A friend and I have an ongoing debate about the robustness of life. That is, about the degree to which little decisions that one makes end up having massive ramifications on one's ultimate fate. She tends to think that a simple missed plane, a rainstorm, a second's hesitation can change one's life, twice. I tend to think not; or more precisely, I tend to think that if such little decisions exist, they are ex ante completely unidentifiable, so fretting about them gets you nowhere.

At any rate, once I learned that I had failed to pull over soon enough, and therefore destroyed my car's transmission, I began to feel a change of heart. If only, if only, I had stopped driving it in South Bend rather than charging on to Elkhart, things could have gone much more smoothly as I moved apartments over the past few weeks.

And now it turns out that my transmission is fine. Jordan Volvo in Mishawaka misdiagnosed the thing (too-hasty, I suppose) and it lives to drive again. The only catch is that the car is currently in Bloomington, Indiana, while I'm here in New Haven. Law Journal hazing, classes, and an out-of-town guest occupy me until mid-September, so it's hard to think of when I could fly back and retrieve it. Or Federal Express will ship it to me for a hefty sum, I guess.

I really wish I knew somebody in or around Bloomington who needed a car to drive to school in the East Coast in the next week or two, but unless such a person is (fortuitously) reading this post right now, I don't think that's going to happen.

(An extended comment upon Raffi's post below)

I realized that I'm extremely uncomfortable with servants who have been hired to do something I can do perfectly well, and particularly servants who take up residence in the home for any period of time.

At any rate, the person who cares for my hypothetical grass while I'm away (or, even, in town) does not learn much more about my life and ways of living than the passerby who sees my while walking by; the backyard reveals little more than the front. A gardener would be slightly more involved---questions of aesthetics regarding whether a combination of birds-of-paradise, wisteria, and tulips would clash; debates on whether a water-garden or statue is worth the price and how the addition or subtraction of koi affects the equation---but still, mostly outside the home.

In P.D. James murder mysteries, there's always a lot of attention given to the moment in which Detective Adam Dagliesh & co. enter a suspect's or witness's house (Also, many of the places they enter feature hand-cranked coffee grinders, giving the police even more time to silently comment on the artwork and knick-knacks in the sitting room, frequently pitying the absense of original oil paintings). And the entry of the police is always a moment of intrusion.

Charming as Dagliesh is, he would not have been invited into these homes---and not into these people's lives---were it not for his business. It's highly unlikely that any of these hosts would have rung Scotland Yard or Merry Maids: "Yes, could you please send someone around at 7:30 next Friday for dinner?" Instead, the intruder must be offered something to drink, and certain social conventions followed, when really the truth is, guests are not invited to see the detritous of our lives, but these people, the police and the housekeepers, have come specifically to poke around the mess and dirt.

I lived in a situation with a weekly housekeeper once when I rented a room in a woman's house, an arrangement that itself brings two strangers' lives together.
Never having to think about scrubbing floors and walls and dusting the tops of doorframes certainly had its benefits; not having passive-agressive arguments, as we did in my shared college apartment, about whose turn it is to take care of these shared responsibilities, is equally a blessing. But between the housekeeper and the house's inhabitants, there's an assymetrical information exchange: my books are on the shelf; my mail and random things picked up and notes on top of my desk; sentimental photos somewhat displayed.

There are two responses. One is that chatting, developing a friendly relationship, dispells awkwardness. The other is the Anna Karenina principle that to the housekeeper, as to the doctor, this is all in a day's work. A case of Lenin's revenge, brought on by something I shouldn't have eaten, is far more personal for me than it is for a doctor, who has seen this malady time and time again. My intestinal bacteria, like my lawn outside or my home inside, aren't so private that they can't be violated when need be. But if need doesn't exist and I value maintaining my privacy and, like Raffi, value not having a service relationship, then I'll hire the anonymous steam carpet cleaners once a year and vacuum it myself the other fifty-one weeks of the year.

During a recent visit to Washington, I finally isolated a feeling that had gnawed at me for a while. While trying to coordinate a housekeeper and gardener my parents hired to take care of the house while they were travelling in different places (Algeria and France, respectively) , I realized that I'm extremely uncomfortable with servants who have been hired to do something I can do perfectly well, and particularly servants who take up residence in the home for any period of time.

I don't mind hiring a specialist - I obviously can't pave the driveway, so I happily exchange money in return for that service. But personal servants - like maids, housekeepers, and so on, really stir up revulsion somewhere very deep within.

I've been trying to discover the reason for my problem. I'm an unabashed elitist of sorts, so one might think that I just don't like "working" people. But in all honesty, that's not it - I've worked summers as a janitor, store clerk, and any number of menial jobs where I didn't feel anything except sympathy for good people stuck permanently with bad jobs. Alternatively, my revulsion might be based in some sort of American egalitarianism, bound up with democracy and equality before the law. But given the attitude of our founders towards servants, that all seems kind of unlikely.

It later occurred to me that other libertarians I've met have expressed similar concerns. Perhaps, I thought, there was something in my libertarian side that makes me uncomfortable with personal service? Of course, that's not really an intuitive result, since I'd usually say that people have the right to bind themselves to do almost anything. Nor do I really believe that there's anything bad in people accepting money in return for unpleasant chores because they need money to pay for rent or food, or anything else.

But after thinking about the problem for a while, I came away with the sense - not very defined - that there is something about most libertarians' desire to be left alone that makes servants undesirable. A political philosophy based in large part on getting others to let you do what you want seems unlikely to fit comfortably with the layered hierarchies of a service relationship. Hiring personal servants, to me, is a fundamentally conservative thing to do, while libertarianism - however alloyed with traditional Republicanism - hardly seems like a conservative philosophy.

Ultimately, this all could be a personal idiosyncracy. I admit to being a little odd. But I wonder. Does anyone have any thoughts?

I've recently been re-introduced to the Kronos Quartet playing Philip Glass string quartets.

Usually, I'm not a huge fan of Glass, namely because I think the entire joke of how Glass would play the opening measures of the Waldstein Sonata holds all too true in his own music more often than not. Although, there are some exceptions. Not that it's not repetitive, but I feel that sometimes it's effective in his soundtrack to the Hours.

But there are other times when I'm completely impressed by him--like 3:03 in the fifth movement of the fifth string quartet, where he completely breaks mood and goes classical boogie-woogie.

That's right, classical boogie-woogie.

And what's surprising (help me, Lord, I'm actually writing this) is that it works. It works surprisingly well, as do the rest of the string quartets on this CD.