Peter Krupa

Maybe it’s because I work from home now, so I no longer have to be out in it, but the afternoon rain has become one of my favorite parts of the day. The clouds come in and a cool breeze kicks up and the rain comes roaring down on all the tin roofs, straight down, like it’s heavier than other rain. I always imagine that the jungle is still covering the Central Valley, or I think of the Ticos in the countryside taking shelter from the aguacero to drink afternoon coffee and watch it come down.

I try to deny it sometimes, but the truth is I love gadgets, and my new Asus EEE laptop is just too sweet for words. Tiny, light, cheap, useful, robable… so far I have nothing bad to say.

The keyboard is a little small, but that’s only a problem when transitioning from a different laptop. I love this little thing. If someone were to invent a machine specifically designed to be a poor, traveling journalist’s best friend, this would be it.

I give it an A, for Awesome.

This morning my wife and I drove our SUV to the gym, so we could exercise our bodies using electronic machines. Then we drove back, I dropping her off at work and passing through San José in our SUV so I could meet someone on the other side.  Afterwards, I drove the SUV to lunch with a friend, where I ate tuna. Then I drove home, through crushing traffic, and when I arrived, I turned on all our incandescent light bulbs. After a little while, I drove back into the city to pick up Ona, then we drove home, turned on all the lights again, turned on the stove, and watched a documentary about global warming.

That’s to say, it has not been a very good Earth Day.

Due to the pressures of a normal job, I fell silent on this blog. Fortunately, my normal job is now over, meaning I’m sort of an independent contractor, meaning I work from home and set my own hours and will blog here whenever I damn well please. It will be blogging into the void, since I can’t imagine anyone checks here anymore for updates , but whatever.

Forward!

I remember when I was a conservative attending Hillsdale College. Just budding, I was. We were conservatives, and we read Great Books and took rhetoric classes, and we told ourselves that we thought with our minds and would have none of the mushiness of the hated liberals, who were full of bad arguments and sundry sleaziness.

I’m no longer a conservative, in fact I’m not really anything. But sometimes I look back, look for that classic rhetoric that conservatives - in my day - prided themselves on, and I’m a little shocked. Was it always like this? Or did something change?

Take Jonah Goldberg. He’s come out with a book called - I’m serious here - Liberal Fascism. Just right there in the title, Goldberg has already made an association fallacy and more or less violated Godwin’s Law.

According to a Slate.com review, Goldberg declares Woodrow Wilson to have been the 20th century’s “first fascist dictator,” and then traces that fascist political DNA all the way up through - wait for it - Bill Clinton.

I have this idea that there was an earlier generation of conservatives that liked to wrestle with ideas and have a good, spirited debate that didn’t devolve into this kind of idiocy. A Golden Age, if you will, when we strove to be like William F. Buckley, not Bill O’Reilly.

Sure, looking back into my imagined Golden Age of conservatives, there were plenty of ideas that I now find distasteful. But at least there was a tradition of real thought behind them, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that I’ve managed to think my way out of being a conservative.

Now today’s conservatives – well, they’ve given Goldberg 3.5 stars on Amazon and pushed the book’s ranking up to number 25.

“This is a serious scholarly work, and it deserves to be read and judged as such,” said one reviewer. “Goldberg is attempting to right a historical injustice.”

The human brain is prone to nostalgic misrememberance, but I swear to God, “conservatism” has gone completely off the rails.

No one ever accused Apple of price-consciousness, but come on: four freaking dollars to rent a movie over the Internet? Someone didn’t get the memo that the Internet is supposed to make movie rentals cheaper, not more costly, considering you don’t have to run a physical store to rent them.

So much for progress. Guess I’ll stick with the $2 bootlegs I rent down the street.

UPDATE: Sorry, I have to add, this is why “Mac” people are so annoying, as is the Apple-obsessed media: Because none of them will call bullshit when something is legitimately bullshit. Four dollars for a movie rental in the year 2008 is an insult to modern innovation.

When I lived in the states I paid $15 a month for Netflix. Unlimited rentals. True, I couldn’t transfer the movie onto my iPhone/iPod/iWhatever and watch it three times in three different sizes over a 24-hour period.

But show me a person who wants to pay $4 to do that, and I’ll show you me, backing away slowly and making no sudden moves that might stir that lunatic into conversation.

I just got one of these, but now I really want one of these. It’s funny, they seem to be marketing the ASUS Eee PC to kids or some shit. Tiny, 7-inch screen, 4-gig flash memory hard drive, 900 mhtz processor. Maybe it just screams “child’s play.”

Perhaps I have a unique situation, but I see a much greater possibility, a newer market niche: The robable laptop. I mean robable from the perspective of the owner - as in, I would carry around my digital camera, but no way in hell I want to risk my $1,500 MacBook getting ganked.

Again, maybe I have a unique situation. I do live in a city where at least 600 known and repeat muggers wander around and no one does anything about it (one guy’s been arrested 80 times!). I also work as a journalist, so I love, love, love the idea of having a tiny, useful, cheap laptop that I can whip out anywhere to take notes or take advantage of a hot-spot without advertising that I am carrying around the local equivalent of three monthly salaries.

At $400 - roughly the cost of a nice digital camera - it would make sense to carry this laptop around, and I wouldn’t cry if someone stuck a gun to my head and took it away. Seriously, this is brilliant - the second laptop. A truly mobile, useful laptop.

A robable laptop.

I’m not sure what it was that made blogging in New York City so much easier. Perhaps my state of semi-employment. More than that, there’s the problem of topic. From New York City, you can post about all kinds of things in the universe because you are at the center of it (anyway, that’s what they told me).

From Costa Rica, however, people post about idiotic things, like how wonderful and kind are the Ticos in this cute little paradise of a palm-tree sprinkled wonderland, or, alternately, how they were violently assaulted/cheated/covered in black soot from a 40-year-old school bus on the Paseo Colon.

Is this making any sense? No, of course not, because you’re not here, you’ve never been here, and you probably think Costa Rica is an island. So how could I blog about fun stuff like free trade agreements and roads with potholes the size of a Hyundai when most of you still think I’m in San Juan?

Aside from the lack of interest/knowledge on the part of my audience (audience?), writing almost anything about Costa Rica would be a violation of the first rule of blogging: Don’t post about work. Since I’m a reporter on the politics/real estate/business/tourism/China/economy/trade beat, that pretty much means I can’t post about anything interesting that happens in this country because of all that “objectivity” nonsense impressed upon those of my profession.

I am, therefore, frozen in the headlights of my own destiny, loathe to post about the whimsical thing that happened to me on the way to work, yet grown weary of throwing up the perfunctory link to the New York Times with a line or two of sarcastic analysis.

Here we approach a crisis. A crisis of purpose. But I will figure something out.

When I was younger and more tender, the idea of “relativism” - such as it is - filled me with indignation. Because, you know, if truth is relative, that means everyone could be right at the same time, a reality which would both defy common sense and smell like hippies.

I never considered the other side of the relativism coin, which is that perhaps, since truth is relative, everyone is simultaneously wrong.

As I grow older, this possibility strikes me as more plausible.

This morning, I watched a knee replacement surgery. They bent the patient’s leg, made a vertical incision, and pulled aside the skin and the knee cap, revealing the glistening curves of the bottom end of a femur. The surgeon sawed those curves off and replaced them with titanium. I will never think of knees quite the same again.

This afternoon, I talked with a financial analyst with the Costa Rican stock market who explained to me his plan for making the market available to small and medium businesses that need to raise capital. He was British. We talked about how bad traffic is getting in San Jose, and then he had to go.