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Wow, long time with no posts. I have no explanation really except to say that after a particularly brutal school term, I needed to a serious mental reboot. While I am working on school project this summer, I am also getting in my fair share of trashy novels and summer sun.
So Sailor actually has most of the summer off, but since he needs to update his Coast Guard license, he is still not in town as he needs to attend classes all over Hell’s Half Acre and take various exams as far away as Virginia.
What this means to me is that not only is Sailor gone, again, but I now have the added benefit of being car-less. As a one car family, Sailor needs it to travel so I am walking or biking my way around Erie…which fairly sucks by the way…
Mostly this is because Erie has, possibly, the worst population of drivers outside of Boston. Pedestrian signals are merely an annoyance and my mere existence in a crosswalk is apparently cause for vehicular manslaughter. A woman actually jumped the curb in her car on 38th street yesterday and nearly took me out in the process. This is because she was texting while driving. After the car came to a stop, she didn’t even bother to look to see if she had struck anyone or anything, she merely resumed texting until I started banging on the hood of her car demanding for her to step out.
There’s also a ass-hat that works at the Veterans Hospital that somehow has the idea that my bike is required to stop and let him turn into the hospital when I have the mother-effin right of way. So everyday has become a game of chicken where I am rushing ahead to avoid getting hit by this jerk-off.
My favorite people are the car load of reprobate teens who thought it amusing to lean out the window and try to push me off my bike. I guess it didn’t occur to them that such an act could quite conceivably kill me, so I didn’t feel too badly about grabbing the kid by the hair and half pulling him out the car window…little bastard…he screamed like a little boy.
But the strangest reaction I receive is from my co-workers. If I bike to work, this is somehow all right, but if I walk, then this is cause for concern. Why didn’t you just call me??
But whether I bike or walk, I encounter the same issues: hostile motorists who do not respect the law or my right of way. Barring that, when I just don’t feel like possibly getting killed and decide on traversing the sidewalk, there’s also the people who leave their kid’s toys everywhere, or who have spectacularly decrepit cement, or terrifically overgrown bushes and trees, or cars who block the sidewalk thus forcing one back into traffic.
So this interesting little experiment continues for the foreseeable future. Sailor return this week, but I am going to continue to walk and ride to work. I like the exercise, I like the time to myself, and maybe I just like the thrill of the evident danger that is cruising the streets of Erie.
Tally to date: Cars – 0, Inmate – 6.
If you haven’t heard, a Philadelphia man was shot in a movie theater on Christmas Day for refusing to keep quiet during the film.
While I don’t approve of the violence, I certainly understand the impulse that drove the shooter to his actions. Seriously, I get this. Total no brainer. People, in general, have become such complete barbarians in public, I’m more surprised that incidents like these doesn’t happen everyday.
For instance, I can not remember the last the time I saw a movie that wasn’t interupted with cell phones, people talking, or people getting up out of their seats every few minutes.
Libraries apparently have become the place to hang out with your teenage pals have a raucous good time.
Grocery shopping with your four sullen teenagers who skulk about, hogging lanes, not watching where they’re going, and have zero sense of their spatial relations, or, shopping with your screaming child in an SUV-styled grocery cart that crash into eneryone’s shins, apparently is now the accepted norm.
Noisy, crying, ill-behaved children in nice restaurants alongside the people who have no voice control or no sense of discretion sitting at the next table? Go ahead, complain, I dare you. Be forewarned that you will be viewed as the problem in that scenario,
Having to listen to other people’s loud and inconsequential phone conversations every damn place you go is now required.
Society’s utter lack of shame, or the absence of the implementation of shame as a social control, has removed any refuge from such boorish behavior. There is is simply no one place a person can go anymore and expect that rules of common courtesy be adhered to and I can easily see how the noise and constant harangue of these intrusions can cause someone to snap as it did in that movie theater.
How do you enforce the concept of common courtesy or appropriate behavioral norms? I can just see the ridiculous backlash heading this way in the form of movie theaters installing security to protect against violence as opposed to simply asking rude customers to shut the hell up. However, maybe starting with a few armed guards in movie theaters to ensure the domestic peace and quiet might not be such a bad idea.
Atheists have an interesting gig come holiday season. Thanksgiving is okay and obviously New Years doesn’t bother me, but it is exceptionally tough to navigate Christmas.
I didn’t believe in a god from a very young age and this carried over into any secular sense of Christmas as well. If I didn’t believe in an Almighty traffic cop in the sky, you sure as hell weren’t going to get me to believe in a red-suited fat man popping down the chimney. I remember my dad having a talk with me when I was six asking me to keep my opinions to myself so as not to ruin the holiday for my older siblings.
And so it has gone. I suffer in silence every year through the holiday I hate the most.
Not that there weren’t parts of it I enjoyed. We used to sit around the Christmas tree with my dad listening to the Mormon Tabernacle choir on the stereo with the all the lights off just talking about whatever. I really could have done without the presents. Receiving them has always embarassed me. Just sitting like that, around the tree, with the TV off, drinking mother’s lethal eggnog was enough and I looked forward to that every year.
I liked walking around the neighborhood at night looking at the lighted houses. The tackier the decorations, the better I say. Bring me back the 1970’s anytime. And I love Solstice. Always have. Something about celebrating the sun standing still and the longest night of the year has always appealed to me.
But as a married adult, I am more trapped by all this holiday hooplah than ever. Sailor and I don’t put up lights, we don’t have a tree, and we don’t send out cards. But Sailor’s family is all into this nonsense and they “tolerate” my atheism (although not a single damn one of them goes to church) so long as I play nice through what I believe is hipocritcal nonsense. I’m expected to give and receive the knick-knack junk I whole heartedly detest, to put in the time on Giftmas Eve and Day and to attend holiday parties with the same people I see week after week. And I do it. Every damn year. Because I love Sailor and these tribal rituals are deemed somehow necessary in his family’s life.
But here’s the thing, I would actually play ball and cease being so pissy about all of this any of them actually believed in any of this either.
Sailor’s family do what they do only because it has been so deeply programmed into them as the socially appropriate response to the season. And that’s crap. I shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about wanting to ignore it all for simply enabling their bad habit.
I forgive it in my own parents because they do go to church. They do actually believe in all of this. Wholeheartedly. And despite our differences in philosophy, their staunch belief makes all this activity easier to deal with.
But, for better or worse, I also belong to Sailor’s tribe now and, per usual, I am making nice.
I try to focus on the one year where I got to do what I wanted. December 25th, 2004, Sailor and I, back in Maine, out on the island. We watched all 13 hours of the Lord of the Rings extended dvd’s along with a quite few appendices. We stopped only for soup, eggnog, and the brief run with the puppy dog through snow in the cemetery next door.
Best day ever. My happy place. You can be sure I’ll be focusing on that during the next holiday party.
An oldie but exceptional goodie from the brilliant mind at Indexed
It’s final exam time and per usual, I am appalled at what I find myself consuming after 12 hours in the lab.
All those healthy habits you pick up as an adult after college? Out the window!
With limited facilities at my end of campus and only a drug store and a fast food chain within a reasonable walking distance, I’ve been having odd negotiations and rationalizations with myself in front of the vending machines after having been in front a computer for 8 hours straight…
Payday or Snickers bar? Payday has peanuts and peanuts have protein, but then, maybe, Cheezits? Less sugar? But more salt. How long has that gronala bar been in this machine? What the hell are Soy Flakes? Hmmmm….
And so it goes. I don’t drink soda, but exhaustion at this time of term has me guzzling Dr. Pepper like it was the 1970’s. Caffeine induced paranoid delusions inevitably follow with the obligatory sugar crash. But I use the time I have productively in a frenzied wave of energy. A lot gets accomplished.
I try to bring food from home to the lab, but I haven’t been to the store in weeks. No time. Too many papers, projects, tests, and study sessions. Just as well, we have no refrigerator or microwave available.
And don’t get me started about the pooch. She’s always pissy this time of term. She barricades the front door by moving the couch in front of it. More than once has her dog bed ended up in the bathroom and chairs have been drug into the kitchen. There’s nothing more stressful than a crabby mastif.
Not that I blame her. But she doesn’t listen to reason. I followed her around the house last night begging for just 2 more days of patience and then everything will get back to normal.
She doesn’t believe though.
Sometimes, neither do I.
So I voted this morning. The lines were non existent, the parking was ample, plenty of people were on hand, but yet it still managed to take more time than it should have.
The problems begin with the location. I voted at Trinity Lutheran Church on 38th Street, which just felt wrong. Plain wrong. But aside from issues regarding the separation of Church and State, there were no signs – anywhere – telling you that this was the place, this is where you enter, or this is the room to where you go to vote.
There was ample room for the bake sale the church decided to have, but you could not turn around in the room where the actual voting takes place. The ladies running the show (and don’t get me wrong here, I have the highest respect for poll workers) where at best unorganized and discombobulated.
No matter. I voted. Made my voice heard. And then got the hell out of there.
With regards to the after work voters though, I can see this process getting long and ugly.
If you want to explain the effed-up spectacle that is American Politics to a Viking, it is best explained via the Prose Edda, a collection of poetry about Norse Mythology.
In one particular understanding fo the world, there is the World Tree, Yggdrassil, which is inhabited by several beings: Veðrfölnir, a hawk residing at the top of the tree, and Níðhöggr, a dragon who resides at the bottom eating the roots.
The most interesting character residing there however, is Ratatosk, a red squirrel whose sole job is to ferry insults between Veðrfölnir and Níðhöggr and spread gossip.
So as we enter the final two weeks of this election season, and tempers flare hotter, and the attack ads get nastier, I think it is safe to assume that despite whomever one takes for being either the hawk or the dragon in this election, I think we can all agree who is Ratatosk.
I’ve never been more thankful to not have the TV hooked up.
As the economy continues to spiral down the drain, and yet another weekly bailout plan is thrown at us, I’ve been contemplating the increasingly strange evolution of the relationship of this government with its people.
The best idea of the government has been to throw more money at the banks and Wall Street. All of course with tax payers’ money mind you, which in theory gets the bank lending to each other again, and in turn, to their thinking, will somehow get us into back into the bed with these scummy entities via the form of investing in the stock market.
And the all the while Henry Paulson acts like he’s some noble hero by stealing our money and strong-arming the banks into accepting money some of them don’t even need. What Paulson fails to realize is that this behavior does not make him or the government heroes, but it does, however, make them pimps.
Yeah, that’s right, you heard me, big ol’ Pimp-thug-dealers. In fact the only thing missing from this picture of the government is the hat.
For years the government, let’s call it Big G, so Big G sat on the corner trying to entice people with his cadre of lovely banking beauties, his “Ho’s”, by stripping away every layer of regulated inhibition. C’mon what’s it gonna hurt? Who’s gonna know? Pushing and pushing until people felt a little toss underneath the sheets was a victimless crime. I mean really, who would it hurt?
But the economics of being a good pimp means you also have to diversify your product line. Few pimps deal strictly in sex. A little drug dealing, just enough to keep both “Johns” and “Ho’s” hooked, and the occasional enforcing to keep the deviants in line, all help flesh out the portfolio.
The banks got hooked on the crack of deregulation and the people got hooked on the sleazy ease of unlimited credit. And then the proverbial condom breaks and we all end up with a fat and nasty STD in the form a financial meltdown.
(Big G also failed to realize that if your Johns and Ho’s all die of overdoses and disease, you lack a both product and a customer at the end of the day.)
But really, the fact is it doesn’t matter how much play money Big G throws at this situation anymore. The Johns are not inclined to get into bed with a Ho who is going to them financial syphilis or worse. When England nationalized their banks, heads rolled and a new harem of Ho’s were brought in. No such provision is being made here.
Clearly, a massive does of penicillin is required. Whatever metaphor you want this penicillin to stand for is up to you. I just know that it’s time to either double-bag it, switch street corners, or get thee to a nunnery.
Any body else as sick of this election as I am? I’m at the end of the proverbial rope. It would be worse if I had the TV hooked up because I’m sure the political assaults are in full force. However, the radio is performing admirably in its deluge of bad financial news and campaign hooplah and I can barely even tolerate that anymore.
Now that I think of it, I think listening to the radio makes this all much more vivid. TV is a primarily a visual medium, walk out of the room when one of the attacks ads is playing and you don’t receive half the impact because you lack the imagery. With radio, you can’t escape it except to turn it off. Words written for just audio impact it pretty strong stuff. Switch stations and it’s only more of the same.
And let’s not forget the voices in our heads: McCain, Obama, Palin, Biden.
If McCain says “my friends” one more damn time…I mean…!@#$%$!…can’t he think of another word??? Honestly, get that man a thesaurus! Here, I’ll help: amigo, brother, chum, sister, confidant, confidante, mate, pal, comrade, dog (as in yo’), Romans, countrymen! Seriously, I’ll take anything, just switch it up already!
And Obama: decibel control, dude! I know on radio they are recording him speaking at events, but wow, Big! Booming!Voice!All!The!Time!
And Palin? Ah, jeez, I cannot, simply cannot listen to that idiot babble on. It wouldn’t be so bad if were just the babbling, but factor in her incredibly annoying, kindergarten teacher voice and something just takes over: must.shove.pencil.in.ear….
Is Biden even alive anymore? Where the hell is he? Maybe this is a radio thing and he’s just not getting the same play, but really, where is he? Not that I need to hear his schizophrenic, love/hate relationship speech with McCain anymore.
I just need this all to be over. Make the voices stop.
One person’s news blip is another person’s major revelation.
Iceland, my dear, dear, Iceland has taken a loan from Russia in the amount of $5 billion dollars to help offset its potential banking collapse.
Dayamn.
Now let’s be clear that this was an option of last resort for Iceland since its Western Allies weren’t ponying up some dough. And this is a HUGE mistake on behalf of the US. I won’t comment for the UK or the rest of Europe, but if we are in fact, and I think we can all agree on this, on the verge of brand spanking new Cold War, then militarily speaking, we should have found a way to help out Iceland. Period.
A quick review of the facts for a moment, shall we? As I’ve been writing about for over a year now, Russia has launched illegal flights over the island nation, claimed sea floor for Russia dangerously close to Iceland’s territorial waters, and they’re building a scary new submarine not all that far from the most strategic point of the North Atlantic. And now Iceland has been put in the position of having to borrow money from them?
Where the hell is the US strategic policy on this one?
As I previously quoted, Iceland is like a revolver pointed at the back of the head of the person not holding the gun.
And since America stepped out of Keflavik air base in Iceland in 2006, they are wide open. I hope that when Iceland is need of as second loan, and it is looking as thought it will be necessary, I hope the US smartens up and finds a way to help them out.
Among all the other things we can’t afford right now, this is another item on the list.
And of course I speak as an American on the topic and what Iceland means to us strategically. Hildi, I hope you’re out there. I’d love your input on this.
