Tuesday, November 30, 2004

valium sucks

Dear University of Minnesota,

Thank you for the wonderful complete lack of dental insurance. What I've always wanted is to suffer through dental work while inadequately sedated. Because really, I couldn't possibly have a real phobia of either needles or dentists. It couldn't possibly cause me to sob uncontrollably while there's a NEEDLE IN MY FUCKING MOUTH. And really, I should be thanking you for my piss-poorly paid job, which grants you cheap labor and helps you avoid hiring people you actually have to GIVE BENEFITS TO!

And thank you so much for offering me discount dental work at your dental school, so that more of my money can end up in your pocket. Don't you think, though, that it would make sense to teach your students how to use nitrous oxide? Oh, that's right. I forgot: those of us who need sedation are just a bunch of fucking whiners. No reason why the valium that DIDN'T EVEN PUT ME TO SLEEP last night won't take care of it.

Thank you ever so much. This was officially the second-worst dental experience I've ever had, after the poorly done surgery in which, at age 8, I was 1) not allowed to have nitrous... or any other type of sedation; and 2) operated on before the fucking novocaine started working.

I understand that you really don't think I'm worth the money to insure (or hell, pay), but I help keep your school running and bringing in more money. I really don't think it's too much to ask that I not have to choose between being able to afford dental work and being able to have it done without nearly having to be strapped down.

Yours in servitude,
CJ

Monday, November 29, 2004

your daily wince

Read the "raw materials" section. In case you were ever wondering where those lost bits got to.

My blog is edumacational!

Sunday, November 28, 2004

In Which I Rant Again

Look, jackass, if I want to take a course called Performance and Social Change, you can rest assured the only thing your continued disapproval and disappointed sighs will get you is an assurance that I am now determined to take the fucking course COME HELL OR HIGH WATER!!!

Go to hell, you bastard.

Love,
Me

Goddamn Liberals

Do not adjust your monitor, it really does say that.

So, there was this shooting recently that killed six people (the article says five, but another died the next day) while they were hunting near the Minnesota-Wisconsin border. The weapon of choice was an SKS assault weapon -- not your typical hunting fare (in fact, it's not legal hunting fare), but, and here's the key, not illegal to own, either pre- or post-assault weapon ban. Seriously, my dad has been eying one for years (that and the AK; just, don't ask).

There are differing accounts of what happened that day, including who fired first, and whether or not the white hunters who were killed shouted racial slurs at their assailant. Some news reports have examined the cultural tensions between Northwoods hunters, others have looked at the life of the shooter, attempting to answer the unanswerable: why?

If you look at that last linked article, you'll find some strange things. First, you'll find that Vang had isolated himself from both his neighborhood community and the Hmong community specifically. Yet his white neighbors comment on the fact that "they" keep away from "us," and that the government allows "them" to keep chickens in a zone where livestock is otherwise outlawed. Vang also served in the US military for a short time, though the article makes no mention of why that time was short (this article tells us that he was a file clerk who earned a sharpshooter's badge, and was once arrested for holding his wife at knifepoint). My point, which I have been rather slow in making, is that the entire thing is rather a mire. There are many different social and psychological aspects that we simply do not and will not ever know about.

And here's where simple-minded, single-cause liberals begin to bug the shit out of me. The particular quote that I'm most pissed off by goes something like, "there are six fewer red-state voters tonight, thanks to our failure to pass an assault weapons ban." What kind of a person can say something like that? First of all, even when we did have a ban that particular gun was not illegal. Second, how can anyone who claims a political monopoly on compassion possibly suggest that the loss of six lives is less devastating because it came from a region that voted for the other guy? The implication that they "brought this on themselves" is the most cold-hearted fuckheadedness I have heard in quite awhile. And what if that crowd of hunters was in the forty percent of Wisconsinites who voted for your guy, oh allegedly liberal asshat? Does the tragedy of the situation suddenly become important to you?

So, once again, to drag this to some kind of point: lumping people into geographic categories explains nothing. Saying, of the Hmong, that "they" aren't friendly to white people helps about as much as saying, of dead white Wisconsin hunters, that "they" brought it on themselves by not voting for Kerry. Whether you "other" people by place of origin or political association (which in this case comes back to place of origin), you are assuming that you know all you need to know to judge a person based on that one category.

So. To the East Coast liberal who made the above association (no, I doubt he'll see this): does it make you feel better that you can dismiss the entire state of Wisconsin for disagreeing with you? Because I gotta tell you, the Republicans who are dear to me tend to live there, and I guarantee you that they would be more than just "red-state voters" if they were the ones killed by a troubled ex-military man with a seemingly troubled past (you did vote, right Ryan? Because I've been refraining from deleting your political posts so far, but you will have to 'fess up eventually:-). The world doesn't sort well into black and white -- or for that matter, into red and blue. And that's certainly a piss-poor way to judge the worth of human life.

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Questionable Content

Turtle Nerd

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Cheburashka! Cheburashka!

This is highly awesome. Dude, it's Cheburashka. He was a running gag in my high school Russian class, and is completely hilarious.

What are the odds that my mum will buy the DVD for me? It comes with a plushie and has English subtitles... this could be hilarious.

Arrrr!

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Presidential Bloopers

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

More fun with news


Jerry Falwell's Greatist Hits.


Fear my guard dolphins.

And the saddest news of the evening:
Dan Rather will not longer anchor the CBS news come March. In honor of this, I give you the "ratherisms" I collected during the election coverage (with the help of Jon, who compiled them as I spit them at him via Instant Messenger).

- ohio is, and I quote, "the biggun"
- "ohio is a sauna for both candidates -- all they can do is wait and sweat"
- "don't taunt the alligator untill after you've crossed the creek"
- "Play a verse of Johnny be good for john kerry in illinois tonight"
- "ding-dong battle in new hampshire"
- "this presidential race is hotter than the devil's anvil"
- "it won't mean a thing if they don't get those swings"
- bush is "sweeping through the midwest like a big combine"
- "never gamble against strangers, never bet against a republican in kansas"
- "in what may be a tachycardia-inducing race..."
- "the race is... it's comin' along like ray charles"
- "the democrats must absolutely, positively, tee-totally have that race"
- "that'll be whoopee news down in texas"
- "if john kerry doesn't carry Pennsylvania, it could be the equivalent of death valley for him"
- "If you believe that folks, you believe rocks can grow"
- "let's call a television time out for one second"


Thanks, Dan, for the laughs (and groans). It may not have been the best in news, but it sure was entertaining.

This Guy is the Dumbest Dumbhead Who Ever Dumbed

... you have to realize, ninety percent of the people who go to
therapy are women. So people who study men in therapy are studying
only ten percent of the male population.
-- John Gray

What's wrong with this picture? And yes, this is par for the course.
This is how every measly grain of "evidence" has been presented.
Evidence that "proves" naturalized difference between men and women.
So, for the record, if women make up 90% of the therapeutic
population, that tells us nothing about what percent of the male
population is in therapy. See? Different populations. You'd think a
world-famous hack counselor would know that, yeah?

Monday, November 22, 2004

Not at all Confidence Inspiring

So, I'm nuts. I would normally not TMI you like this, except it was just too funny not to post. But yes, I'm nuts, and recently have become a rather debilitating sort of nuts, so I finally swallowed my complete mistrust of mental health professionals and made an appointment.

Today was that appointment, with a very nice, reasonable woman who actually wanted to hear me blather about the freakish ways in which my mind and my autonomic nervous system have recently conspired to convince my body that every waking moment is an emergency. And so I blathered a bit, ignoring the bits of Foucault dancing about in my head (some lucky bastards get sugar plums), and I even managed not to blanch at the thought of medicating with anything other than a nice glass of merlot. And then it happened.

The very nice woman had to leave for a moment to handle something of gerater urgency than my blather, so I took a gander at her bookshelf. There amongst the various manuals of practice was a familiar name. Now, this is not universally a bad thing; I am about six credits off from a degree in psychology, so I know a lot of related names. But this name I knew from elsewhere. This was one of the names attached to one of the keynote lectures I mave been transcribing this term. Transcribing and making fun of. Mercilessly.

The very nice woman came back, and we wrapped up our session (which bizarrely included a discussion of Foucault; is there a social science/humanities discipline that DOESN'T claim him as their own?). She made sure I was sorted out with appointments with other Very Nice People, as she will not be my "regular" therapist. I'm telling you now: I'm not entirely sure how regular this will be. If I see a copy of John Gray on anyone's shelf, I'm done. Because I'm nuts, but not that nuts.

Fucking Hilarious

"Screw you, America: Sometimes the Fish in the Barrell Deserve to Die"

Yeah, don't click if you're right-leaning, sympathetic to the current adminiatration, a religious conservative, or have no sense of humor.

Sunday, November 21, 2004

In the News

Mawwiage

This is really kinda funny. The folks at the Alliance for Marriage think that banning gay marriage will open doors to family-friendly workplaces and other policies that "strengthen" marriage. Meanwhile, back in Washington, corporate lobbyists rub their hands together with glee, realizing that as long as we fight about what makes a family, they can go about their merry way making sure that folks have to work two jobs to provide for one.

Marriage: for when you need false consciousness, stat! (That joke? Flashing neon sign for "CJ needs a vacation.")

Google Talk

Katherine linked to Google Talk, and I've been procrastinating playing with it. So far, I've got:

1) A very strangely re-written Three Dog Night song

just an old fashioned love Song Playing on the radio/ With the radio on and off. and to connect nanophotonic chips to optical fiber.

2) A cliche (how the hell do you put accent marks in this thing?) that turned into a public service announcement that turned into gibberish

if momma ain't happy aint nobody happy, Reply With Quote. Quote. Reply with Quote. On the Internet, and the World Wide Web Virtual Library History of the Internet. Society is a non- profit organization? profiles. small business Administration) SBA) Loans. The SBA s programs and services, For the Blind and Visually Impaired People. to use paper money. and a Smart card Reader writer. USB w/ DVD S/ W This

3) A very dorky milkshake

my milkshake brings all the Virology on the Internet, and the Prisoner of Azkaban Movie Review.

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Ebay

So, I went to E's tonight to watch Finding Nemo and relax. Much hilarity was had, including previewing her wardrobe for the cruise she's going on in 16 DAYS (!!!), realizing every fifteen minutes (in the manner of Dory, from the movie) that there was a cat in the room, and discovering that she had married Ebay.

See, I was admitting to a desire for something (this will go unnamed for various dorkitude-related reasons), and trying to explain what exactly that thing was. Here hubby piped up with a far better description than I ever could, and THEN proceeded to quote a price range. Flabbergasted, I blurted out, "your husband is Ebay!"

Friday, November 19, 2004

Theater Geekery

This lost of things I promise never to do when directing Shakespeare is absolutely hysterical. The one that broke my brain, though, it this: I will never stage Macbeth entirely in freestyle rap. Now, I've seen music successfully incorporated into many shakespearean plays. Hell, the best production of Midsummer that I've ever seen set one of Puck's monologues as a rap. But the entirety of the Scottish Play? Um... no. Just, no.

Mars and Venus

I have not read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, but just from hearing a lecture by the author I think I can honestly say that it makes one of the best arguments in favor of homosexual relationships EVER. Especially if you're a woman, because the man is frankly ODIOUS. Apparently testosterone is the master factor in the happiness of... well, everyone. Also, we are all aliens from different planets. Also, if I hear him refer to my gender as "Venutian" one more time I'm going to defenestrate my computer (OK, probably not, but it's a nice thought). It's actually more annoying than Deborah Tannen's "different cultures" theory, in terms of naturalizing gender difference. I promise you, my mother's uterus was not some strange teleportation device that migrated me here from Venus. I was made the same way all y'all boys were: good, old fashioned, HUMAN sexual relations. If John Gray wants to go this far out of his way to avoid thinking about his parents having sex, I hink he should really keep it to himself. (n.b. He can't even say the words vagina or penis -- possibly not even sex. He says "going south," to the exclusion of all other euphamisms. Possibly this is different in his book. I'm not holding my breath.)

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Video killed the radio star...

Perspective

Just to put this in perspective, the presumptive sentence in Minnesota for Crim Sex One (first degree criminal sexual conduct; forcible, penetrative rape) is 86 MONTHS. That comes nowhere near 55 years.

Yep. The guy who sells you drugs with a gun in the room will go to jail for longer than the guy who rapes you with a gun to your head. Because according to the US Attorney, it's the "purveyor of poison" for whom posessing a gun indicates intent to kill.

(The link requires registration or bugmenot. But do read it, as it gives many more examples of disproportionate sentencing.)

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Gmail

I can't remember who asked, but if you wanted a gmail invite I've got more now. Lemme know.

Integrity... we got it in spades!

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

BEST. POST. EVER.

OK, I felt the need to have a few things all in one place. So, first off, the llama song (thanks, Maeven). Have you ever seen a llama kiss a llama on the llama?

The Library Musical. The best prank in the history of man.

The dancing car from a few posts back (I may delete that post, as this is the digest version).

Where can you see lions? Only in Kenya.

SLEEPY KITTIES!!!

If you've never seen Sifl 'n Olly, you've been deprived (if you HAVE seen, you've probably been depraved).

The Viridian Room is freaking me out -- in a good way!

And if you're a particular type of dork -- which I very much was at one point -- you'll enjoy the deleted scene from the X-Files episode "Memento Mori."

If you're Ryan, you'll enjoy this. Type "fight" as your order (again, many thanks to Maeven). You will have to explore in order to figure out how to make more... interesting things happen.

If you have a lot of time to waste, consider selling lemonade. Or if you're in a hurry, poke the penguin.

If you're feeling a bit naughty, check out some prawn. Or, try something truly devine (this one is Not Safe For Work).

Feel the rhythm, or dance to it ("Break" is admittedly not the best of games on that site; Flash Boyfriend and Flash Band are hilarious).

And if none of this is good enough for you, you can just bite me!

Elitist Pig

Goddamn those high falutin' politicos and their
green tea
. Puttin' on airs, they be.

Unsettled Lives

Forrest is moving to Vermont, and I came home from dinner to a note that says "went to urgent care." When did my life become one constant cycle of goodbye dinners and medical emergencies?

And when did Forrest become the kind of guy who can say "I really like your hair. It looks great!" without showing typical boyish "OMG she'll think I LIKE her" phobias? All of my boys are grown up and moved away. Poo.

Now, to figure out why mom is at the hospital.

Coolest. Car. Ever.

Monday, November 15, 2004

Unimpressed

But for one stupid half-hour PT appointment, I'd be in Duluth tomorrow.

Fuck you, world.

Saturday Night Fever

So, I had an adventurous saturday night. First, I went to see Bill in "Damn Yankees." Bill playes Applegate, and was FANTASTIC. He had one line that absolutely killed me dead, and a fantastic solo that killed me deader. If you don't know the play, it's about a baseball fan who sells his soul so that his beloved Washington Senators (now our Minnesota Twins) can beat those Damn Yankees and go to the World Series. It wakes place in DC in the 50's, which means plenty of political references, including Bill's Big Line That Killed Me. See, Aplegate is the devil. Satan. Beelza-whatever. And at one point he's complaining about job stress, especially in light of recent elections.

Cue audience laughter that won't stop.

Anyway, Bill rocks and the show was cuter than should be strictly legal, and from there (because who needs sleep, really?) I went straight to uptown, met up with Esther and Mark for pre-movie drinks, then saw the midnight showing of Pirates of the Caribbean on the big screen. Yes, I own the movie, but I never saw i in the theater the first time around, and midnight shows at the Uptown are well known for being fan-friendly (we won't talk about the recitation of lines going on in that theater, except to say it wasn't me... really). The best part was the spontaneous applause at appropriate movie moments, like when Captain Jack Sparrow first walke on to the dock from the mast of his boat. Well deserved, that.

So, yes, I love the night life. Only, I'm still so wiped I took a three-hour nap this afternoon.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Is it just me...

... or does "Girl All the Bad Guys Want" by Bowling for Soup have some really strange similarities to "Green Tinted Sixties Mind" by Mr. Big?

And is it just me, or am I the only person who would EVER think to care?

Oh, good God

I could have happily lived my entire life without exposure to the phrase "diamond-encrusted pleasure probe".

Saturday, November 13, 2004

The Wonderful World of Disney

Apparently, the folks in mouseville have decided that the murder of Matthew Shepard was nothing more than a mugging gone wrong.

Oh, so THAT'S why my stomach is off today.

Friday, November 12, 2004

By the numbers

Mostly for my own records, in order of likeliness of not inducing homocidal urges:

1. theater arts -- performance and social change
2. public health -- Violence prevention and control
3. public health -- Adolescent Health
4. poli sci -- Che: in his own words
5. art history -- films of hitchcock

Number of these that have anything to do with research interests: arguably 2 (one wholly, two partially)

Number of these that the department will "frown upon" (yeah, I should really let that go; then again, X should stop being a dick, and I don't see that happening any time soon, either): 2

Percent overlap within the above overlap: 50

Desire to take ANY fucking classes: zero

Panic level: off the fucking charts

Memories...

Frog just posted a list of entertainment events from 1992, and woah, junior high memories. E. will certainly hear me on this. Remember Color Me Badd? Whitney and Kevin in "The Bodyguard" (that movie blew so badly, especially for the amount of hype it received)? That business with the Elvis Stamp?

OK, but here's my favorite. Everyone was on the "End of the Road" tip once Boyz II Men started breaking records with it, right? So much so that our JH choir director was convinced to get the sheet music for it. Yeah. Wrap your head around that -- or don't, if you value your sanity. A junior high choir -- and specifically, a choir in which I was allowed to participate -- attempting a fairly complicated harmony made for mostly male voices. You see where I'm going? Yeah, even most of the males in the choir didn't have the voice required for most of the parts. We truly sounded like ass -- I think i may even still have the video.

We also won't talk about any duets done by a voice impaired blogger and a well-meaning partner in crime. No, I won't tell you which song. Shut up. And leave my Wall of Hair out of this.

*runs and hides from the memories*

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Reading is Fundamental

I do believe Monsieur Bourdieu would be more comprehensible in the original French.

EDIT:

Cher amazon.fr,

Pourquoi vous ne m'aimez pas?

Je ne t'aime pas,
CJ

P.S. Comment ecrit-on des accents aigu et grave dans cette machine?
P.P.S. Je suis un ananas.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Donkey Whore

I don't normally watch morning TV. OK, I don't normally watch much TV at all, but especially not in the morning, owing to teh suck of it.

I flipped on the TV this morning to find that Jerry Springer is not just on at three in the morning anymore. Here, paraphrased, is what I saw:

Woman: Wah! My future mother-in-law hates me!!!
Jerry: Why is that?
Woman: I won't join her donkey show.
Jerry: What with the who, now?
Woman: She has a donkey at her house. She has sex with it. [n.b. apparently this happens in public, hence the "show"]
Jerry: You mean she's dating a democrat?
Woman: No. *gives Jerry a Look*
MIL: SHE LIES!!!1!!1!!
Crowd: Don-key Whore! Don-key Whore!
MIL: *slaps woman*
Woman: *beats MIL with bouquet of flowers* [n.b. Woman is dressed in wedding garb to fit the "distressed bride-to-be" motif]

TV is off now.

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Funniest headline all year

Monday, November 08, 2004

Cleaning out my closet

Well, I said I'd been working on it for days, and I wasn't kidding. It's long, it's TMI, and it doesn't make much sense, but I needed to put it somewhere other than my head. So here goes...

I think I may have run into my first huge crisis in reflexivity. For those of you who do not regularly sit through my rambling diatribes on qualitative research methodologies, the reflexive turn in social research developed in reaction to "objective" social science. It called into question this objectivity, and suggested that for a truly accurate picture of social life to be painted, the researcher must reflect on her place in that life.

For class yesterday we read Joshua Gamson's Freaks Talk Back. It's a really fabulous book that looks at how sexual non-conformity is mediated through TV talk shows. The results are complex, which is one of the reason's I really enjoyed it. There's no single overwhelming answer: talk shows are not a universal scourge, nor do they create an urge toward diversity and tolerance in all who watch them. Needless to say, I had a whole lot to talk about when I got to class.

Except I froze.

See, I've gotten used to thinking reflexively in terms of gender when I "do" sociology. This is good, I suppose, as gender is one of the areas in which I (hope to) work. Sexuality presents a a concurrent area of interest, and the one in which my current struggles lie. Over the past ten years, however, my approach to thinking about my own sexual identity, both personally and professionally, has largely been to attempt NOT to think about it.

(A short aside: if you remember, I once spoke vaguely about this in a completely asinine post driven largely by desperate humiliation. Badly. With much purple prose and false hope. Yeah, don't bother clicking that link. It will only make you wince. But at any rate, hopefully this post doesn't really surprise anyone.)

Back briefly to Gamson's book. One of his findings is that acceptance for lesbians and gay men on talk shows often comes at the expense of the "BT." Within the world of the shows, bisexuality is synonymous with promiscuity; transgendered people are lying to those who love them about their "true" (biological) gender. Gay AND straight guests (and hell, Oprah) tell bisexuals they "have to choose." This both binds sexual identity to sexual practice and dictates a particular normative practice, namely the development of a long term, possibly permanent, monogamous romantic relationship.

Now back to class. There were several places in which we discussed GLBT movements where I would have liked to complicate discussion by addressing the implications of these findings. I was stopped, however, by the very thing that made the piece so resonant for me.

When I was sixteen I came out as bisexual. It was hardly a big deal, as most of my friends were tolerant, if not G, L, B, or T themselves. I started going to a GLBT support group and became active in my school's community. I was vocal and brash (yeah, I know, hard to believe), and most importantly, I wasn't dating anyone.

About six months later, I started dating a guy (well, there was a bit more drama involved, but I'm really not going to embarrass myself THAT badly). We dated for a month, then broke up. This gave me massive street cred with my Group, as I immediately started meeting women (and subsequently crashing and burning with women; seriously, the extent to which I have no social skills cannot be overestimated). Eventually, though, we got back together (about two months later, as is The Way of High School), and my welcome within the GLBT community at my school was worn thin, as was his (he identified as bi; they reassigned him "straight but bendable"). There was a pretty clear message sent: you're welcome to experience heterosexual attraction, but you ought not act on it. Bi is fine, so long as its manifestation in action is homosexual. Anything else is just "passing."

So, I never bothered coming out to my father (mom, yes, but that was just an annoyance, never a fearful ordeal). I stopped using the word bisexual, for several reasons: first, the only "authorities" I knew on the subject had deemed me unworthy. Second, once that became so much nonsense to me, the term seemed to come with connotations that didn't fit: I didn't want to date girls and boys at the same time, I didn't want to "choose a side" based on something arbitrary like gender (if you really want to know, I am eye-crinkle-smile-sexual: people who's eyes crinkle and sparkle when they smile totally gut me... if you want to put an arbitrary, impersonal characteristic to my sense of attraction, that works far better than gender). Third, it seemed politically worthless. If I was going to have little or no credibly within GLBT organizations, be generally reviled as a fickle slut in straight society, and still have the social skills of a large boulder, I wasn't going to bother.

Then there was Manhattan, and drama school, and The Bastard. And then there was Duluth, and much culture shock. And I resided in my closet through most of it, especially Duluth. And then I came here, to the U.

My department is not friendly to us fence-sitters, those of us who won't "choose." One of the first and most oft-repeated stories I have heard is that of the woman who married a woman after being engaged to a man. This is described in scandalous tones, with implications of deception, as if she HAD to have been leading him on. It is usually associated with the teller's other, more general negative evaluations of her character, as if it is proof that she can't be trusted. For all we talk about liberal inclusiveness, we do no practice it very well. It certainly brought several "what-ifs" to mind. If I were to start dating a woman, would it be said that I was "driven" to it by a famously unrequited male romantic interest? Would he be thought "lucky" to have "dodged a bullet" when he said no? Or what if they knew that the person I had been thisclose to having something with prior to that was a woman? Would I be seen as trying to "pass" by dating a man? None of these seem unreasonable to expect, given what I've heard.

So here I was, sitting in this class, frozen, thinking, if I try to discuss this part of the book everyone's going to know, the gay people are going to think I'm a poseur, the straight people are going to be disgusted, and my personal life is going to once again be open for speculation throughout the department. Sure, maybe it's my own paranoid prejudice at this point, but it's not without precedent. But this is kind of the sort of work I want to do, and these are the kinds of things I want to discuss, and so it behooves me to get the fuck over it.

And so I come here and rant to you people like a narcissistic freak. Or, as Jon says, to brain dump.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Just a Note

Yeah, the giant update of doom is on hold. I had to drop in, though, to tell you all that I am a temporally misplaced hippy. I have iTunes playing as I try to Get Shit Done, and it just rolled from Arlo Guthrie to Bob Dylan.

In other news, I just wrote the following to explain the level of burnout I'm feeling today, at trying to abstract books that we THINK should fulfill the (unstated) requirements for a history class presentation: "I never thought I'd be sick of books, but I'm fairly confident that, if told to choose three books for a one-way trip to a deserted island, I would simply flip the bird and hop on a plane."

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Temporary update:

I am in the middle of typing up a big, neurotic, most likely masturbatory post. The likelihood of its posting declines everytime I re-read what I have so far (and that's not very much at all, given that I have no damn time), so in the meantime I dropped in just to say that despite the best efforts of my schedule I have not yet died.

Thursday, November 04, 2004

[no title]

I am just horribly mopey and blah today. Everyone at work is depressed (except for Chris, who is insane), and it's kinda contagious. Also, my fucking classes suck this term. I have no real idea what any of the papers I'm supposed to write this term are to look like. Have resorted to moping over a glass of wine. Also, someone made a random comment today that just won't leave me alone. Fucker. (n.b. this refers to no one who would ever read this blog. I would never be that passive-aggressive to any of you.)

Hey look, I have nothing worthwhile to say!

Man tries to convert lions to Jesus, gets bitten

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

What's next?

It's the West Wing term for "I'm over it, let's move on": what's next?

For starters, I'm sending a get well card to Justice Renquist. Frankly, if we manage to rearrange SCOTUS too much over the next four years, I'm simply giving up reproductive sex altogether, or at least until I'm back in a country that recognizes my body as my own territory. I'm sure this statement would carry a lot more weight if I had any kind of sex life to begin with, procreative or otherwise.

I'm also not making any immediate plans to leave the country. This is my home. I tend to do a lot of leaving home, so I probably won't live here forever, but I'm not being driven out by a citizenry that's addicted to fear and convinced that their religion is now the National religion.

I'm going to look for ways to change our toxic political culture (what is culture in this sentence? Er, sorry. Kathy's class is getting to me). I know that we can find a way to help foster a political space that values inclusion and reason rather than blind nationalism and the destruction of this year's "enemy." A more daunting task is finding a way to encourage people to gauge economic success by the state of the poorest of the population, not the wealthiest. With either of these changes we move away from being driven by what our leaders tell us to fear toward a country that is welcoming and welcomed in an increasingly small world.

I'm going to support efforts to reform the way we vote, whether that be through instant run-off voting or proportional distribution of the electoral vote, or some other masterful strategy I've not yet heard of. We saw record voter turnout this year, and this is a good start. Now that we've got people willing to participate, let's see if we can make this democracy more representative.

John Kerry was a pussy. He lost. I'm not surprised, and I knew it would happen. Now that we've got that out of our system, now that this pseudo-liberal farce we call the Democratic party is undergoing regime change of its own, now that we've got four more years of making fun of Bush as he tells us which brown people to hate this week... what's next?

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Monday, November 01, 2004

Dish War

My mother is in the next room making fun of me to her friend AT A VERY HIGH VOLUME. And she's being VERY CREATIVE with the story she's telling. So I retaliated by yelling "I'M BLOGGING THIS!!!" Yes my friends, if my mother can talk shit about me, I feel fully justified in telling you that SHE IS A MEAN POOPY BUTT WHO STINKS!!!!