All politics, all the time

I bet the 7 of you who read this blog are really looking forward to the election being over, if only so I'll stop talking about it. Too bad for you all, I have 2.5 months left!

So, how's about that scary bitch of a VP candidate??? I think it says a lot about this country that the GOP chose someone with no experience, who is a right-wing psycho fascist, JUST because she's a woman and may steal some of the Hilary vote. I think it says even more about this country that they may actually be right, that Obama could lose just because some Hilary supporters are still so pissed off that their girl didn't win that they'll actually vote against their beliefs or stay home altogether. I hope hope hope Obama wins, but if he doesn't, the democrats will have screwed themselves again, by letting that primary go on to the point where the party is so divided it may sink its own candidate. I'm so proud to be part of this fucking moronic organization. And yet it's the better of the two choices.

Just wait, more commentary to come during next week's Karl Rove convention. Anyone else see the irony of a hurricane hitting New Orleans on the anniversary of Katrina, just as the republicans gather to promote a walking fossil and his affirmative action VP pick?

Can I just say...

...where the fuck was this Al Gore 8 years ago??? If he'd spoken like this then, with this passion and articulation, maybe we wouldn't have the last 2 terms of crap to recover from. Stupid man. I mean, lovely speech, but why such a late bloomer, Al?

Why yes, we are still watching the convention here, thanks for asking.

If I were a religious person, I would be fearing for my family's souls

We are suffering through hour 6 of the Democratic National Convention, and we're all getting a little punchy. My mother has a 44 year history of watching the whole convention every 4 years, and this is the first one since she moved in with us, so it's a big week for all of us. She's actually Tivo-ing the whole thing, just in case we miss any of Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper's scintillating commentary. I'm really starting to understand why the Democrats keep losing. This couldn't be more soporific. I'm as enthusiastic about Obama as anyone, but I can't see this lineup of dullness, set to dull music, as inspiring anybody.

Oh, but my family's souls. We're watching the introductory video on Michelle Obama (who I really like but kind of fear), and her brother says, "we lost our father in 1991." Simultaneously, my husband says "we found him in 1995" and my mother says "and we've been looking for him ever since." I live with funny, but kind of wicked, people.

Shame

Shame is almost a pretty sounding word, like serendipity or quintessential, but it's an ugly feeling, and I don't think I really knew its meaning until this year. Shame, I now know (try to write that, while marginally drunk, at 2:45am, by the way, it really wants to come out 'I know now'), is having to answer questions like "have you recently turned to drugs or alcohol" and "what kinds of feelings are negative feelings" from a marriage counselor. Me? Turn to alcohol? And please, who doesn't think anger, sadness, and anxiety are negative feelings? But that gave the Steve Martin therapist with the child molester mustache much fodder for note-taking, at $2 a minute. Clearly, thinking some feelings are negative is a big red flag. And so, I have renamed our therapy as "wife failure class," and hereby resolve to do better, although I'm still a little unclear about what that entails, exactly. Probably, to be honest, not going out drinking and dancing until after 2am the night before the kids meet their teachers.

An excellent character trait in a spouse

Not to be too personal, but things have been a little roller-coastery around here, marriage-wise, and I'm happy to say they seem to be on an upswing. When discussing the possibility of marriage counseling, we talked about not wanting to disappoint each other. My lovely husband said - as the children ran dirty and grouchy through the filthy house, as he put away dishes from the meal he bought and prepared after working all day to support us, as I sat with my 3rd beer in an hour and surfed the internet with my fat roll hanging over the waistband of my too-tight shorts - that I never disappoint him. And so I have determined that the single most important character trait in a spouse, at least in my spouse, is low expectations. It certainly helps to be the second wife, compared always to a woman who seems to actively seek slovenliness, poor parenting, insanely bad money management, and unkindess. I'm just not ambitious enough to beat her.

Peace and Quiet

Next up in my list of weird things - peace and quiet. I'm visiting friends in Minneapolis, and have had a long lovely day, full of books and movies and way too much junk food. I feel like my brain has been full of buzzing and bitten off words and sharp pointy things for months now. Being here, away from children and schoolwork and chores and obligations, I can feel an almost tangible stilling of the hectic mess in my mind. I'm not sure yet if that's a good thing. It's a little scary to think that I may finally see what's been lurking under all the noise.

Things That Are Weird

This is the first in a series - okay, who am I kidding, I have nothing like the perserverence to write an actual series, but let's play make-believe, shall we? - about things I find weird. I find a lot of things weird. Life is strange. One of the strangest things about being an atheist is that I don't see reason in anything, no overall pattern to tie all the weirdness together, and so things that seem normal at first glance, just because you're used to them, seem really bizarre and unlikely upon further inspection.

So, my first weird thing - beer. Not that I don't like beer, as you all know, so you can see from the beginning that weird does not necessarily equal bad. It's just strange, how we pay money and seek out this sort of foul-tasting, off-smelling liquid (when soda is so much more socially acceptable and more slowly damaging, biologically), when all we do with it in the best case scenario is convert it almost immediately into urine and in the worst case into vomit and urine. And yet, when you have had a day like mine, when your 7 year old has tried your patience for the 9,000th time and your patience has failed, no contest, you need the beer or you will run away screaming, will seek out hard drugs, will enter a life of crime or whatever it takes to get. the. fuck. away, you damn near worship the beer for its temporary reprieve, its dulling of life's sharp edges, its postponement of real life and real problems. Like I said, beer is weird.

My face is blurry

My friend's daughter spent a lot of time with her eyes open underwater yesterday, and emerged from the pool with the pink eyes of an easter bunny. She rubbed them and said, "my face is blurry," which I thought was the best description ever of that used-up raw itchy feeling. I felt that way myself on Saturday night, after powering through the new Twilight book. I love immersing myself so completely in a book that I feel like I'm waking up from someone else's dream when it's over, when my eyes are grainy and red from being submerged so long in a fictional universe. A lot of my 32-year-long writer's block is fear of trying, and failing, to bring my own imagination so tangibly and accessibly to life. It's too bad I can't just read fiction for a living, I'm one hell of a reader.

August and Everything After

Isn't that a Counting Crows album? I love Counting Crows.

This summer has been long and strange, and I was looking forward to the turn of the calendar, but August 1st started off a bit rocky. On my way to a chemistry test for which I was grieviously underprepared, my car abruptly clonked out of commission in the middle of an intersection. Four strangers stopped, during rush hour, to offer assistance, and my friend came with his Volvo to push me out of harm's way, so the actual breakdown ended up being sort of uplifting, in an all-people-don't-suck sort of way. Unfortunately, the estimate on the repair is about half of the car's actual value, which does suck, no matter how I look for silver linings. I made it to class only a few minutes late, while the professor was still reviewing. The test itself was insanely hard, causing one girl to leave the classroom in hysterics and one unfortunate 20 year old boy to weep quietly at his desk. I am perverse and kind of enjoyed the challenge of it, although my classmates didn't appreciate my enthusiasm during the postmortem. I hate having to wait until Monday for the grade.

After all that, the day improved dramatically. I had a nap, one of my favorite food groups, and then took the little monsters to the pool and saw a lot of friends. Then I got to dress up like a fancy girl and go out for a fancy dinner with some old and some new friends, and it was great fun. Then, best of all, we went dancing, which always makes me happy, even though I'm not a good dancer and it was like dancing in a sauna and my legs were already sore from a way-too-ambitious workout on Monday.

The new Twilight book is out today, and my mother is at the store getting it right now. That's my whole plan for the day, which is just fanfuckingtastic. Well, that and a nap, of course.