old white men

Four years ago, during the Bushie/Kerry election, my friend K. and I joked that we wanted to make t-shirts that said, "I'm so sick of old white men," due to the fact that there we were, another election, another set of old white men as our only options. After I thought about it, I realized that this could be taken the wrong way, so it's probably a good thing that we didn't ever make them.

But it made me think.

The Christmas after that election, I got in a little, er, discussion, shall we say, with some relatives. One relative said that the country was in so much better a condition 200 years ago - more focused on God, more moral. I could only gape at him and finally I said, "Yeah, for rich white men it was better! It wasn't better for anyone black. They were slaves. And it certainly wasn't better for women."

I don't think things were better in this country 200 years ago. I think some things were better, perhaps, and some things were worse. For anyone concerned about the moral heart of the country, I point out that slavery was supremely immoral, and it was a fatal flaw in the moral heart of the nation just as surely as anything happening now. To get all Biblical on you, oppression is the one sin that God hates, as the Bible says over and over. I can't imagine he was all that happy with this country in 1804 given the slavery thing. This country was a brilliant place to live in 1804, sure, if you were white. And rich. And male. And if you didn't mind the fact that thousands of people were enslaved.

A few weeks ago, this old white men thing came up again. I was talking with a friend about issues of race and gender, and I told her this story. Why, we wondered, do white men get so defensive when the situations of women and people of color improve even a little?

I can only conclude that it seems to white men like a zero sum game. If people of color are less oppressed, white men lose power. If women gain power, white men lose it. It makes sense, in a way, because if other people are no longer under your control, you feel like you have less power. You feel like you are losing control. It's not really a tenable power, though. Keeping the power to control other people... well, I don't have that much sympathy. I'm sick of old white men, and I'm sick of them clinging to power.

permanency

In my little old Michigan, we do not have a DMV. We have a Secretary of State, and we go there for licenses to drive, etc. I have had a Michigan driver's license since the day after I turned 16 (I turned 16 on a Sunday) and a driving permit for 10 months before that. Everywhere I've lived for the last 14 years, I've been a Michigan driver.

No longer. My Michigan license expired on my birthday, October 1, and it didn't quite seem right to renew it, since I no longer live there. (Don't think I didn't think about just renewing it in Michigan - there was some serious emotional attachment going on there.)

But no. I got a little driver's manual and I studied the rules of the road and I went to the DMV and I waited in a crowded waiting room for them to call number B75 and I sat at a computer answering questions with photos that seemed to involve an inordinate number of cars made in about 1983, and they took away my Michigan license, never to be seen again, and today in the mail I got a brand new New State Driver's License.

It looks like I might actually be here to stay.

those highlighted words down below are a link; click on them.

Conversation ~ 1 year ago:

Person I know: You are wearing trousers! Trousers are not permitted here.

Me: [dumbfounded stare]

Person: No, the commissioner has said that trousers are not permitted. Women are not permitted to wear trousers.

Me: That is not possible. I am going to wear trousers. Even the commissioner cannot prevent me from wearing trousers.

Person: Those trousers will maybe be okay. They are not too tight.

Me: [spluttering]

...

Check this: South Sudanese Women Arrested for Tight Trousers.

an open letter to my no-longer-favorite airline

Dear Northwest Airlines,

I was shocked to discover, upon investigating your website, that you now charge for checked luggage. I was aware that some airlines have started to do so, but disappointed that you have joined them. Furthermore, you offer the following in the FAQs:

...

1. Why is Northwest changing its luggage policy and charging for each piece of checked luggage for travel in North America?

Northwest is better aligning its costs to transport luggage for each passenger.

...

Are you kidding me? This is the most ridiculous nonsensical sentence I've ever read. It has no meaning, other than, "we love screwing people over." (No, really, read it again. It has no meaning. I HATE it when people think that big words substitute for meaning.) I have been an increasingly frustrated customer for the last several years - I used to love you, and then I didn't love you anymore, and now I sort of despise you. Today, I am already irate, and I haven't even gotten on my flight yet. I remind myself once again that you are teetering on the edge of being an airline I swear never to fly again.

(American Airlines! Remember me? I swore off you after flights to/from Jamaica in which the bathrooms had pee dribbling out the door on ALL THREE PLANES and we had no time to make our connection in Miami and I almost died of hunger because I didn't have exact-change-only-please-$5 for a snack box? Remember how I hate you and will never fly you again? I do not miss you!)

(Kenya Airways! I miss you! I miss those delicious wheat rolls you serve for breakfast and the way the flight attendants smile at me and don't act like they hate me for existing. Also those lovely red and green blankets that I've never stolen because I want you to stay in business but I want one so. badly. Northwest could learn something from you. I have never felt like flight attendants so resented my existence - any passenger's existence - until my last few flights on Northwest.)

So, NWA, we are on shaky ground. Someday soon, I am going to get a well-paying lawyerly job and you know what? I will pay extra to avoid you. I'd rather ride the city bus belching exhaust all the way across the country than be treated like utter scum as your employees treat all customers.

Why is it that health insurance companies and airlines are the two industries that get away with treating their customers as if they hate us, as if the money we pay is not quite good enough to earn us customer service?

Sincerely,

A (former) (unappreciated) Passenger

moving up in the world

Let us shift our focus to a topic that we can all safely agree on: isn't it delicious to sleep up off the floor?

I realize that this is completely cultural. There is no real need to sleep on a sleeping surface that is raised off the floor. Here, at least; in other parts of the world there is the malaria mosquito, which lives within 18 inches of the ground, not to be confused with the cow mosquitoes in Southern Sudan that bit me through my jeans and through any gap in my raincoat and on my face, the only exposed part of my body. Those were some mammoth, vicious mosquitoes. (I call them cow mosquitoes because I was told that they could bite cows through their hide. See: mammoth, vicious, above.) Malaria mosquitoes, though, live close to the ground, so a raised bed would help.

One of the reasons why I survive well in developing countries is that I can tolerate a great deal. Discomfort, inconvenience, delay. I don't really mind them. As long as I am warm and there is prospect of some food at some point in the future, I can put up with most inconveniences. This is fantastic when I'm living in Rwanda and we are waiting for four hours on the top of a mountain for someone to come show us some possible goat stables. It's great when I'm using a pit latrine in Southern Sudan. It's perfect when that bed in Ethiopia doesn't really look or smell too clean. (I draw the line at cockroaches, though. I don't like cockroaches.)

It's not so great when I'm living in Gone West. In fact, it has gotten downright embarrassing. The other day when the topic somehow came up in a group setting, that I was sleeping on an air mattress on the floor nine months after I moved into this apartment, a male friend said, "Wow. You've been sleeping on an air mattress on the floor even longer than I did. And I thought I was bad."

This is not okay. I cannot be more of a slacker than a boy. A boy! You know how they are! Boys have two beers and a package of hot dogs in their fridge! Boys haven't cleaned their sinks since they moved in! Boys think a microwave is the only cooking implement one needs! (I just thought of some more examples, but it turns out they are all also true of my half-together apartment, like the books on the floor instead of on a shelf and the shower curtain still just the clear liner - but I did this on purpose so the bathroom would not look so crowded. It's not like I have roommates. No one here but me. A clear shower curtain is just fine.)

I am apparently living more haphazardly than boys. This is just not acceptable.

So yesterday I sighed and coughed up the money for a bed frame. I had to buy the kind with wooden slats because I have an odd aversion to box springs, especially the cheap kind, because they sound like cardboard every time you turn over and it wakes me up every time. Plus a mattress + box spring is so bulky. The rest of the world does not do this. They sleep on a mattress alone like proper human beings. It's so much more streamlined.

Then I forced a friend to spend two hours putting together this 1ke@ monstrosity. I love 1ke@ until I try to put the stuff together. The golf-elbow arm has not recovered. There is aching. There is paining.

But, whatever. I slept up off the floor on a real bed frame last night, for the first time in nine months in my apartment.

Too bad I still have an air mattress in the bed frame.

Baby steps.

(Just don't ask when I'm finally going to get around to hanging something - anything - on the walls. Sigh.)

politics

It will come as no surprise to readers here that I am a Democrat. (I know! You are shocked! I have said nothing, NOTHING about how awful I think the current administration is and how huge an Obama supporter I am! OBAMA 08!)

Eh-hem.

A better question is how I managed to become a Democrat. Or, more properly phrased, why I have never ever been a Republican. Because I grew up with the Republicans, oh yes, I did. I was surrounded by them. In seventh grade, when Mr. DK had us do a mock vote (it was Clinton v. Bushie Sr. at the time), I was one of two people in our class of 32 who voted Democrat. Mr. DK cracked, "Bush wishes this was reality." (Good news! Bushie lost that year.)

We were expected to be good little Republicans. We were expected to be against abortion and welfare and to vote against them reflexively.

It never really worked for me. I think in the beginning I was a Democrat partly because one formative person in my life (who shall remain anonymous here) was a Democrat, and partly out of sheer obstinacy. ("You want me to be a Republican? Fine, I'll be a Democrat." - I always wanted to be rebellious but I was just too much of a rule-follower, so I had to do it in quieter ways.)

When I started really thinking about it later, I just could not accept the lines that Republicans fed me. For example, I could not believe that voting against abortion was more important than voting for foreign aid (something more than the 0.03% or whatever of the national budget we give now). Even given the assumption that life begins at conception, I could never accept, having grown up in Africa, that the life of a three-day old zygote was MORE important than the life of a child whose mother had to watch him starve to death in Africa, or the life of a child who was killed by a bomb paid for by my taxes. Equally important, I could accept, but I could not accept the focus on one at the expense of the other, and I could not accept that I was supposed to ignore one of them with my vote.

I also never could accept that welfare was a bad thing. I lived in the inner city, as close as AZO gets to inner city, anyway, and I just did not see that mythical "welfare mother" abusing the system. I saw desperate people who needed some help. If I have to choose between a government that uses my tax dollars to provide a safe environment for the children of single mothers without skills or a government that uses even more of my tax dollars (and a lot of money borrowed from China) to fight untenable wars in multiple countries, I am going to choose the government with a good social welfare system every time.

Later, I learned that it was all more complicated than I was told growing up. The rates of abortions are identical in countries with legal and illegal abortion. Abortion is not cheap or simple; women don't get abortions because they are a fun thing to do. Women get abortions because they feel like they have no other choice. Even if abortion is illegal in the US, they will continue to feel like they have no other choice. The rate of abortion in this country will not change. You know what will change if abortion is outlawed? The number of women who die while they are having abortions. Making abortion illegal will result in more death, not less. What actually does help in reducing the number of abortions is having more of a safety net for women in desperate situations. Like, oh, I don't know, welfare. Universal health care. Which is exactly what Democrats favor. This is why rates of abortion are lower under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. You want to save unborn babies? Vote for the candidate who will provide the best safety net to pregnant women who do not have money, help or health insurance.

As long as outlawing abortion is the only issue for so many voters, Republican politicians are free to do whatever they want on all the other issues. They are free to deregulate everything to the point that even the average consumer (let alone anyone vulnerable because of youth, age or poverty) is at the whim of very large, anonymous corporations concerned only with the bottom line. They are free to shift the tax burden from the rich to the middle class and use the money to fund a horrific war based on false premises like, "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction." I'm really tired of knowing that my tax dollars kill people.

Republican politicians will never get rid of abortion, because then they will lose their core constituency. People will start thinking about other issues.

As I said a few weeks ago, I have a lot of respect for conservatives who have thought through their policies and remain convinced that deregulation and free trade will help the most people in the long term. I just happen to disagree. Deregulation, as we have seen, results in huge monopolies who will do anything for money. If we don't trust our government to do a better job with health care than the current huge monopolies who spend all their time trying not to give their customers the services they paid for, then we should be improving the government, not simply turning everything over to the big companies and giving them permission to screw people over even more completely in search of even more money than they already make. This is what accountability is all about.

The fact is that you will find very few Republican US Americans overseas. It just doesn't last once you start seeing the rest of the world as real people. The world is too complicated to vote only, reflexively on the issue of abortion. We are all too interconnected. The world, and this country, needs us to hold our leaders accountable for far more than their views on one single issue.

Now is the time to expect more from our government.

aching

I miss Africa in my bones.

(Because of this, right now.)

(I am not doing that thing where people are like, "And the country of Africa..." - THANK YOU, GEORGE IDIOT BUSH. It's just that I miss too many countries, too many bits of too many places over too many years on that huge continent. And I don't have time to list all the swirling memories in my head. The banality of grocery shopping awaits me.)

quite possibly the best (political mockery) line ever

In the SNL parody of that Katie Couric interview in which Sarah Palin gave up on saying anything remotely substantive and just tipped her head to the side and smiled as if her charm and looks have never yet failed her and she thinks surely they will not fail her now:

"Forgive me, Mrs. Palin, but it seems to me that when cornered, you become increasingly adorable. Is that fair to say?"

furthermore

Is it technically illegal to drive on the wrong side of those double lines? Because I drove back through the mountains yesterday, and what feels right to me, when driving through mountains (thank you, Rwanda) is to take the inside of the curve, as long as I can do so without crashing into an oncoming car. Handily, this also requires less movement of the steering wheel. But it occurred to me that those double solid lines are there for a reason and law enforcement might look unkindly on my crossing them so as to improve my curve-taking.

oppositional

I am a whiner, when it doesn't matter, and I come through surprisingly well when it does. I surprise even myself sometimes. One thing you should know is that I despise carrying heavy backpacks, to the point where I simply refuse to do that "backpacking through Europe/Asia/Africa" thing. I will take a suitcase, thank you very much, with wheels, and I will roll it. I am not a snail, carrying my world around on my back.

All the way up the trail on Saturday, I whined about my heavy backpack. It hurt me. It hurt the small of my back where the hip strap is and my shoulders where the shoulder straps are and my chest bone where the front clasp is.

I recovered when we got to the campsite where warm chicken stew and rice awaited and we sat by the fire with faces feeling crispy from the heat and backs stinging from cold. We had highly mature conversations, tending toward things like, "Would you rather puke on yourself or poop your pants?" (inspired by the baby that one couple brought along). There was consumption of copious quantities of gatoritas (not by me; I hate the taste of tequila). The creek rustled along down below and the fire snapped and popped.

After a while, we made our way in the dark to the hot baths. I looked back along the trail and saw a stream of elvish bobbing lights following me, and we took off our clothes in the dim light of oil lamps and scurried two or three at a time into deep hollowed logs filled with steaming sulfur water, ignoring the invitation of two slightly creepy men hogging the big pool. Someone passed a flask of whiskey from tub to tub.

One of our number was overcome by the heat and the dehydration and the whiskey, and we helped her into her clothes and carried her down the trail, which seemed much much longer when navigated three across in achingly slow steps over tree roots and rocks, with a steep drop on the right side.

In the morning, I took all the heavy stuff in my pack, to lighten hers, and cinched it up tight. I marched along down the trail, utterly unperturbed by the stopping for puking or by the weight on my back. Funny. The weight didn't seem so painful when carrying it helped someone else.

cheese. yum.

I just ate a delicious grilled cheese sandwich and this is what I have to say about it: I do not eat enough grilled cheese. I know, cheese is full of fat and we are sad for the poor cowies who are kept in unpleasant conditions and milked even though their udders are infected but still. Cheese. Yum.

I am about to go camping. I like camping. The only problem is that I despise being cold, and camping at the end of September somewhere in the northerly part of this country is inevitably going to involve being cold. The first intended location involved a pool and also a creek, both of which were going to be cold. I was not planning to immerse myself in cold mountain water in late September. Even in August the temperature of the mountain streams and lakes is the only part I dislike about hiking here. When my sister and I were hiking in August, I kept saying, "If this were Africa, that waterfall would be WARM, and we'd be SWIMMING in it." As it is, one can only look, unless one likes numb limbs. I don't.

But there was/is a forest fire. So the new location involves hot springs. Did I mention that the water is warm? I am so there.

The other good news is that the sleeping bag which has been borrowed for my use is 1. for tall people, and 2. a cold-weather bag, good down to -15 degrees. I probably will still be cold, because I am always cold, but that ups my chances of comfort. I will need a sleeping bag designed for Antarctic expeditions if I'm ever to hike in the actual winter.

addicted

I daydreamed about it all day.

When I had to work overtime, I sat and stared out the window and thought about it.

On the bus, I glanced at my watch again and again, counting the minutes.

I raced through the door to my apartment, ready, poured it into its perfect little glass, and drank it down.

My new addiction: children's cold medicine.

The only thing that keeps me from wanting to claw out my own throat from the pain.

vegetable quest

When I first arrived in Rwanda in 2004, the Canadian couple who had come to check up on the program and give me some orientation took me to a restaurant called Exxotica. No, I am not kidding. This was the name, and it was not a strip club but a nice restaurant, one of the nicest in town, filled with Lebanese families dressed in suits and flowing dresses. It has since closed, but it was just near the lower roundabout downtown, next to one of the closest things Rwanda then had to a supermarket.

Exxotica was an Indian restaurant, sort of, when it wasn't a Lebanese restaurant. It served the best dal makhani I have ever had, and when I was in Kigali, I would buy dal makhani with garlic naan for takeaway and then go sit in the Prado in the parking lot and eat the garlic naan immediately, prying open the tin foil and burning my fingers on the hot butter. The dal I took back to Kibuye and ate for several dinners in a row with fluffy basmati rice.

I had a great life in Rwanda, really.

J. and E., the Canadians, took me to Exxotica that first week and introduced me to salt-and-pepper vegetables, vegetables breaded and fried ever so deliciously. We ate them rapturously. I only had them a few times, in all, because I could not justify buying them if I was eating alone and would be staying in Kigali without a fridge for leftovers, but I have been searching for them ever since I left Rwanda. Unsuccessfully.

This afternoon, I went to lunch with a friend and my eyes suddenly popped out of my head because I saw them! I saw salt-and-pepper vegetables! They were being brought out in a big basket to the table in the corner! Only they turn out to be Thai tempura vegetables (which throws a whole new loop into what genre of restaurant Exxotica was, exactly). We ordered them as an appetizer, crunchy fried spinach and carrots and cauliflower, and I stuffed myself before my cashew chicken ever arrived.

Now they are lost to me again, though, because the salt-and-pepper vegetables were a special called Summer In a Basket, and summer ended today along with the special. These vegetables are an elusive thing, made more valuable by their rarity.

here we are

The bus is a place to meet interesting people. I sat next to an older man reading a library book one day, and he looked over and said, "I like your bookbag." I was holding a little brown-paper shampoo-bottle bag from Aveda, just the size of three small books or two big ones, just the size to be easily carried along with my purse and other work paraphernalia. In a city full of environmentalists and readers, a good book bag is a treasure.

...

A few months ago, I had coffee with another lawyer who went to law school in Colorado. "I actually found it a relief to move out here," she told me, "It was so sunny all the time in Colorado. I felt this pressure to be cheerful all the time."

I thought she was nuts, at the time, but when the air cooled off a few days ago and the sky clouded, I looked up at it with relief. In a place with such a short summer, sunshine creates such pressure to be out enjoying it, making the most of it. A few days of cool and clouds are a pleasant change.

Unfortunately, this is the start of about 9 months of cool and clouds. "We really only have three seasons here," someone told me today. "There is no real spring."

"No," I said, "there is a spring. There is no real summer. This whole summer has seemed like spring." And it has.

I could use a bit more mixing of my clouds and sun. Why must they be so separate?

religion

Last week someone asked me if it's true that Barack Obama is or once was a Muslim.
For. Real.

I wanted to splutter, but I answered "No," calmly because, well, because.

I suggested that she read Dreams from My Father.

I should have asked, Why does it matter?

And more importantly, Who is spreading these rumors and why is there so much hatred behind it?

But it isn't her fault, not hers specifically. She is trying to the the Right Thing, whatever she thinks that is. I probably disagree on what the Right Thing is.

Right now, we are in the month of Ramadan. There are two men who meet to break their fast every evening in my building's lobby. At the beginning of Ramadan, someone put up a sign in the elevator that said, in Arabic and English, "May you have a blessed Ramadan," and my heart swelled with joy.

I am more afraid of Christian hatred, Christian fundamentalism, than of Islam.

In Africa, at least in most places I've lived, at least in Rwanda and Liberia, Christianity and Islam live together. My Christian friends say, "Inshallah," at the end of conversations, and my Muslim friends invite me to Eid al-Fitr parties. In Rwanda, Islam is growing, because it is the religion of peace. It was the Christians, not the Muslims, who opened the doors of the churches to let in the killers during the genocide.

It is here, in the land of supposed diversity, of supposed peace, where we live in fear and hatred, where we spread what are intended to be vicious rumors, I heard that he's Muslim, as if being Muslim were equivalent to molesting children. In fact, I've seen people who have molested children welcomed in the Christian church with open arms, their actions covered up, while Muslims must be fixed, converted.

There is something wrong in a country where a claim - a false claim, but does that even matter? why would it matter if it were true? - about a person's religious beliefs has such weight. There is something wrong when labeling someone as a member of an ancient, venerable religion that gives purpose and hope to millions of people makes the target bad and unfit to lead us. There is something wrong, and the wrong is in us.

nightmares

When I was little, I used to wake up crying and terrified from bad dreams in the middle of the night. I would dream about death and gore and monsters and wake up too scared to get out of my bed. Instead, I would shout for my mom, who always came to walk with me through the dark to the bathroom and who told me that my bad dreams came because I really had to pee and my body was telling me to wake up! wake up! so that I would get up and go to the bathroom instead of wetting the bed.

That hasn't happened to me in a really long time, but it happened last night. I dreamed that my friend S. and I were being stalked as we went to a pizza place and we ended up fending off the attacker with pizza rollers.* And then he got smushed disgustingly by a car. There was gore.

And then I woke up and realized how terribly I had to pee. Also, I was freezing.

*This has an actual basis in fact, because I went to pizza on Labor Day with a friend and the pizza place was out of knives, so they gave me one of their rolly pizza cutters instead, which made me really happy because I use that to chop up my pizza on my place at home as well, so that I can eat it in tiny little triangles starting with the crust. What? Why are you looking at your computer screen like that? This makes perfect sense. The middle of a pizza is the best part, all saucy, so I save it for last.

...

I am only capable of one project per evening. I can EITHER get exercise OR do dishes OR clean the apartment OR write a blog post OR get some groceries OR revise my resume OR... It's very weird. Also annoying. Last night, I set out to do the following: 1. get a plane ticket to MI for October, and 2. get some exercise. Obviously I only managed one of the two. Fortunately, I managed the plane ticket. Not so fortunately for my cardiovascular health, of course, but it is a relief to have my dirty little mitts on a ticket that will get me to the lovely Mitten State.

heal the sick

I want to blather on for a moment about universal health care. I have a lot of respect for people who are conservative for fiscal and policy reasons and have really thought these things through, most of them much more thoroughly than I have. In my next life, I am going to be an economist, but I am not an economist now, and I completely understand not trusting the bureaucracy to run major systems. (Especially after the last eight years. Disaster after disaster. How can we trust the government ever again?)

BUT, I do not understand the arguments against universal health care, particularly at a primary care level. You the taxpayer pay for it right now anyway.

People who are uninsured (like me, at the moment, even with my J.D. and my job and my license to practice law) hold off on going to the doctor. I know I do. If I could go to the doctor and have my minor health concerns dealt with quickly and cheaply, I would. But I simply can't afford it. So I wait, and if things get really serious, I will do what most uninsured people do: I will go to the emergency room. They can't turn me away there.

Guess who pays then? Guess who pays my now-much larger bills? Hint: not me. I can't afford it. The way things look now, I will never be able to afford it.

So who pays for health care for people without insurance now?

YOU pay, because the hospital has to treat me, and they have to get paid somehow, so they raise the costs of all health care, and your insurance premiums and your copays go up.

YOU pay, because when a person is mentally ill and they have no insurance and can't get prescription drugs to keep them healthy, judges keep them in jail, on your tax dollar, as the only way to get them help.

YOU pay, because someone who could have gotten well with a simple antibiotic five months ago now needs that leg amputated, and again, where is the hospital getting that money? Your pocket, baby.

The problem is that insurance companies ARE bureaucracy, and the system is set up so that they have little to no accountability. They have, by and large, a monopoly on health care. They have made it impossible for people to pay on their own for health care, with their own hard-earned money. How would it be that much different to have a monopoly that, *gasp* helped everyone, even those who are not merrily middle-class?

I think universal health care would save everyone money. People would go to the doctor when they needed to go, and major problems would be averted. Very expensive major problems, problems that cost you and all other insured people a lot of money.

I am open to a logical economic argument why this is not true, but the charge that it is "socialist?" Why, that's just silly. Being against things because they are "socialist" is often code for being selfish. Just because I don't need it (well, I do, at the moment), just because you don't need it, doesn't mean it isn't necessary.

addition

I was amused, rereading my last post, to realize that I condemned personal attacks a mere sentence before saying McCain was a robot. I guess I was talking more about character attacks. Robotic behavior? Sorry, man. And woman. Fair game.

character witness

I am about to start a series of political posts. I just can't help it. Too much is boiling about in my head. Here is the first:

Eh hem. I'm watching Sarah Palin at the RNC and I am horrified. HORRIFIED. Sexism, blah, blah, blah, accusing women of not being nice, blah, blah, blah, but why is it that Barack Obama is the only one in this entire race, from the beginning until now, who isn't acting like an attack dog? I am struck, every time I see him, by the way he acts like a gentleman amongst the hordes of politicians. This woman isn't just critical of Obama. She is BRUTAL. Personal attacks all the way. I get the concept of disagreeing on politics, but the meanness is just too much for me.

Also, not to be petty, but John McCain is a robot. Watch him. He is. He turns like a robot, as if he is required by law to keep one foot on the same place on the floor. And Sarah Palin... well, I have a thing about mouths. I pretty much decide whether or not to like people by their mouths. And I don't like hers. She holds the corners too far out to the side in a constant fakey smile. I don't trust her because of that mouth. I also don't like her monotone voice. Robots one and two. Robotic potential president and robotic potential vice-president.

Finally: there is no EYE-RACK, people. EYE-RACK does not exist. There is an Iraq, which is actually a pretty word, but surely you cannot mean to be referring to it with your awful American accent. STOP WITH THE EYE-RACK ALREADY.

the onset of fall

It somehow got cold while I was in the tea shop, allegedly working on job applications, and then my bus was late and I was early, so I stood at the bus stop blowing steam up at the stars and forcibly preventing myself from shivering. I thought summer weather was supposed to last into September, but this summer has proven everyone wrong over and over. "People move here for the summers," I've been told over and over. "They visit in the summer and the weather is perfect and glorious and dry and then they move here and they are disappointed by the long, cloudy winters." I guess it's a good thing that I moved here in the winter, then, because I've been disappointed by the cold, cloudy summer. The weather was better in parts of February than it was today.

Riding the bus at night is very different from riding it during the day, and slightly unnerving. The lights are on in the bus and all you can see of the outside, unless you press your face to the window, are the lights on the houses. The windows are imperfect mirrors, and sometimes you can't tell from which side of the bus the lights you see are coming.

I arrived home too hungry to pick something to eat and wandered back and forth between stove and computer and sink and closet trying to focus long enough to just start something. In desperation, I finally made macaroni and cheese, the perfect late-night food in all its cheesy orange deliciousness. Then I ate three popsicles in quick succession because I bought them on the way home, three flavors of pomegranate plus other fruit and I had to try them all.

It's one a.m. and I'm not tired because I didn't get out of bed until 1:30 p.m. because I was sleeping off some sort of stomach issue. I think I poisoned myself accidentally, but I don't know what I poisoned myself with. Food of some sort? Food poisoning? I have eaten nothing strange, unless that Mexican mocha yesterday morning was contaminated. Anyway, I slept for a good 12 hours last night. This is a lot, even for me, the girl with the 10-hour-a-night ideal.