, I never slept with my law school professor. Yes, she was in my bedroom, but so were 5+ other students (my apartment wasn’t very big), so it wasn’t a one-on-one situation.
But she did sit in a corner and read through my personal poetry, which was uncomfortable. It seemed like a weirdly intimate thing for a law professor to do. Afterwards, I always felt kinda/sorta “exposed” in her classroom.
Like, she saw parts of me that I wanted to keep private.
Now, during my senior year of high school, I did ask out my English teacher. She was a student teacher from the local college (and had, uh, certain qualities that a superficial male finds appealing), so one day after class, I took my shot.
“Hi. Um, there’s a new movie called Hook. I heard it was really good. Um, I was wondering… uh, maybe you’d wanna see it with me on Saturday night?”
I still remember her exact words: “Scott, if you were juuuust a few years older — or if I were juuuust a few years younger — THE ANSWER WOULD STILL BE NO BECAUSE I’M YOUR TEACHER. Don’t ever ask me out again!”
(I mumbled “Ok!” and stumbled into the coatrack with a beet-red face.)
Win some, lose some.
But the nice thing about romance is, you only need to get it right one time. Doesn’t matter if you struck out a hundred times in a row: You’re always one date away from finding your “happily ever after.”
It could happen the very next time you go out!
Of course, some people have forsaken marriage — and sometimes, for excellent reasons: Their hearts were shattered beyond all repair, and they don’t wanna risk being hurt again. Or maybe they’ve decided that marriage is a nice concept, but it’s not right for them — that they’re the exception to the rule.
I dunno. I suspect there’s a lid for every pot.
With 8.14 billion people on the planet, there’s an astronomical number of star-crossed possibilities. Part of the challenge, I think, is that we expect more from our partners than ever before. We want our spouse to be our best friend. And lover. And confidant. And financial partner. And playmate. And roommate. And provider. And chef/maid. And role model for children. And security. And Netflix binge-watching buddy.
That’s a lot of hats.
A few hundred years ago, our expectations for marriage were modest: children, shelter, security, food, safety. (And if you’re REALLY lucky, maybe you’ll learn to love each other.)
But as our expectations changed, so did our sense of happiness.
The classic Buddhist solution is to “free” your mind of desires, because unfulfilled wishes are the path to pain and suffering. Moderation, Buddhists preach, is all-important. (Which makes Buddhists extremists about moderation, which is more than a little contradictory.)
There’s a political lesson in this: If you don’t know your audience’s expectations, you’ll never make ‘em happy. It’s impossible.
Everyone has a problem. If you’re in the business of selling solutions, if you don’t know the problems your audience has, then YOU are the one with the problem.
The Democratic Party has sputtered, stuttered, and stalled, because it’s trying to solve two sets of problems that cannot meet in the middle. On the far-left are the #Resistance fanatics, who truly believe Trump is Hitler and must be stopped at all costs, because there’s no compromising with “literally Hitler.” But everyone else just wants to live their life and make the best out of the next three years of Trump’s term.
They don’t want to spend the next three years at each other’s throats, burning through piles of money every day.
Fanatical, kneejerk #Resistance is bad for business, and the Democratic Party’s corporate masters don’t like losing money. They don’t funnel obscene globs of cash into the DNC because they love AOC/Bernie Sanders, but because they benefit from crony capitalism and are (broadly) sympathetic to a left-leaning worldview.
It’s why the Democrats are caught in a trap of their own making: For the hardcore leftists, #Resistance is both the means AND the end. Trump is too dangerous; compromise is an impossibility. Thus, they want the “Schumer Shutdown” to go on and on (and on).
But what they want isn’t sustainable. Eventually, the government will have to reopen.
The “problem” my English teacher had was immature knuckleheads (like me!) not taking her seriously ‘cause she was only a few years older than her students. The “problem” my law professor had, I suspect, was that she was lonely and depressed. (The previous year, I was told, her best friend on the GMU faculty had passed away.) Going out drinking with kids 20-years her junior — and then rifling through my poetry — was probably an attempt to feel socially connected… and maybe a little less lost.
And the “problem” facing the Democratic Party is that they’re gonna either break the hearts of the #Resistance extremists by caving to Trump and reopening the government — or they’ll break the fortune of their corporate masters by keeping the shutdown going.
One side’s gotta give to the other!
(And my “problem” in high school was thinking Hook would be a good date movie. Good Lord, I was an idiot.)
PRedictions: We’re only nine days away from the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, plus the mayoral election in New York City. If the GOP wins (or vastly overperforms), it would strengthen the hand of the DNC’s corporate donors to pressure Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) into reopening government.
But if the Dems overperform — and sweep Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City — it’ll form a consensus within their party: The status quo is working.
At long last, the Democrats are WINNING!
Which means, the shutdown will probably go all the way ‘til Thanksgiving.
So, if you favor the shutdown, vote Democratic in Nov. And if you wanna get back to work, vote Republican.
PRojections: Is Steve Bannon simply trolling the media by insisting Donald Trump will be president for a third term?
Probably.
And to be fair, Donald Trump does it, too — such as leaving “Trump 2028” hats on his desk when Democrats visit the White House.
To me, what makes Trump so admirable isn’t that he’s a superhuman who’ll never age, never die, and can serve forever, but that he’s a flesh-and-blood, real-life person who’s doing the best he can — for as long as he can.
But Father Time is undefeated. And Donald Trump would be 86 by the end of 2032.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to separate Trump from his schtick. Clearly, the guy is having fun: Did you see him dance this morning in Malaysia?
It probably won’t happen ‘til after the 2026 midterms, but eventually, the MAGAverse will need to coalesce around its 2028 “favorite son” — and right now, the odds-on frontrunner is JD Vance.
A Vance-Rubio ticket would be awfully tough to beat. Team MAGA would be doing backflips! Donald Trump might be the heart and soul of the MAGA movement, but a Vance-Rubio one-two punch would be one helluva consolation prize.
Is there also a tactical element to Bannon’s trolling?
Probably.
The more hysterical the Democratic opposition to Trump becomes, the easier they are to lampoon and ridicule. There’s strategic value in keeping your opponents on “tilt.”
You’ve just gotta be careful you don’t inadvertently put your own supporters on “tilt,” too.
PRaise: When I first heard that a mysterious, anonymous billionaire had donated $130 million to pay troops during the Schumer Shutdown, I assumed it was Elon Musk: Seemed like the kind of move he’d make — and besides, there’s gotta be a shortlist of billionaires who can afford a $130 million price-tag, right?
(It only comes to about $100 per troop, but hey, it’s still an amazing gesture.)
After Elon Musk nuked his relationship with the White House (and helped ignite the “Trump is in the Epstein files!” conspiracy), he was on the outside looking in, as his tech competitors — including archrivals Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman — were feted, feasting, and frolicking at presidential dinners. So, I thought to myself, “What a clever way for Musk to regain that goodwill! And it ‘only’ cost him $130 million!”
But it turned out it wasn’t Musk at all. The mysterious, anonymous billionaire was some guy named Mellon.
No, not Thornton Melon — the ultra-rich, plus-sized clothing magnate, and master of the legendary “triple lindy dive”:
Turns out it’s Timothy Mellon. (Someone I don’t know much about.)Still, you’ve gotta tip your hat. We’re blessed to be in a country with so many big-hearted — and deep-pocketed — patriots.
PRedators: Good news for all you Kamala Harris fans: There’s a CHANCE she might run for president again!
(Yawn.)
We’ve discussed her snakebitten book release before:
On the same day she leaked her juiciest excerpts to The Atlantic, Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah.
And almost immediately, her “meticulously planned” comeback was completely forgotten.
She began Sept. 10 on page one, fully expecting to dominate the run-up to her Sept. 23 book launch. Everything was strategically in place! But after the tragic, unspeakable death of Charlie Kirk, she went from the lead story to the back of the bus.
For the next ten days, nobody cared what she had to say about last year’s election. Everyone was thinking about Charlie.
Which was a really big marketing problem, because there wasn’t a preexisting demand for a Kamala Harris tell-all. No one was whispering to their buddy at the neighborhood bar, “I’m dying to know what Kamala thinks about X, Y, and Z. Can’t wait to hear her side of the story!”
Instead, she needed those extra days to drum up interest.
So now she’s selling books overseas, subjecting herself to interviews in England, and promising European reporters that the world hasn’t seen the last of the great and powerful Kamala Harris:
As former Vice President Kamala Harris continues her international book tour promoting the political memoir 107 Days detailing her candidacy for POTUS, she affirmed to BBC in a new interview that she is “not done” with politics and may well run for high office again.
“That is correct: I am not done,” she told the publication in her first U.K. interview. “I have lived my entire career as a life of service, and it’s in my bones. And there are many ways to serve; I have not decided yet what I will do in the future beyond what I am doing right now.”
While appearing on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Harris maintained that her grandnieces would see the first female POTUS “in their lifetime, for sure.” When asked to clarify if that distinction could one day be hers, the former California attorney general answered: “Possibly.”
There was the pesky problem of Kamala’s poor polling numbers. As the reporter noted, she’s now trailing Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Democratic popularity:
Responding to polling results that place her behind even Dwayne Johnson in securing a place on the Democratic ticket, Harris said, “I think there are all kinds of polls that will tell you a variety of things; I’ve never listened to polls. If I listened to polls I would have not run for my first office, or my second office — and I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here in this interview.”
Well, she certainly wouldn’t be the first American to lose her domestic audience and then try to rebound overseas. Basically, she went from being the next Margaret Thatcher to the next David Hasselhoff.
Only, y’know, without the spellbinding talent:
