Yup.

Forget Red vs. Blue — It’s the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda | Media and Technology | AlterNet
…The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying.

A Gen X response to Barack Obama | Salon Life
Suddenly it makes sense, what you’ve been trying to tell us about John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Sure, we knew all about their roles in history, we’d learned about them in a million classes, through countless books and documentaries. Eventually, though, the endless memorials and tributes and TV specials and Oliver Stone films grew a little tedious. We didn’t quite understand why you’ve never let those two go, why you’d speak so relentlessly about a better time.

But how could we have known? We were raised under Ronald Reagan, smiling emptily under a shellacked cap of shiny brown hair like a demon clown, warning us (With a knowing nod! With a wink!) about those evil Russians stockpiling nuclear arms thousands of miles away. We were raised by “The Love Boat” and “Eight Is Enough” and “Charlie’s Angels,” a steady flow of saccharine tales with clunky morals. There were smiling families, hugging and learning important lessons on every channel, while at home, our parents threw dishes at each other’s heads. We went to church and learned about God’s divine plan every Sunday, but all it took was one Dr. Seuss cartoon about an entire world that existed on a speck of dust, and our belief in God was deconstructed in an instant. Our childhoods were one long existential crisis. We ate Happy Meals while watching the space shuttle blow into tiny bits.

Heather Havrilesky over at Salon wrote this piece completely covering what I didn’t even know I was thinking. People seem to be doing that a lot these days. From being alone in the world and totally disaffected, I now find that lots and lots of other people were thinking the exact same thing. At some point that might feel comfortable or as if I’m part of a community or something, but for now it just feels weird.

I followed a link this morning that promised me “The saddest thing you’ll see all day.” Why exactly I would want to expose myself to more sad things, or sadder things than I’d already seen and felt recently, I couldn’t tell you. But I clicked it and saw this:

I cried for that. I cried because even though I don’t support his politics, I think that Ron Paul stands for something, that he believes totally in the things he’s standing for and that he doesn’t waver from them. Even though what he’s doing isn’t resonating with most Americans, he thinks it should and he stays true to that thought. Standing firm in your beliefs, acting on your principles even when they’re unpopular and benefit you nothing, that’s one of the only things I find admirable in other people.

I cried for Ron Paul because his body language presents him as vulnerable and yet somehow stubbornly resolute in his defeat. I cried because he looked like the most alone man in the world, and I wanted to hug him. I cried because his shoes broke my heart.

I hate competition. I hate sports. I hate the Olympics. I hate trivia night and lawn darts and fantasy football. I hate television ratings. I hate that someone gets chosen last for kickball. I hate the idea of defeat. I hate for anyone to ever lose at anything.

Last night watching his concession speech I felt sorry for John McCain, because I believe he was fighting for what he believed in, and he was confounded by his country’s rejection of him. I felt sorry for Sarah Palin because I imagined she might have the grace to feel humiliated by her ignorance and the resounding message we sent her about it. Today I felt sorry for George Bush, imagining what it must feel like to know that the entire globe can’t wait to celebrate your absence.

I understand that these people can’t have what they want - the world is better off for their losing power. But I feel for them anyway.

My indiscriminate and overwhelming empathy for everyone and everything doesn’t benefit me, it only makes me feel as if I have no layer of protection between me and the entirety of the world’s pain. It makes me feel crazy, absorbing the broken dreams of everyone I see and experiencing them as if they were mine.

I cried for Ron Paul today, because I don’t think anyone should ever have to feel alone and abandoned and unsupported. I don’t want anyone to feel that they’re misunderstood, or that they’ve done their best and shown the world their soul but the world said “meh.” I want everyone’s dreams to come true, even when they’re in conflict with mine. I want everyone to win. That’s why the world breaks my heart, and why I am still crying today even though last night’s election went the way I so desperately wanted.

I just wish we all could have won—and I hope that we did.

Consider this a placeholder for the LONG LONG ANGRY rant I am going to post later about how people who work in health care shouldn’t be such total fucking asstards.

Seriously. I think it may qualify as a screed.

Once my nap is over. Just you wait.

Red Insurgency

Originally uploaded by ecstaticist

If I could build my own perfect fantasy world from pictures I find on Flickr, this would be a corner of my garden.

I have more music than I can successfully catalog/recognize/remember. Actually I have more going on in my poor brain than I can hope to keep track of, but music especially can be problematic. I tend to amass large quantities of new songs and then keep them in a “pending” folder in iTunes until I decide if they’re going to make it into the permanent collection or not. Sometimes something will hang out for 6-8 months before I hear it a few times and start to realize that I like it. I’ve also got a currently-listening list called _car, that I listen to (you guessed it!) in the car. When I hear a song on general iTunes rotation that suits my mood-of-the-moment  I add it to _car so that I can listen to it more often. But in general I am confused and non-remembery about the music I’ve been listening too lately unless I’ve absolutely fallen in love with the band/artist. (Yes, I am talking you, Weepies.)

When MyTodd™ and I were at El Scorcho in Maplewood last week, the saddest/most haunting song came on. I knew it, knew I owned it, couldn’t remember who sang it or the title. I mentioned it to MyTodd™ but he couldn’t name it. It itched in my brain all week long but I couldn’t remember the lyrics to look it up even, just the tune. Made me sad because I wanted to hear it again but knew it would take months for it to come up by chance in my collection.

Friday we were out at the bar and there was some sad-but-good music on. It made me melancholy. Matt said it was My Morning Jacket. Jessica and I were talking about them, and I knew I had some of their stuff but couldn’t really remember what I liked of theirs. Made a mental note to listen to them more.

Saturday morning I was at the computer and remembered to pull them up and give a more intent listen. The first song to come on was “Wordless Chorus” which I saw was in my _car rotation as something I wanted to listen to more. I played it.

It was the El Scorcho song from the previous week.

Unconnected but connected coincidence, important to no one but me. When things like that happen it makes me feel like my life is accidentally going right in some way I can’t see.

My insomnia (the staying-asleep kind, not the falling-asleep kind) has gotten so bad that I’ve taken to covering up the clock in my bedroom so I can’t see it when I wake up during the night.

When I went to a sleep clinic a few years ago they told me that with clocks available in the bedroom we wake more often and sleep less as we constantly want to check the time. So I’ve taken that ability away from myself, because waking at 3 a.m. and then worrying about why I am awake at 3 a.m. and how I am going to get enough sleep and what I will feel like the next morning, etc. does seem to exacerbate the problem. Since this change I haven’t been waking up as much in the early morning, or if I do I just roll over and go back to sleep. That’s good. But even with the clock not available, I still wake up at 5:57 a.m. (+/- a few minutes) every weekday morning. Not only does it suck to be awake 3-4 minutes before the alarm, it leads me to believe that I am not sleeping as deeply overnight, since something in my brain holds me poised and ready for wake-up even if my alarm doesn’t work.

I can’t be sleeping well if part of my brain is staying tuned-in to the time, even in the absence of a clock. Can I?

Water Lilies at Art in the Park 092808

Originally uploaded by superBadGirl

Didn’t know we had this pretty little park in St. Louis. Todd and I are going to go back when it’s not all crowded with random art fair people.

Happy October, my favorite month! I hope it’s a good one for all of us. It’s shaping up to be quite interesting, that’s for sure.

And a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Heidi and Jeni, I wish you guys were here so we could celebrate in person. Hope your respective b-days brought some relief to the stuff each of you has been going through. Love you!

Sometimes I think that my entire life is just an exercise in determining the myriad ways in which I can humiliate myself, over and over and over.

Short version = I was using Twitter’s “Find & Follow” tool to check and see if any of my contacts had new twitter accounts. You know, that I might want to… find and follow. Of course there are people in my gmail address book who, for various reasons (they’re business, not personal contacts, I don’t actually like/interact with them but they’re still in my address book for some reason, etc.) I don’t want to follow or be followed by. So I ran their little tool deal and didn’t see anyone I wanted to add. I hit “next” not realizing that it then adds all the people it found, by default. So now a whole slew of business contacts and people I’ve been out of touch with for ages just got notified that I was following them. Fuck me sideways.

Naturally I don’t want any business contacts following me, or even figuring out who I am, so I had to set my whole Twitter account to private, temporarily. Readers of the blog who don’t have twitter accounts will probably be getting an obnoxious message about logging in (because of the sidebar widget) for a few days. Sorry. I will set it back to public in a week or so.

Fuck me, I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near my own life. I am way too incompetent to be running it. I am also way too tired to be allowed near a computer right now, I am only 35% here, mentally.

How utterly humiliating and awful. Fuck.

bone

Originally uploaded by superBadGirl

Finally, Jake’s got a bone to himself with no pesky girls to try to swipe it.

I really don’t like Vista AT ALL so far.

I really hate mosquitoes.

I am none too fond of my gyno at the moment, either.

I am tired of being tired.

I am going to bed.

I had a great birthday! What a fun night. Thanks to everyone for the e-cards, the paper cards, the b-day drinks (not sure if I am thanking Dave for the tequila shot or not.) and the fun that I had. What a nice day :) Now sleep.

S.

Goal for next week = normal amount of sleep.

Note: Today is SIX MONTHS to the day from when I broke my foot. Yes, I still need special attention about it.

Note Two: It’s August and therefore MY BIRTHDAY for the next 31 days. Fawn on me.

Last night Dave came over and sorted out my cabling issues with the stereo-to-PC. Well, sort of. We didn’t realize that when you unplug the microphone the webcam becomes the default input device, and the initial recording we did is all over-dubbed with our voices talking about how genius we are for getting it figured out. Once he left and I played it back I realized what was up and unplugged the webcam too. I think it’s working out now. That’s going to be a tedious process, but I can just do it on and off while working on other things I guess. Now I just have to keep convincing myself that I do NOT need a 60GB iPod, I need to winnow down my collection. Good luck to me on that one.

It was fun to have company, I fed him dinner and beer and I extracted all his scandalous dating stories for the past few weeks. (Me to him: You understand that what YOU think is happening is rarely-if-ever what SHE thinks is happening, right?) Then he surprised me in a good way by hanging out to watch Project Runway and some Big Bang Theory. I say that finding a straight male who will watch PR with you and comment intelligently on the designers and their work (well, OK one of the comments was “She needs to get eliminated because I don’t think I can look at her teeth for the rest of the season.” but I concurred with that sentiment, so it worked for me.) is a total bonus. We also agreed that the winning design was dog-ass ugly and like some sick “Barbie dressed in South Florida couch cushions” kind of nightmare. I don’t experience enough intelligent, aware straight men in my life, I decided. Or maybe he’s just a unique specimen.

Twas funny trying to get  food ready, since I told him that I would be most delighted to serve him dinner,  and whatever package-tearing-open or unwrapping of pre-cooked ingredients was necessary would be an absolute joy to me. (Whatever, I won’t pretend to be a cook even for someone who’s doing me a favor.) Anyway we had lemon-dill roasted chicken breasts, ceasar salad, some kind of rosemary potato salad and my favorite-ever bread (olive-oil and sea-salt ciabatta) all from Straub’s. The funny part was that he’s a beer drinker and obviously I am not. So I wanted to be all good-hostess-y and buy some to have handy. So first I had to text MyTodd™ in L.A. “What kind of beer does Dave drink?” (Answer: Guinness) so that went on my list to purchase. Then I realized that if I went to the store after work (4pm) and he came over at 6pm the beer might not have time to chill. I twittered to ask if this was the case, leading someone to respond “can’t you just buy it cold?” leading me to feel like a total asstard, because yeah - of course I can. I was thinking of wine, which is the only alcoholic thing I really ever buy. So, requisite humiliation, check - I headed to the store only to determine that there are multiple types of Guinness, and I had no idea which was the right kind (for the record, from Dave: “Any Guinness is the right kind of Guinness.” then he tried to explain to me something about one you drink from a glass versus one you drink from a bottle with a rattling thing in it, and something else, but my eyes glazed over a little.)

Anyway, it was a fun evening with a productive outcome and I am glad to have had some human contact when dirtybastardassface MyTodd™ is out of town. Now to get on with ripping all that vinyl.

Oh, and a note to SD: Please enjoy the monastic, family-friendly vacation you have planned and don’t let thoughts of black vinyl bondage tape anything else distressed damsels hidden in your secret lair distract you. Have fun!