Ruminating from Princeton, NJ

The ex-NSA-spook Cris, very nice guy that he is, just invited me to go out with him and his model girlfriend in Manhattan Friday night. Says Cris: "All her friends are models, and there are never enough guys."

Meanwhile in Austin, later this month Beck is playing at Westlake High School.

Famous people are playing at local high schools and I am being invited to hang out with models. Clearly I have crossed over into another dimension, one in which the standard rules of physics do not apply: the world...of teen movies!

Things like this are not supposed to happen in real life. I begin to wonder whether the jets and helicopters flying over Austin are not also part of this Hollywood-rules dimension. Maybe Top Gun is leaking into Teen-Movie Land.

Anyway, unless I need to make use of that night for plans with my local friends and acquaintances, I suppose I'll take him up on it. If nothing else, it should be interesting to see what New York clubland looks like from the beautiful-people perspective. And Cris is of the sort of friendly, personable disposition that essentially guarantees a fun and entertaining night.

And hey, if teen-movie rules continue to apply, when I get home to Austin I'll fall madly for the vaguely-geeky (but not too geeky, this is Hollywood) girl I'd always overlooked, just before the credits roll and the pop music kicks in. That could be cool.

Just don't let the pop music be Creed. Please. I'm begging.

Downtown Austin is changing, and I don't just mean Ruta Maya Coffee House being replaced by something called Halcyon.

There are regular flyovers by jets and Blackhawk helicopters, for one. I'm not sure whether these are training flights, or patrol runs over the Capitol and surrounding government buildings.

There's also a sleek black car left running in the breezeway of my building (clearly marked "No Parking", of course) , almost all the time. It's precisely the sort of black car with tinted windows that I was very accustomed to when living in the tony, monied Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, home to many a top-ranking politician. Here, however, it seems very much out of place.

I'm curious—who in my building warrants a chauffeur? The flouting of the "No Parking" signs is de rigueur for chauffeurs and bodyguards—no surprise there—but I'm just wondering what kind of person with that much fame and/or authority would live in an apartment building like mine. The place is somewhat secure, but certainly not conducive to privacy.

My current working hypothesis is that one of our building's few furnished apartments is currently occupied by a celebrity who is just in town for a few days. Ethan Hawke is supposed to be appearing at Bookpeople, 2 blocks away, later in the week. Maybe it's him.

People have apparently been sighting Sandra Bullock in town again, so maybe it's her, too. I was under the impression she had already purchased a more permanent residence in the area, though.

Still, whoever it is, I must say I'm not surprised by the parking behavior but I am annoyed by it. Yet another example of the tendency of my fellow building occupants to completely disregard the implicit social contracts of community living.

I really am tired of the loud parties at 3am on the rooftop, the broken beer bottles in the stairwells and elevators, and the anonymous person who left a note on my door telling me my music is too loud at 5am and he/she has notified management. Never a knock on the door to say so, and besides I am asleep at 5am, so he/she has the wrong apartment, which a knock and a friendly request would have confirmed.

Can't we try to resolve problems without whining to management first? Isn't this what they taught us in kindergarten?

I guess I'm not so worried about downtown changing as I am about people changing. People are not civil anymore. Politeness and respect—left for dead.

In their place, helicopters buzzing over as I walk to Katz's of a Sunday morning, and sleek black cars left running, running.

What ever happened to civility?

My arrival at the apartment homestead yester-evening was met by a whole building full of doors plastered with memos from the building management.

Oddly -- and a bit chillingly, as you will see in a moment -- my apartment was apparently the only one lacking these missives. I walked over to a nearby door and quickly read the contents before replacing them on the neighbor's door.

In front, a colorful, festive invitation to a wine and cheese reception for residents on Thursday. Behind that, detailed news of the recent FBI warning of the possible plot to have terrorists occupy residential apartments and rig them with explosives.

At first, I was mildly outraged -- yes, I've already seen some cursory notice of the FBI warning in local media, but isn't this bit of communication important enough to double-check that you've reached everyone?

Ultimately, my mind settled into a more deeply troubling question: assuming something "out of the ordinary" did happen in my building, would I know?

My building is on the whole remarkably secure and safe, with electronic swipe devices at all of the entrances (which work at least most of the time), and two members of local law enforcement paid to live in the building. These and other features were trumpeted by the building management in their memo.

But these things aren't likely to be especially effective against this particular threat. One only notices the out-of-the-ordinary if one knows what "ordinary" is.

Apart from the friendly young entrepreneur woman who lived next door until recently, I don't know anyone in my building. How am I to know if something is amiss in the neighborhood if I don't know the neighborhood? Do I even have a neighborhood?

This is really the problematic difference between "them" and "us", terrorists and their victims.

Terrorists know each other -- their organizations are structured in tightly-knit, almost familial, cellular networks. Even where cells are unaware of each other, there's always a strong trusted link tying them to the rest of the network. Terrorists have one big neighborhood.

On the other hand, we in the U.S. have a government of disconnected bureaucracies, intelligence agencies that distrust each other implicitly, a government that distrusts the public, and a populace increasingly disconnected from the people and places in their immediate surroundings.

As effective group dynamics go, we're in a horrible place. The concepts of "neighborhood" and "cooperation" are becoming about as foreign in the U.S. as the concept of "class action litigation" would be in Zimbabwe.

I'm not sure what to do about it on the national level (and indeed I have little hope of improvement -- an Australian work visa is looking like an increasingly attractive option), but on the local level, however accidental the pairing of those two memos probably was, I think the silly wine and cheese party is a step in the right direction.

I hope I'm not the only one who shows up trying to build a little bit of a neighborhood.