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Regarding the Engadget Mystery Box - I'm still sitting on a post about it; however, because the world stopped caring about Iran all of a sudden, as well as the fact that I had swine flu or something half of last week, as well as etc. etc. etc. bawww, I have not finished said post yet and have not set up an ebay auction and still don't know where to donate the eventual ebay proceeds.
( Instead, have a boring life update! )
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Comments: Read 7 or Add Your Own.
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But it is still on our floor unopened, because I am moderate-to-deathly ill with what is probably flu of some kind, so unboxing hilarity will have to come later, perhaps this evening. The duct tape was a nice touch.
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The situation:
An arty dude I fanstalk on LJ and elsewhere (but I KNOW doesn't watch me, so I'm not naming him here) posted a tweet early this afternoon, bitching about how turning your icon green to "support democracy in Iran" and then doing nothing is like hipsters wearing Che Guevara shirts and essentially we should all go to hell for being poser jerks. I was in a pissy mood and have watched some internet acquaintances go to great lengths to do whatever they can from thousands of miles away in the past few days, so I started a reply that was going to quite reasonably tell him he was being a dick and not everyone on the internet is a sucking soulless vacuum of memery, all in 140 characters of eloquence and reason.
But - and you can probably tell where this is going - what I sent him was not, in the end, terribly reasoned or eloquent, and he shot back something that really got my ire up, and so pretty soon we were having our own adorable miniature flamewar which ended in me telling him to, in short, diafplskthx, and him deleting his half of the conversation in disgust.
The thing is, I've watched this guy for probably two years and I really do admire him. I've bought art from him and laughed at his jokes and nodded at his wisdom. I know he's going through some hard times right now, and was probably in a really shitty mood when he made that post, and probably regrets being such a dick now, as do I. I thought about sending an apology through another channel but worried it would sound too stalkery.
The gist of his argument was that if we American Twitterati are really committed to helping out with the revolution-in-the-making half a world away, we should be writing the Iranian Embassy, going to protests, donating money to human rights groups - y'know, not just turning our icons green in one click with a Twidget. The gist of my argument was that some or many of us really do give a shit but don't have a lot of time, energy or money to give, and feel somewhat helpless; we devolved into personal attacks before I could finish my thought, which was that the green icons remind us every time we look at them what is going on, even if we're not news junkies, and keep it constantly in our thoughts, and that is absolutely better than the nothing that the vast majority of the American public is going to do.
I walked away angry and frustrated, because I do want to help, I do want to make a difference, but any heartfelt sentiment I could have offered in that conversation would have been rejected outright due to his general unreceptiveness at the moment and the fact that we'd been sniping at each other for 15 minutes.
So:
About 20 minutes later, I got an email from Engadget saying I'd won their Monday giveaway. I barely remember entering yesterday - entering every random-ass sweepstakes and contest I come across has become second nature - so it was that much more of a surprise. The prize: an "insane grab-bag of stuff". That's it. I don't know what the stuff is, or even really have any idea what it could be. But they're mailing it sometime this week and I'm getting an awesome surprise present in the mail.
It doesn't take a genius to make the connection. I decided then and there to take something from the mystery grab bag of awesome and Auction It For Iranian Democracy, and dedicate it to the unnamed gentleman who so ground my gears this afternoon.
More news when I actually get the package. Human rights group suggestions for the eventual donation would be appreciated.
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Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.
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We were driving to the store to buy a bike lock (they only had one) when three fire trucks in a row came screaming past on Van Dorn. This was our first indication that there was a serious train crash on the Red Line this evening. I don't know what's going to come out of this but my best guess is the second train operator had a stroke or something. She's one of the confirmed fatalities so we may never know.
Today we were sent home from work around lunch due to a major power outage in our building. I am sort of curious how many of my coworkers take the Red Line home*, and how many of them might have been on one of those trains had our workday proceeded normally. I was glad of the extra relax-time, and was going to write a long LJ post catching up on the past few weeks, but now I'm just tired. My heart goes out to everyone involved.
*EDIT: Turns out it was the inbound rather than the outbound, so trains were much less crowded than might have been the case.
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I am somewhat philosophical at this point. I figured we could put off buying it a lock until after my parents' visit this weekend, because I was too exhausted to go anywhere every evening last week and the bike was unrideable, its tires completely flat. Apparently I was wrong. I don't know how far you can get on a bike with two flats, and it's entirely possible that it will turn up in a ditch down the road, but I'm assuming someone has to have driven up and physically placed it in a vehicle under the cover of night.
If nothing else this may make the manager of the building, who promised to review the tapes last week when Bike #1 vanished and hasn't contacted us since, sit up and pay attention. I'm assuming we'll never see either bike again, but perhaps they'll angle one of the security cameras to take in the rack as well so there's no longer a blind spot, and whatever we manage to scrounge up in replacement will be safer as a result. Perhaps we'll be compensated, which would be great. I still haven't looked into renter's insurance claims, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to go after every avenue of compensation possible.
We went to the bike store today and bought Arthur a helmet, then made a hasty trip across Duke to go look at an old men's Ross posted to Freecycle. It's rather antique-looking and is finished an electric blue, but I rode it around a little and I think all it needs is a tune-up (grease, tires, brakes) to be perfectly functional for recreational use. Now I just need to find something with two wheels and a gearshift. Shouldn't be too much trouble.
At least I had the foresight to take my nice biking gloves out of the saddlebag. I figured nobody would be dumb enough to try to ride the thing away but they might steal the bag. What the fuck.
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I can't remember what I've noted here and what I haven't, so have a blogblob.
EDIT: Manager is having someone look at the security tapes for the parking lot, so maybe we can pinpoint when the bike was stolen. I am much less angry and more philosophical about the incident today, since we had invested no money in the bike as of yet, it had no nostalgic value, and there is the possibility of either a renter's insurance claim or a "sorry you got jacked on our property" reimbursement from the condo management itself to help offset the cost of a newer, better bike for Arthur.
( blogblobblargh )
I'll admit it's hard for me to post simple banal life updates while people are rioting and being shot at in Iran. The many Twitter feeds bring the fear and the anger and the precariousness of life and politics out into the wider world, even as the mainstream media has been slow to catch on. This is bottom-up organization at its finest, and there were over a million people marching before the gunfire started. Here in my comfortable desk job, it's hard to find the relevance of my life.
Yet, I suppose there is always gunfire somewhere, and in our hyper-connected future I will always hear it, and the task becomes merely to choose my battles (literally) and avoid mutating into the kind of news junkie who reads and watches and types but never does anything.
Hackers around the world are pounding the shit out of the Iranian government websites. I don't know what they expect to accomplish, but I can't help but cheer them on.
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Someone stole Arthur's bike.
It wasn't really Arthur's bike yet. It was going to be Arthur's bike, once we got that one and mine fixed up from their 2+ years of disuse, this weekend or next. They're both beat-up and a little sad-looking, and I figured that if the dusty-looking old bikes on the rest of the rack weren't locked, ours didn't need to be, either, since bike locks weren't really in the budget. I guess I was wrong.
Someone either pulled mine off its hook or just shoved it aside, finding its two flat tires unrideable, and lifted Arthur's down. They did this with impunity, because the hook rack is a mysterious security-camera blind spot. This happened sometime in the past 24 hours, because I check that the bikes are there every time I enter and leave the parking lot. The pimply bastard at the security desk appeared deeply unmoved by our problem, and joked when I said I didn't think anyone would steal our crappy old bikes that "it beats walking". Ha-ha, asshole. What if someone stole your smarmy grin? How would you survive?
So the price of going biking with my boyfriend just doubled, at least, because now I'm buying two bike locks and a new bicycle on top of the helmet for him and tune-up for me. Which, well, motherfucking fuck.
Why can't this bullshit happen to someone who can afford it?
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Arthur made it to Philly and back in one piece on the Chinatown bus, and by all accounts it was a very nice graduation. The notoriety of the transport method is well-earned, though - he got back so late yesterday that the planned evening Up viewing was postponed to next weekend. (Birthday excursion, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) alexpshenichkin?) He said one of the famous and accomplished alumni speakers described himself as a really shitty student and another said she graduated swearing never to return to that campus, so I guess there's hope for me yet.
I muddled through the weekend with a great deal of napping and even more unpacking which seems to have STILL barely made a dent in the living room. There was a brief excursion to a friend's housewarming (huge townhouse, I'm jealous! (srsly their basement is almost the size of my apartment)), where we watched Howl's Moving Castle and I was subjected to (and successfully resisted) fiendish peer pressure to buy what looked to me like more fetish than steampunk gear off the internet. (You steampunk people are all EEEEEVIL with your awesome clothes that also cost money.) If I someday own a corset it will be all their fault. NOT in the budget right now.
Today: I fail at brain, work is correspondingly slow. Tonight I will go home and mindlessly unpack and organize until there is no more unpacking or organizing to do.
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Me: What kind of wine goes best with a "quesadilla burger"?
Arthur: I would think a wine that is not very expensive.
Me: AWESOME.
Also, I stacked a coupon with a gift card I got with "points" from my newspaper subscription such that our $21 meal was actually $6. We are so wild and crazy it's mind-blowing. :D
Moving is officially done, because we got up this morning, cleaned the living crap out of the apartment, passed our inspection with flying colors, and turned in the keys. Arthur is busing up to Philly for Swat graduation tomorrow - I would like to come as well, but I don't have the energy after the moving hell that has been the past week. We came home from the inspection and I immediately took a several-hour nap, which I'm about to follow with a several-more-hour night's sleep. Goodnight!
EDIT: Okay wait I had to come back and show you this. It's like that "Tribute" video we made in college except it's by guys, it's a rap, and it's about the joys of conservatism (so okay, really all they have in common is the incredibly low production values - and ours was made in 2005, so I don't know what their excuse is. Maybe they're shooting on a cell phone?). Srsly, watch it, it's so full of fail it wraps all the way around into win. If this doesn't end up on the Daily Show there is something wrong with the world.
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Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
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( textdump go! )
Er, anybody want to buy a 9,000-word romance involving a 10,000-year-old giant robot and a gengineered product of deep-time space colonization? Loosely based on Beauty & the Beast such that it starts fantasy and ends science fiction? Now it is time to shop it to magazines with a cheery READ MY BRICK PLS cover letter.
Yeah, I'm ril gud at writing sellable stories. >.>
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90% of life moved to awesome condo of awesome. By coincidence, there was a kicking-off-the-summer-type poolside cookout dinner tonight. Continuing my so-far-100%-right theory that I can't go anywhere without immediately tripping over SWIL, the first nice older couple we started talking to (and spent most of the party hanging out with) turned out to be huge dorks. Topics of conversation included, but were not limited to: NASA, space meorabilia, science fiction fandom, book collecting, pocket universes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Thunderbirds, Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, 80s television shows in general, knitting, bike trails, alcohol is bad, etc. etc. etc. Someone else heard me mention that we'd just moved in an hour before and yelled "So how do you like your welcoming party?"
Me: "It's great! You folks do this every day?"
Him: "Only when you guys show up!"
It was actually kind of awesome to, y'know, socialize with my neighbors. It's the kind of thing I never managed to accomplish at the old place, no matter how hard I tried. We were the youngest adults at the party, which probably gives a good indication of the demographics of the building - smattering of kids from toddler to ten, one teenage lifeguard, bunch of late-20s early-30s types and at least 50% of attendees with gray hair (plus some more who were obviously dyeing, among...other things...Lord, those short shorts cannot be unseen).
The last couple days have been kind of a blur. We spent all of Thursday night through Friday night packing, with one excursion to buy cleaning supplies, during which we stopped for gas and I tried really hard to pretend I wasn't avidly watching the two-bit drug deal going down in the McDonald's parking lot next door. Body language is such an interesting thing.
[Also protip: don't bring your already-high and/or borderline retarded friend to the buy, because she will yell something hilariously inappropriate from over by the gas station vending machine like "Did you get it? Where is it?".]
I think that's the second one I've seen in my life, the first being that time we parked behind that furniture store next to the movie theater in Bethesda (thought that was a number of guys standing shiftily around a car trunk, so it could've been anything illegal), which I suppose means I am both an intensely privileged and intensely boring person.
Packing. I tried to avoid turning the packing into one 36-hour extravaganza right before the move, but it happened anyway. This means the move was more trash-bag-oriented than I would have liked, but so far we've only had one major ripping problem. The UHaul depot, a creepy seedy dump backed hard against the Beltway, was staffed by astonishingly kind and friendly older men. The hired brawn showed up a little late but stuck around almost 45 minutes extra to finish the unloading, even though they had another job to get to, which was very nice of them. Tipped accordingly. The new apartment is full of bags and boxes and furniture askew. The old apartment is full of dust, the remaining odd thing-that-needs-to-be-moved (suit jackets, fridge contents, hamster, all my plants) and my feet are double balls of agony right now, so I believe I will go to bed.
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In karate we "meditate" for about a minute before and after class; I love the ceremony of it, even if I can only tolerate so much spirituality in my continuing ass-kicking education. I don't know why, but my mind blanks immediately, no matter how stressed or tired I am. I concentrate on my breathing, drawing the air in through my nose and letting it form a Broadway-belting column on its way out - the eyerollingly-named but deeply important Dragon's Breath. It is something I can do quietly at work, when I am frustrated beyond belief by another paperwork snag. It is something I can do quietly on the train, letting the day's stupidity slip away, knowing I will soon be home in the arms of my love. I am coming to new realizations every day, new little discoveries. I am "growing as a person", or regenerating, as the case may be. This time last year I was lost without my cane.
I'm reading astronaut tweets from orbit and dreaming with an urgency I thought I'd lost forever. The compass just below my sternum was knocked spinning when I got sick, and swung wildly through swaths of possible futures for over two years; but it has once again settled true, and it points into the deepest, darkest part of the forest, full of brambles and bandits and pitfalls, and I can do nothing but ready my senses and my fists and wade in swinging.
For this day, this moment, this cusp of bated breath, I am at peace with life.
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Two nights ago: I lived in some kind of small town. There was going to be a job fair. My brain decided to interpret this literally as a cross between a fair-fair and a cat adoption fair, where people go to shop for their rescued pet if they don't have the stomach for the shelter. It was a big outdoor event, at which dozens of besuited hopeful-looking people sat at card tables with neat stacks of CVs, waiting for employers to wander by. Many people, including dream-me, went just because they were curious. One of these non-employers might approach a table, curious as to what the occupant did, but the looks of warring hope and desperation on the unemployed's faces drove everyone quickly away to the games and turkey-leg stands. I played a few carnival games and bought some chicken on a stick, but it was impossible to forget why everyone was here, or fail to notice the bubble of Sargasso calm around the tables, and so eventually I just went home, feeling terribly guilty that I couldn't offer anyone a job.
Last night: I lived on a dreary, nearly-barren rectangular island at the edge of an archipelago of similar islands, laid out in a grid pattern, all in the middle of a dark, putrid sea. We all fished, with lines over the side or spears in the caves beneath our feet; some of the islands near the center of the cluster had trees and grass and other vegetation, and they were where all the powerful people lived. In my dream, over the course of several weeks, I crafted an intricate necklace from fishbones and the colorful scraps of plastic that the sea flung onto my island, then swam to the center of the archipelago to make a pre-arranged trade. I had no bag or pockets, so I swam back to my island with my payment in my mouth. As soon as I crawled back onto my habitual fishing perch, I carefully spat my prizes into my cupped hands and counted them to make sure I hadn't swallowed any; then I clutched them to my chest, filled with elation. They were a handful of melon seeds, and they were my ticket to a better life.
For consideration: I totally stole "for consideration" from crisper. But also: Looks like I've finally internalized the gloom'n'doom!
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While I was reading the paper and waiting for the train today, this panhandler came up and started giving me this long spiel about how he needed $2.60 to get to his friend's for some reason (he had a speech problem or something so he wasn't terribly understandable). I took too long thinking about it (I'm carrying $2 and I need it for exit fare because I forgot my stupid Smartcard on my desk this morning...if I give him some nickels and pennies will it make him go away faster, or will he just be pissed at getting such a small return on investment?) which apparently encouraged him, because he kept coming up with more and more reasons why he needed $2.60. After about 20 seconds I said "Sorry...can't help you," and turned back to my paper.
Usually they accept this and leave, but I guess I'd accidentally gotten his hopes up, and so instead he started berating me about being a lying lie-face liar. I told him calmly I had two dollars that I needed for exit fare and he could go straight to hell. The people around us edged away. Finally he wandered off, muttering about what is the world coming to, liars, etc. I turned back to my paper. When I first moved here, this might have bothered me, but instead I forgot completely about the incident until just now.
I'll be a real city-dweller when I can keep reading the paper like he's not there; but I always look up, in case it really is someone in need. I'm pretty sure panhandling inside the Metro station is illegal no matter what.
Then, coming home from karate tonight, I was nearly sideswiped by this skinhead asshole in a red sporty number doing about twice the speed limit and weaving through traffic. I watched him slow when he saw there was a red light ahead, then turn into the side road to Huntington to bypass it. This also had a red light, but ah-ha! He was tricky. He turned into the parking lot next to the road in order to bypass THAT light, too. Except that that light turned green as soon as he made the turn, so he suddenly swerved around and tried to get back into the lane that was now full of cars not being driven by assholes, including me. He started to pull out like he was going to try to cut me off, but I was already practically on top of him and would have hit him if he hadn't stopped. I slammed on my brakes, then leaned on the horn and gave him the finger as I drove by, zipping through the yellow light. He ran the red and tailgated me by inches for about a hundred feet, honking like a douchebag, and I thought it would be hilarious if he actually rear-ended me and I jumped out in my karate uniform. But instead I turned into my apartment building and he blew past like his ass was on fire. He did it to himself, really, but I'm glad I got to be the instrument of karmic justice.
In other news, I totally learned a brown-belt form in karate tonight! It was awesome. My regular instructor was out so I had the substitute guy. He was all like "Don't tell anybody I taught you this!" So I'm telling the entire internet. I can't actually use it in class, though. I'll miss this dojo - I'm switching to another one that just opened this winter and is much closer to where I'll be living for the next year. They're the same franchise and all group classes are open to students of any one of the three dojos in the area, so I might come back and visit sometimes if I can haul my ass out of bed on a Saturday.
EDIT: Monday night I dreamed that I was still in class, practicing the move over and over again, and getting pointers from my dream-instructor. He gave the kind of tips I know he would have given in person. I'm not obsessed with karate, I swear.
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This entire thread is still the best thing to come out of Livejournal, ever. If I can someday have an art battle somewhat approaching this in awesome, I will die happy.
I was taking stock of my worldly possessions for moving reasons and it occurred to me that I've accumulated a lot of cruft for hobbyist purposes, some hobbies in which I have lost all interest or motivation. I figured I should make a list of it here, in public, to help motivate me to either start things or admit it's never going to happen and give the components away.
( cut for long )
-------------------
So, I guess that's a KEEP (for now) on everything but the computers. Anyone want a functioning Mac Classic and Mac Color Classic?
Urgh. I have too much stuff. There isn't a whole lot I want to get rid of, but I have to actually advance some of these projects before I get hooked on any new hobby-things. Or, I guess, take stock again next year and give away more stuff if I'm never going to get around to it.
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Thursday, April 30th, 2009
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I've had a rocky past couple of weeks. Work has been frustrating and depressing in the most mindless and bureaucratic manner possible, which drives me to anxiety for no reason. Additionally, about a week and a half ago ( I developed a medical problem that made eating very difficult. (cut for length & also probable TMI) )
Lesson: Both MinuteClinic and Blue Cross Blue Shield can blow me. I could really have used that hundred dollars. The pain's finally gone, and last night my hunger reflex came screaming back from a week and a half of involuntary starvation dieting, so I'm finally feeling like myself again, just in time to panic about the fact that I'm moving in a little over three weeks and haven't even hired a truck yet.
Last weekend I took Cinnamon to another adoption fair. I'm sure that even with her multiple issues she'll find a home soon, as soon as she STOPS PEEING ALL OVER MY CLOTHES. B (the foster group head) was kind enough to give me a plug-in Feliway diffuser. This seems to make the cat happier, but she's STILL PEEING IN MY LAUNDRY (on the rare occasions that I leave any laundry on the floor these days). Argh. It's a very strange and very specific behavioral problem, and I'm half-convinced she just doesn't like me.* She yells at me to feed her, and she seems to enjoy it when I pet her, but we have not developed what I would call a rapport, possibly because I've been either working or exhausted and don't pay enough attention to her. If she's still doing this in a month I may request that she be moved to another foster home to see if I'm the issue - though if it's a more general anger and frustration at being ripped away from her original home of ten years, this runs the risk of exacerbating the problem.
My longest excursion of the weekend was a trip over to Alex's, where I provided moral support and fashion consultant for his long-overdue wardrobe update (his mom thinks Sears is only for old people, feh) and we watched a bunch of recent South Park and S3 Venture Bros. Also I clipped Mamacita's nails, a process which required both of us to hold her down (one 13-lb cat can produce a surprisingly vigorous amount of PANIC FLAIL FLAIL FLAIL).
This weekend: MAKE MOVING PLANS ARGH. This should have been done last weekend at the latest but I was too miserable to think past the next hour, much less the next month.
Also, sleep. Also...no, I'm not going to set any more goals, since I'll just spend the whole weekend researching moving options until I'm crazy.
* EDITED TO ADD: This is not as silly as it sounds. She already has a pattern of revenge-evacuation whenever she's placed in a carrier. I have to bring an extra towel to adoption fairs, and until I figured out not to feed her breakfast those days, I had to scrub poop out of the carrier in Petco's bathroom, too. I'm fairly sure it's not panic-crapping or nausea-crapping - she's very careful not to get it on herself. She is an elegant and beautiful lady of high standards and multitudinous opinions, and she does not hesitate to let me know when I'm pissing her off (literally).
"Next time it'll be the sheets, bitch!"
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Saturday, April 25th, 2009
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Cinnamon is super-fluffy and very pretty. That is all.
Well, okay. I took her to her second adoption fair with me today. She was very unhappy about this. The closest thing to an application she got was a woman who said she'd promised herself that the next cat she adopted was going to be a black cat from a high-kill shelter because she'd read that something like 95% of those get put down....but was obviously very, very taken with the pretty lady here. She said she had to think about it.
Cinnamon's age, minor health issues and leeriness around other cats are major strikes against her, but it seems like she meets at least one person every fair to whom they would not be a problem, so here's hopin'.
Meanwhile, a nice family came in and wanted to adopt a single kitten, but were told that the young kittens have to go in pairs for socialization purposes. I suggested a nice youngish gray male over on the other side of the fair, and by the time they left they were already talking about how long it would take for their application to be approved. :)
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Since I spent much of the weekend too exhausted to so much as get up and vacuum, I started going through old LJ entries again to annotate and weigh them against my current and future reputation. Did I swear too much in this entry or that? Not as much as I remember. I have made entries that were angry or upset, but taking the cussing out of them would be neutering the force of emotion behind them. I have edited nothing but the occasional broken link, if a new one is available.
Mostly I'm kind of amazed, going back, to realize the workload under which I was constantly straining as college progressed. Two years out it feels like a nightmare that just happened to leave lasting scars, but ended all the same. I'm trying to work up the nerve to go through junior and senior year. Those wounds are close enough to fresh. I'm still wondering at how I ended up in a position that was so obviously bad for me, but was so trapped in a hell of my own devising that I couldn't even process the fact that this was not normal, this was not how it had to be. I raised my head sometimes, but it was usually to reassure myself that all I had to do was hang on for another little while - halfway through! Three-quarters of the way through! Almost done! - and everything would get better. I bought in so completely that I broke myself trying to live up to the image of the perfect Swattie.
I've bitched about this before. I'll bitch about it again. Two years out, and I'm still angry, and will remain angry for a long time.
In happier news, I've finished reading the first three books in John Scalzi's Old Man's War "trilogy" - minus Zoe's Tale and The Sagan Diary - and I <3 them bunches and can't wait to read everything else associated with this universe. I don't pretend to be a professional reviewer so that's all you're getting out of me. Also: OWN THEM.
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Thursday, April 16th, 2009
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Well, hope you had fun, kids. Because the protests themselves sound like they were the worst combination of stupid, lame, and more revealing of the participants, sponsors and not-so-secret cheerleading squad than fruitful in any political sense. The Washington Post covered our local 'rebellion'. I could describe it, but I think I'll just end with what the journalist himself used, since nothing else sums it up so neatly:
Bunny Monroe, a retired teacher from Fairfax County, said: "I'm really concerned with what's going on with this country. . . . I'm afraid of what's going to be happening. . . . There is no place like this country. . . . I'm afraid that [this] America is not the America that I was born into."
No shit, Sherlock. When you were born all the black kids in your neighborhood (if there were any) went to their own special school with the leaky roof and the 20-year-old textbooks. Women were teachers or librarians or secretaries or housewives. The environmental movement was not even in its infancy, it was a fetus, and many separate and wide-ranging interests were trying to abort it as quickly as possible. The America you were born into was either suffering its biggest economic catastrophe in history, fighting valiantly against a powerful and obvious evil fascist threat, or, if you're on the young side, entering a mini-Golden Age of unsustainable growth and suffocating conformity in which the worst you had to worry about was BEING NUKED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH. But seriously, none of that compares to taking our first hesitant steps out of a national nightmare of Orwellian madness to find A BLACK MAN IN CHARGE OF THE COUNTRY TRYING TO FIX ALL THE DRASTICALLY BROKEN BITS (HINT: MOST OF THEM) AT ONCE USING THE SAME KIND OF DOLLARS THAT PAY YOUR TEACHER'S PENSION.
BE AFRAID, BUNNY. BE VERY AFRAID.
(P.S.)
(10:15:42 PM) Alex: I love how they protest waste by... throwing teabags into thrashcans.
(10:17:34 PM) Alex: Maybe next time we can have rallies in support of traditional marriage.
(10:17:41 PM) Alex: They will consist of man-trains.
(10:17:45 PM) Eliza: XD
(10:19:27 PM) Alex: Hey, it's just like supporting our troops.
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Comments: Read 8 or Add Your Own.
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tired.
contemplative.
working.
infuriated.
exanimate.
creative.
exhausted.
calm.
blah.
cranky.
drained.