Tonight leaving work I ran into two women with a gigantic boombox playing an old R&B song from the early 80s. Rock steady, steady rockin all night long… It made me quite happy. Passing motorists seemed to agree.
I needed a passport-sized picture of myself in my responsible-adult disguise today, so I took one. It’s surprisingly hard. Every time my expression just seemed to cry out “I’m not wearing any pants!”
OK, I need to organize my bookmarks again. Unfiled items that have clogged up my main bookmarks menu:
One and two from the Guardian on science, plus the paper on depression I never got around to reading, something about core national values and their betrayal plus the war in context and newsbites about Clinton insulting Bush from afar.
Most of the stuff I have is war and politics and God but some of it is more esoteric spiritually and there’s a thing on speculative ethics that’s been floating around for awhile. Some of it is funny, like the rules for drinking too much.
Most recent in the huge pile are the MS PowerPoint template for delivering bad news and the the bad news that does not get delivered. And of course Orwell and dogs in hats.
Dainty Time is an art series about the nature of femininity and childhood. Crocheted tampon-cosies, embroidered panties, tattooed babydolls, and more. Neat stuff.
A complete victory, you have to acknowledge, is impossible. You’ve got two options: compromise, or keep fighting. Keep fighting until … until everyone loses. Nobody is going to win. Winning would mean flattening every building and killing or displacing every single person, and you know as well as I do that’s not victory.
There’s going to be an irredentist movement no matter what, on both sides. But irredentism is suicide, it’s a desire for the impossible victory that will turn to blood-stained dust in your hands. Reasonable, calm voices need to find a way to convince and cajole and co-opt the extremists, siphon them off and take their leadership into positions of power in moderate structures. If you do not, we will all suffer.
Subject: Palestine
Example: Northern Ireland
By seven on a Friday night, the commuters have left the gym, exercising while waiting for traffic to clear, finishing their three days a week at five fifteen workouts. Weekday nights it’s still crowded at this hour, but not Fridays. The weekday crowd, I’m guessing, doesn’t regard exercise as a suitable prelude to weekend entertainment. Me, I’m waiting for my friends to get out of the X-Men movie before we head over to TC’s for PBR and bad selections on the jukebox.
The music on the Sports Club Network Radio tonight is dance and disco instead of the usual top-forty and alt-rock, and the treadmills and stairmasters are populated by breastless anorexic women and heavyset fortysomething guys. They seem to be punishing themselves for not having anything better to do. The weights, though, seem to be draped with overmuscled, underclothed men who gawk and stare and flirt. For a lot of them, it seems that the gym is the entertainment.
Swingers, a 1996 movie in which foolish young men try to pick up annoyed young women, is often credited, along with that Gap ad, for bringing swing dancing and jump blues into the mainstream.
It’s also been a strange influence on my life recently, since I find myself… well… in my midtwenties and foolish and hanging out in bars trying to pick up rather annoyed young women. Am I in some sort of a Quarterlife Crisis? Probably not. Just young and foolish and wondering, given a phone number or email address, exactly how long I should wait to call? The goal, of course, being to indicate interest, but not so much interest as to be off-putting.
My friend Dana insists that you should call at most two days later, because otherwise they’ll think you’re not interested and go on about their merry way. But Swingers suggests that the answer is at least four days, and ideally six, if you’re really cool. You have to imply that you’re very busy. After all, if you’re not busy, you’re free, which is to say there’s no cost, which means you’re worthless, because only busy people who are avidly pursued by others have intrinsic worth. Or something.
Truthout has a great article about how being a liberal these days is like being a Sox fan: the grinding sense of… well… doom.
It’s all there, in the way the players aren’t quite up to par, in the way the TV pundits smirk. In the way the US votes against human rights treaties. and the fact that everybody knows Bush lied in order to go to war and the secret reports on The Great Tragedy.
“Everybody knows that the ship is sinking, everybody knows that the captain lied… Everybody knows that the game is rotten, old black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton for your ribbons and bows, and everybody knows. Everybody knows, that’s how it goes…. “
People have been pointing out that Our Leader exhibits many of the characteristics of a sociopath, and so it’s not surprising to find a shirt branding him the American Psycho. The media is also beginning to point at the ungentlemanly tone of his persuasive methods.
