Present Imperfect

I also like "No Survivors"

November 15, 2004

I was having trouble deciding what, if anything, to write here today. Luckily for this, I don't have to!

My favorite thing about the one above is how the bully's yellow baseball cap is flying off his head. It's all about the details.

My Hearing Aid's Starting to Melt

November 12, 2004

Welcome to my new TypePad blog. It was rough going last night, but it's a small price to pay for archives that work. I had to kick Blogger to the curb for its pathetic speed and post-eating, but it was fun while it lasted.

Sadly, I could not automatically transfer comments to this new blog, so I will be pasting them in manually from Haloscan. I know you don't care. In the spirit of full disclosure, I just wanted to point out that all the comments will have incorrect dates on them. Scandalous.

In slightly less boring news, I ran out of gas on Wednesday morning. I've only done this once before, but I think it's fair to say that twice is two times too many. And hey, I just used "to," "two" and "too" in a single sentence. Anyway, the thing is, gas is much cheaper near work than it is near home, and instead of fueling up on Tuesday night, I played the lazy card and bet that I'd be able to make it to work just fine on Wednesday. I, uh, lost that bet. Luckily, I benefitted from two things: first, that I have AAA Plus and intend to get my money's worth, dammit (100 miles of towing! How can I make that work for me?), and second, that I have been extraordinarily calm in the face of (slight) adversity lately.

Here's a good example. As I'm in the downtown Avis office returning the last of three rental cars we drove up from Los Angeles with a bunch of crap in them, Eric witnesses a young woman pull her rental car out of its space and into the back of my parked car. According to Eric, the hitter then leapt out of her vehicle railing that "that was a really great place" for Eric to park. Right! Because it's always the parked car's fault! Anyway, I emerged from the rental office to find Eric seething and the hitter swearing. She hadn't bothered to purchase the rental insurance. I took a look at my scratched and dented quarter-panel and told her that it wasn't that bad, that nobody was hurt and it wasn't such a big deal. Because hey! To me, it wasn't! I don't have to pay $1770 to get it fixed! (According to the body shop estimate, I guess it was kind of a big deal.) Of course, now she has to go through her insurance, who must first get some paperwork from Avis, but whatever. See? Cool as a cucumber.

Then there was Wednesday's incident. I certainly could have flipped out over my incredible stupidity (a favorite recurring theme of mine), but instead I decided to call AAA, calmly wait for them to arrive whilst listening to NPR and be thankful I managed to get off the freeway, thereby avoiding a potential traffic citation.

Okay, I did cry and eat a lot of ice cream after the election results came in, but I think I'm turning over a more zen leaf these days. I resolve to kick it Julian of Norwich style, telling myself how all shall be well even as the flames lick my heels.

I guess that sounds a lot like "denial," actually. Whatever. You say tomato...

The View from the Handbasket

November 03, 2004

Today calls to mind a "What Do You Think?" response printed in The Onion after the 2002 election. It goes a little something like this:

"They say the people get the government they deserve, but I don't recall knife-raping any retarded nuns."

But seriously, folks, I have a message to all the red-state Security Moms out there (if they do, in fact, exist and are not just another ridiculous demographic myth):

You voted for George Bush because you thought he would keep you safe. Fair enough. I get that. I understand that it feels scary to change leaders in the midst of so much strife (even if you believe, as I do, that said leader was the cause of much of the strife in the first place). I understand that you have children and that alone can radically alter your view of the world as it compares to mine.

But let me ask you one thing: What exactly do you have to worry about?! Who's going to bomb your Wal-Mart or barrel a flammable semi through your quaint covered bridge? You either live in the middle of nowhere or at the end of a cul-de-sac in a subdivision just far enough outside of a city that you don't have to deal with the riffraff every day. I don't. l live in a big city. I'm the one who's going to be running for cover when the Bay Bridge or the Transamerica Pyramid comes tumbling down. I'm the one who's going to be trapped in a collapsed BART tunnel for three days. I'm the one who has to worry. Me and my friends in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, three more cities whose population overwhelmingly voted for Kerry. Yup, that's right: The people most likely to be injured or killed in the next terrorist attack trusted Kerry to protect them. Why the hell couldn't you?

Maybe I'm misinterpreting your fears here. Maybe you're not afraid of terrorists attacking your town as much as you're afraid of gays attacking your marriage. My, that is scary!

And how about those taxes?! It's equally frightening to imagine your hard-earned money going to fund programs to help people less fortunate than yourself. Why, "altruism" and "terrorism" even sound a lot alike, don't they?

Oh! I know! It must be that you're afraid of all those scary people who don't believe in Jesus. But I wouldn't worry about them too much. They're all going to hell. And because you voted for George Bush, they'll all get there a lot faster.

Arrowed, not punched.

November 02, 2004

Last night, because I could not bear to watch yet another boring Monday Night Football blowout (41-14? You must be joking. I guess this is revenge for 1986), I watched Frontline’s ”The Choice 2004”, and I’m so very glad I did.

As a PBS documentary, this was clearly framed as a non-partisan examination of the lives of George Bush and John Kerry from Yale to the war in Iraq. But even though the film was constructed entirely from old news footage and equal-time interviews with supporters and opponents on both sides (including the excellent Ann Richards and the creepy David Frum), the end result made John Kerry look like an intelligent, thoughtful, genuinely altruistic man who acted on his convictions even when it amounted to political suicide. Bush, on the other hand, came off as a cunning — albeit charming — politician who acted on convictions he only seemed to develop in a post-born again attempt to court the evangelical Christian vote and pull the rug out from under Richards in the Texas gubernatorial race.

Isn’t it funny how Bush has positioned himself as a man driven by long-held ideals and Kerry as a man driven solely by political gain, when exactly the opposite is true? Yeah. I thought so, too. And I voted to prove it.