As is usually the case when I'm in California, the talk turned to real estate. A 75-year-old retiree told me exactly how much it cost him to buy all the cacti surrounding his pool. A stockbroker from Seattle said the house she recently bought was originally owned by Col. Tom Parker and had a TV room that was specially built for Elvis Presley. Everyone talked about someone named Sven, who was moving out of a beautiful home down the street to a smaller, less attractive and more expensive place 10 blocks away simply because it was a snazzier neighborhood.

No one talked about the stillborn presidential election, which seemed odd since we were all college-educated adults attending a private cocktail party in tony Palm Springs. I had always imagined that people who went to such parties talked about nothing but politics. These revelers, however, were providing a sharp contrast to what The New York Times called "an audience communally obsessed [and] privately agape" at the Florida recount.

Even my mother, who lives in Florida, wasn't interested in talking about it. "Frankly, I'm sick of it," she said when I called her just after the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would review the Bush team's request to ignore the recount. Though she had voted for Gore she didn't find much to approve of in the behavior on either side.