...a certain shade of [green] what are _you_ waiting for?
31.3.03
euphemisms. today i took a gander at the white house's webpage for kids. good to know that our nation's youth is being indoctrinated before they can say the words 'humanitarian aid'. kinda evokes lovely images of komsomol or hitler jugend.
[i wonder how many hits the above will bring this website. i've already had a few hits from a government server, according to the site meter. maybe next the cia will be knocking on my door.]
hopeless aspirations. i have recurring dreams, some of them real enough to get me thinking, about my weblog turning into one of those hipster blogs that everyone links to and cites in writing opinion posts, &c. i think the problem, though, is that i have neither the time, nor the energy, not to mention the resources to devote my entire waking life to reading online news/opinion and commenting on it. also, i'm loathe to have my blog turn into a page of links, which is what some have become for all intents and purposes. realistically speaking, i've got 3 weeks to write 3 essays and a fourth due a few weeks after that and i punish myself for my sloth and procrastination by banishing all leisure reading and writing [save the odd blog update] until the essays are at least near completion. i know that there are millions more stressed out that i am - one of whom reads this little forum on a regular basis - but hey i might as well allow myself to be stressed out by the little things while i can still pay attention to them. anyway, that's not the point - the point is that i'm resigned to my web-publishing fate of small readership and no hipster status. besides, that way i don't have to publish the same earth-shattering opinion several times a day in different formats.
have also taken to reading this modern world by tom tomorrow [a.k.a. dan perkins] and am now thoroughly embroiled in the soap opera that is a political cartoonist's life. never knew the field could be so fraternal - tom's got photos on his site where you can see the exciting adventures of not only himself but also mike lukovich the political cartoonist and dave barry the humor columnist, two of my favorite satirists. check out ted rall, if you are interested - everything he does is brilliant.
also check out the amazing truth x-ray vision website. there used to be an exxon logo in the upper left corner - wonder if the corporate thugs made the webowner remove it?
oh, right, my adventures. belfast is small and quiet - shocker, i know, to those who think it's teeming with violence. the city center is quiet nice though and has a huge fuck-off tv screen in the middle of a square, i suppose for rush-hour traffic to view when the going gets tough. dublin was great fun for st. patrick's day, though people aren't lying when they moan about how expensive it is. the visit with mom and my grandparents was wonderful, really nice to see family again. i've got 6 exposures left on my roll of film and then hopefully i'll be sending them all off to be developed, so there might be an influx of brussels, belfast, dublin and london on my photo album - if i can figure out how to pay for the development, that is.
lack of posts update. sorry [to the 2 people who read this] that i haven't posted in a bit - family is here and i've had no time! rest assured, more mindless drivel after tuesday...
a few minor things to complain about. don't get me wrong, i'm on a bit of a high now that classes are officially over for me until april 15 [edinburgh spring break rocks the party!], but there are a few things i observed today that got my brain a'working again.
firstly [and least annoyingly] - i went today to the physiotherapist for my knee, upon which i feel incredibly hard on the black ice in russia evidently not only spraining my medial collateral ligament [which has since nearly completely healed] but also obliterating the nerve-covered fat pad underneath my lower patella. this nerve damage is also the cause of the residual numbness, burning and pins'n'needles i keep feeling every now and then in my knee as a whole, and the numbness i perpetually feel in a portion of my calf muscle. so, while my knee is no longer causing me excessive pain when i kneel or press on the patellar tendon, i definitely still have minor issues with it. my question is, then, why is the elevator out-of-order for a 5th floor physiotherapy unit? what if i hadn't been able to climb stairs, and what about those people needing examination who most definitely cannot?
second - i've really begun to hate 'defaulters' - by that i mean people who argue a certain point because it's their default, like feminism or anti-war or socialism or what have you. they think it's trendy or socially acceptable or that it makes them more interesting in a certain sense, and because of this they think that are [a] right and only right and as such are [b] supposed to argue with any position taken by another person, even if that position is nearly the same as that of the defaulter. i bring this issue up because i've been dealing with an american socialist/feminist/anti-war/plight of the poor by default girl in one of my classes now since january and today she finally pissed me off to the point of verbal action. her argument was something about representation in elected bodies and how single homeless mothers need a voice. i said something about how single homeless mothers don't vote and any 'voice' they have will necessarily be forced upon them - i wasn't arguing with her per se, i agree with some of her points, but her reasoning was completely faulty because of her desire to constantly win - and she responded with some sort of claim that i was a woman-hater and an elitist [which i won't deny in certain contexts - nietzscheans are elitists by definition] who wanted to deny all sorts of population sectors from political action. efforts to clarify my point in simpler terms for her failed, as she stuffed my mouth full of things i hadn't said, and so i gave up on the pretext that i wouldn't argue with someone who wanted to argue for me. fucking defaulter.
other than that, the week is passing quickly as the '9/4 darroch court belfast adventure' looms on the horizon!
mind over money bent over backwards
light up my life like a very last cigarette
[turin brakes, "mind over money"]
whooping, hollering, and general gaiety. i am now a veritable middle eastern history goddess! class exam done and done. i think i was lucky - as i was reviewing with a friend yesterday, it seemed like i was studying too much, but i managed to predict exactly 3 of 4 questions i answered and nearly predict the 4th. and orientalism was on there - happy happy joy joy! theory meets history!
yes, yes, the protest. so last wednesday lauren and i decided we would go check out this anti-war protest-type thingy happening in one of the squares near the university, apparently to march down to the scottish parliament buildings. we were initially going to people-watch and then leave to get some studying done. at some point a cop came around telling everyone to get a move on as traffic had been stopped to allow for the marchers and so the march should get underway, and so we decided pretty much to leave at this point. however, as we attempted to walk out of the square the marchers were also attempting to walk out of the square, and we found ourselves walking along with the marchers. at this point we realize that we've just joined a protest march down to the royal mile and can't leave for fear of desertion. what a bunch of crap protesters we are! the only thing that would have made us worse is if we had shouted out pro-war stuff in the midst of it. the entire time i was giggling to myself, to the consternation of lauren who could not see what i found so funny, perhaps because it was a visual thing - i just kept getting this picture in my head of the two of us wandering into a whole bunch of marching people and 'finding' ourselves in the midst of a march, and joining it to boot. ok, maybe it really is only funny to me. we were also 'inspected' by a 'weapons inspector' for nukes, bio and chem weapons [sounds dirty but it really wasn't i swear - just hilarious]. in the end we had to leave during the scottish socialist party msp's speech, but we've heard it all before so we didn't miss much.
ta-da!
you've tried me out for now
don't kill what's left off
you never know it's there
i tried to argue
but now your skin is bare
and I could try to make you mine
but I haven't got the time
to waste it all
on someone like you
[electric soft parade - "holes in the wall"]
we are so cool. lauren is brilliant for coming up with this and we are all cool for having convenient names. not that i am that into LOTR [lord of the rings to the uninitiated [oh god, i can't believe i just did that]] but lauren, anna and i have the best character names:
