sound and fury (signifying nothing)

Or at least explain my slightly nauseated demeanor.

It can’t be the reason I feel like a noob on the bike, though. That’s got to be the weather.

Adultery and theft are against the ten commandments (you know, the moral foundation of Christianity, among other religions) and yet are so often greeted with “feh.” The entire scriptural case against gays is “Leviticus says!” yet Leviticus consists of a bunch of outdated rules that are irrelevant to modern Christianity.

You know, if you think gays are icky, fine. But that’s a doubly weak argument: first because it’s based on the premise that all parties involved are of the same religion (or any religion). You don’t get to impose the rules of your religion on anyone else. Second, it’s the only part of Leviticus you seem to care about (nay, focus on): you’re still gonna eat barbecue and wear cotton-poly slacks. You can do that if you want to, but it makes you look like a hypocrite at best and someone hyperfocused on homosexuality.

Here’s an idea: just admit that you think homosexuality is icky. It’s okay. Maybe you can’t help but imagine people having gay sex – or any sex – all the time. I won’t tell.

I think lima beans are icky. I don’t vote to outlaw lima beans, I leave them to be enjoyed by those who prefer them.

WHY IS THIS SO HARD?

This is a weird thought, and it only occurred because I’m in an altered state.

You can’t avoid the news that Senator Ted Kennedy died today. Talking about it earlier, Andrew mentioned that he wondered if the Obama kids were old enough to grasp the situation. I posited that at least the elder (Malia) is probably at the age where she would understand death and be able to mourn a friend of the family.

From there, I thought how hard it would be for those two girls to go through their adolescence not only as the First Children, but as the First Black Children. I hate to denigrate a birthday buddy, but Chelsea did not have an easy time getting through puberty. (And of course, there was that old Limbaugh crack about the “White House dog”.) The Bush twins, at least, had reached the age of majority by the time their dad futzed his way into the office.

Of course, Chelsea was the daughter of Hillary, who has always been kind of frowsy and sort of goofy-looking, whereas Sasha and Malia are the children of a black woman and a mixed man. And mixed kids tend to be very attractive. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but I’ve noticed that when you mix black and white, you get a really attractive shade of gray, with gorgeous hair and creamy skin. So they will have that going for them.

From that, it was only natural for me to wonder why this was so. It may be just a coincidence, or it may be a fluke of evolution. Think about it: what happens in a closed, inbreeding population? Birth defects. Deformities. Freeper Alert. These types of specimens are undesirable and don’t contribute to the overall survival of the species. By procreating across the spectrum of humanity, you decrease the chances of producing a, well, unfit specimen.

So Mother Nature is rewarding those who cross ethnic lines by giving them highly attractive children. I’m not saying she’s shallow, but attractiveness is one factor in how humans choose their mates.

“These are the kind of thoughts that kept me out of the good schools.” – George Carlin

Here I thought my political blogging career was over. Ah, well, it wasn’t I who made a political martyr out of Dr. George Tiller. Nor was I the one who made the abortion debate political in the first place.

I’ve already explained my position and counted to ten. While I’m open to the opinions of others, I’m not going to change my mind, nor am I going to sway anyone else. The kind of people who think that his death is good, or just okay, or say “well what about the babies he murdered?” are not ones to listen to reason or respond with anything other than rhetoric.

I know that this debate isn’t really solvable. The solution I, and many other pro-choice people would prefer, is for there to be fewer unwanted pregnancies in the first place, owing to comprehensive sex education and widely available contraception. The people on the far right side of this ideological rift insist that humans (well, women) should only ever have sex if they are completely prepared to bear a child, which sounds nice but doesn’t take into account anything about human nature.

What I hope is this: that if a rabidly pro-life person should find his or her friend, sister, wife, mother, cousin, or any other woman they care about facing a decision about a pregnancy that isn’t wanted, safe, or viable, they are able to put aside their differences, turn down their shouting, and offer support to their loved one during a decision that is never easy or lightly made.

I’m in a sweatshirt that says Wisconsin.

Driving a car with plates from Georgia.

Heading back to North Carolina.

But I grew up in South Carolina.

I was born in Connecticut.

I left some teeth in a 7-Eleven parking lot in Michigan.

And I’m in Virginia, in what seems to be the methamphetamine capital of the United States.

Time to hit the road.

…of my political blogging career, this election season, and a third tedious thing to round it out.

As you could probably guess, I’m pretty excited right now. Not because “we won”, but because we made history.

Given how cynical I usually am, I’m surprising myself. America, fuck yeah and all that jazz. Just give me my moment. Give me a small measure of hope that the next couple years will be incrementally better than the last eight.

I am grateful that I had an opportunity to participate in tonight’s events. I voted Saturday, after waiting in line two hours. And given that the North Carolina vote is barely going to Obama (around 14,000 votes ahead with 99% reporting), I feel like my vote may have made a marginal difference. That’s a first. (Although, interestingly, Washington is the only county in western Arkansas to go blue.)

I will say this for John McCain: he gave a great speech. You could really tell how much it hurt him to have lost. And he showed the kind of integrity that made me believe in him eight years ago. If that John McCain had been around the past couple years, he probably would have had a better shot. He probably would have had my vote.

Having a song stuck in your head, even a horrible song that makes you want to stab puppies, is much better than having a person stuck in your head. I personally have found myself humming the “Oscar Mayer weiner” song uncontrollably, yet didn’t spend the entire drive home wondering if the song ever thought about me, or what it was up to, or had it show up in my dreams.

I’m seriously starting to feel for heroin addicts. At the same time, I envy them for the ease with which they can fulfill their cravings, however short-lived such satiation might be.

Music: Ryan Adams & The Cardinals – Born Into a Light

Seems like with every bit of progress I’ve made lately, comes a caveat: now take two steps backwards.

I’m really trying to be positive, because I’m ready for a change and because I know it could be worse. I do have to let some of it out somewhere, though, before I fucking explode.

What would seem like the biggest fiasco of the day would be arriving at work to hear the fire alarm going off. This meant that the building had to be evacuated, including all the donors who were mid-procedure at the time. So I got to hang out for twenty minutes on the sidewalk with 60-odd other people, and then go back inside and attempt to pick up where we left off, with the addition of the 40-something people who hadn’t yet gotten this party started.

It was actually surprisingly orderly, even though we had to run our asses off to catch up. People were understanding. No one got ornery. Despite initial expectations, things were going to be all right.

Except that pervasive sniffle. And the occasional sneeze. And the feeling like my head was full of sludge. Wouldn’t you know it, I seem to have caught something from the clientele. So I’ve got that head-cold feeling, where your thoughts aren’t able to connect as quickly as they normally do, snot being a much worse conductor than your standard potassium or sodium. I know it’s quite evident in my writing that my thought process isn’t totally up to par, but I’m powerless to change it. Also, I’m too fucking tired to care.

Leaving, I thought, “thank Christ all that’s over with.” Except it wasn’t, not quite. See, my car developed this problem last night, where activating the right-hand directional would cause the headlights to turn off. Not just that, which was odd enough, but they’d fold down. At first I thought I was knocking the lights off when I flipped the signal, but it did the same thing even when I reached down to the base of the signal stalk, on the opposite end of the headlight switch. And it didn’t do it when I signaled left, either. I’d have to stop the car and turn it off to be able to turn on the headlights again.

Well, tonight they wouldn’t come on at all. The switch was stuck between the dash-lights position and the headlights position. When I twisted it hard to get it to go all the way, the dash-lights became stuck on. But the headlights refused to turn on after 15 minutes of fuck-aroundery.

Luckily, the switch that allows you to flip the headlights up and down was still operational. In the end, I drove home holding the high-beams on, trying like hell to stay back from the folks in front of me, mentally apologizing to everyone I passed. I still don’t know what the hell’s wrong with it. Nor do I care, at this point. I’m tired and achy and stuffy, and sort of bewildered that, in a car that’s 20 years old and has just shy of 200,000 miles, the electrical system is having problems that I was warily anticipating in the engine or cooling system.

Perhaps that’s a good thing. To be followed by one or two more tangential bad things.

Music: Radiohead – Fake Plastic Trees

Things are starting to get interesting, politically speaking.

John McCain (who was the reason I registered to vote in 2000… as a Republican, no less) has chosen his vice-presidential candidate. Well, scratch that. John McCain has met the vice-presidential candidate his party chose for him.

Sarah Palin is a Yuppi-McSoccermom type who is the governor of Alaska. That’s all well and good for the party, I suppose, but I can’t get out of my mind the fact that our nation’s second-in-command would be, basically, Hovis with more kids and a darker shade of hair dye.

No freaking joke: from the party politics, to the highlighted-q-three-weeks updo with nary a strand out of place, to the glasses worn mostly for vanity’s sake, Sarah Palin would be the Elmer Fudd of the political world. Twittering around from this to that, accomplishing nothing.

(There may be a fundamental difference between these two ladies: while I don’t know the biggest challenge Palin has ever had to overcome, I do know that the worst thing that ever happened in Hovis’s life was her son’s leaving for college – a college that was 25 miles away from home, where he would live on campus and go home for weekends.)

What’s sad is that the move itself looks like a direct attempt to say to disgruntled would-be Hillary voters, “Hey, we got your woman right here!” It’s a direct show of the kind of cynicism that you’d think only them damn dirty America-hating libs would be capable of: that they think feministically-oriented voters would pick their guy because he picked, well, a gal to be his backup plan. (A gal who could conveniently also pull in the Single Issue Voters* who think McCain is too liberal, as she is vehemently against abortion, against gay marriage, for drilling in Alaska^¥, and pro-gun.)

Of course, they could just think that they (Hillary supporters) are stupid, which is not only cynical but incredibly condescending. The RNC thinks that by sticking a woman in the #2 slot^♪, they’re going to pull in those disfranchised Hillary folks, either because they’re spiteful at having been shut out of the big game, or because they’re so dumb they’ll vote for a ticket containing a woman who’s pretty much the ideological opposite of Hillary Clinton, just to put a vagina on the throne. (Or at least very, very near it, given McCain’s age and sixty thousand pages’ worth of medical records.) That they weren’t supporting Hillary because they supported the stances she took, the policies she backed, the ideals she believed in… they just wanted to shout a big “fuck you” at the boys.

Surely, the Republican party isn’t right in thinking that the Hillary camp is that willing or able to shoot themselves in the foot so fantastically… right?

As it turns out, they are.

Therefore, I’m pretty sure they’ve lost their right to be taken seriously^√. I mean, I thought we were supposed to be better than that, better than those who turn politics into an us-vs-them fight. Better than the ones who treat the leadership of our country like a college football game and vote only because they want to be on the “winning team”. A Carolina-Clemson mentality is one thing on the gridiron; it’s another when you’re talking about the future of our nation and our people. It makes you wonder, do those people just hate America?^©

*Capitalized because the term is meant to substitute for a variety of types of Selfish Pricks or Fundamentalist Wackjobs, such as people who vote only based on abortion rights, gun control, immigration, gay rights, etc., regardless of how little it personally affects their lives.

^¥Interestingly, she and her husband named a couple of their kids^§ after areas in Alaska they thought were purty, yet she has no qualms about turning an Alaskan widlife preserve into an oil rig.

^§What, you hadn’t heard about this? Not that I think it’s true, that Alaska’s governor is trying to re-enact Mom at Sixteen, but it gives me a chuckle nonetheless.

^♪Hey, I don’t have any pretenses about being a mature political commentator. Therefore, while that comment isn’t quite as hilarious as the major news outlets claiming that McCain “tapped” Palin, it’s still heh-worthy.

^√Not that I’m saying I should be taken seriously. I mean, I did just make a buttsecks joke.

^©Don’t worry, Hannity, your check’s in the mail.

I need to get either my eyes or my ego checked.

I’ve made a couple notable mistakes this week due to seeing things incorrectly, most notably when I checked and pulled up the wrong damn bus (partly, though, it was relying on my common sense for that one, and we all know what happens when I do that). Just a few moments ago I glanced at a piece of paper that fell out of one of my credit card statments. It says “Your Thank-You Award Is Expiring.” I originally read this as “Thank You for Being Awe-Inspiring.”

I had to laugh. I mean, I can’t even coerce myself to write anything more than this drivel. What hope is there for anyone else? Lord knows I’m not the type of girl who can just pull these types of things effortlessly.

Then again, after today, I’m starting to wonder a little bit.

Music: Velvet Revolver – Fall to Pieces

… in my time of need?

When you’re young and on your own and out of your element (check, check, and check), people think you’re ballsy, insane, or both.

Honestly, I’m fine with either classification. I know the usual responses from the peanut gallery – you’re a fool, you’ve done this before with negligible results, you’re getting scammed, you’re desperate, you’re whatever.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t think being alone is everything I built it up to be.

Then again, I ponder as I scribble incoherently by candlelight, what is?

I don’t know anymore. I don’t have any more insight than anyone else. What I do know is that when you find yourself in the midst of another deadly storm and you’re a lone, it would be nice to have someone there, anyone really, to reassure you. Even if the words, ephemeral in their own right, are issued from one no more substantial than smoke.