the need for change beyond obama.

Today, I was behind someone in a large GMC SUV (hopefully that part of the company will die for good with this bankruptcy thing...but it will, more likely, be sold to China just like everything else). This SUV, with its various bumper sticker messages, was actually quite hilarious. I wish I had had a camera on me. There was, of course, the required "W: the president" sticker (if you've never seen one...then you've never spent an hour on an American road). Also, there was a "I Support Our Troops" sticker in red, white and blue, and obviously a "NObama!". But these three stickers are quite common sights. What made this all the better was the "Who is John Galt?" on the back window and the "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" on the bumper. I wish I had had a marker to edit that last one with: "Drill Here (just not in my backyard), Drill Now (no really, right now), Pay Less (until our oil runs out)." And all of this on the back of the ultimate symbol of stubbornly myopic American business and consumerism. Ah, yes.

For more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galt,
http://www.notdependant.com/,
http://www.goingjohngalt.org/blog/

And, on a completely-different-but-really-not-so-different-topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzw_ZoZ7cLg&feature=channel_page (love the little girl at the end)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp76ly2_NoI&feature=channel (should I be scared?)

Okay but honestly, when are we finally, FINALLY, going to change the way we are structured as a society? Why does everything always have to be yes/no, rather than up for a discussion resulting in several different answers? The yes/no mentality, the two-party mentality, however you like to think of it, we need to grow out of it already. There are no excuses for our limited, minimal, strict ideologies and no excuses for us to keep elevating our most extreme ideologues to prominent positions. Now is just the beginning, but I can only hope that in the next few years or decades, we will finally stop ridiculing those who fall somewhere in the grey area between our black and white policies and platforms. Liberalism, I truly believe, can only be achieved by those who allow for liberal discussion; that is, discussion involving the greatest number of viewpoints possible heard in a rational and reasonable environment. And no, I don't mean liberalism like every American would think I do (in other words, I'm not using liberalism as synonymous with hedonism or socialism, but rather with philosophical democracy and basic human rights). And, as evidenced by the recent Pelosi scandal in which the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, stated that herself and Congress had not been truly informed about what was going on in American foreign prisons under the Bush administration and was therefore summarily humiliated into silence by many politicians and the media, we no longer possess a rational and reasonable environment for the two platforms we do have to be presented, let alone other platforms. This, above all, must change. There are no gathering storms except for those we are creating for ourselves, wasting valuable time and resources, disillusioning those that might actually have had true hope and motivation at one point. For now, I'm just going to keep believing that we can and will do better because to think otherwise would, quite honestly, make me a fairly nihilistic person.

They might not have it all right, but no one does. Check out the other third parties listed on their homepage if you're interested in American politics beyond red and blue (yes, non-Republican, non-Democrat parties do exist! Kind of). It's all a start.
http://www.unityparty.us/platform-unity-party.htm

And to everyone eligible to vote in the European Parliament elections, I sincerely hope you do vote and I sincerely hope that you feel responsible for your vote. It is so important for people to feel responsible for and invested in their actions in the democratic arena. Responsibility leads to legitimacy, and legitimacy leads to continued hope.

Inadvertent Tears in Recent History.

I won't even try to make excuses for my lack of postings. There are no excuses. Sorry.

So much has happened since my last sign of life appeared in the blogosphere (ew, I hate that word and I hate people who use it. They're just like people that say "twenty-something". So I say blogosphere with a touch of irony). To be honest, I've neglected posting simply because I haven't thought of a way to coherently outline everything in one post. But then last night, on my way home from work, in the middle of a spontaneous outburst of tears, I realized that was the best structure with which to explain my last few months: the frequency of my recent accidental crying.

While watching Jean Michel Cousteau's "Oceans" on PBS

I didn't really think too much about this TV special but I happened to (accidentally) see Jean Michel Cousteau being interviewed about it the same day it was meant to air. This made me think to record the program on my TiVo, just in case I was ever bored enough to watch it. I got around to watching the show one night after work, probably two weeks later. I was close to deleting it from the TiVo, but my childhood love of orca whales persuaded me to at least watch a few minutes. Well, lo and behold, I watch the whole damn two hour program, crying through most of it. Yes, crying. Because of whales. And you know what tipped me over the edge? They were talking about whales in captivity and about Keiko, the orca from "Free Willy" that was trained to be released into the wild. Well, when they went to release Keiko into the wild after decades of captivity, the other whales basically ignored him. After a few months, some whales went from ignoring him to picking on him, in a whale sort of way. And this struck me as awfully, terribly sad. We had taken this whale from his family, put him in captivity, and made him so dependent on humans that he was literally no longer an orca whale. He had done everything we had asked him to do, been everything we asked him to be, but when we asked him to be a whale again, he couldn't do it. I could only think that he must have felt like the humans who were once his "family" had abandoned him into a world he knew nothing about, left him to be ostracised and ridiculed by his own kind, and then refused to take him back. Keiko was released near Iceland and swam all the way to Norway, where he moved into a fjord. He swam up to fishing boats and swimming children, but the people had no idea how to take care of him or who he was or what he needed. He died just a year after he was released. And I would swear he died of a broken heart. Now, of course it's all a whole lot deeper than that and I wasn't just crying for one single whale. But you can infer the meaning of my empathy. The point is, it caught me entirely by surprise. It was accidental crying.

While sleeping next to you

Since I last wrote, I have been to Paris and back. When I first arrived, I was horribly, disgustingly ill. Emphasis on disgusting. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, and could hardly breathe. Everyone and their mothers asked me if I had swine flu, people on the airplane gave me dirty looks as I sweat out a fever, and I felt like a pathetically ugly duckling walking the streets of the most beautiful city I know. Then, after a surprisingly nice visit to a French doctor and heavy doses of morphine-laced French prescriptions (no, I'm not kidding. Medicine in that country is great), I began to feel better. This was also in no small part to Marc's taking care of me through all the grossness, and even acting like he didn't mind it. We did a million things in Paris and I had the most wonderful time. But lying there every night, I wanted to cry and sometimes did, for no concrete reason. I kept thinking of the person who had said they were sincerely sorry for me when they found out about my long distance relationship. "Sincerely sorry". The words struck me as profoundly sad. She wasn't impressed, she didn't wish me luck, she didn't say she was amazed. She didn't have the normal reaction. Instead, she chose to say she was sorry about it. like it was a disease or a disability. And every night, laying there in a too-small bed, I felt kind of sorry for us. Just vaguely sympathetic, as if I were an objective third party floating over the room, watching the two of us sleep through precious moments together, holding onto each other unconsciously as though we could be separated at any moment. Those nights account for yet another bout of accidental crying.

While reading a book on the origins of Islam

This one I won't go into too much detail about because it would be cruel to make you read all the thoughts and opinions I've developed on the topic of Islam. In very brief summary, I read a wonderful book about the evolution of Islam. "No god but God" by Reza Aslan. I cannot urge you to read it enough, whether you are Muslim or Christian or an atheist or you don't give a shit about religion. It doesn't matter. Read this book. In summary, it made me cry not because it was sad in and of itself, but because what I thought I knew about Islam was pathetically ignorant, because human beings have destroyed yet another beautiful thing through hunger for power and control, and because it is so teeth-grindingly frustrating to to see what Islam has become today, perverted by the perceptions of people who don't understand and by some who practice it. And yes, you can say the same things about Christianity. You can say the same things about the government of the United States, about baseball, or about socialism, or anything else. But this book on Islam seemed especially poignant to me, causing me to accidentally cry yet again.

While at my sister's graduation

This might seem like an obvious one. But I didn't find myself crying because I was so proud of my sister for graduating (not that I'm not proud of her) or because I saw us all growing up and moving on with our lives and boo hoo how sad. No. What made me cry was when they played "Pomp and Circumstance". And I cried because no one played that song at my graduation. I cried because in some ways, graduation for me was all right but in others, all wrong. Selfish of me to think like that, maybe. But really, if I could have a do-over, I would make sure that song was played at some point in the ceremony. (I would also have never even mentioned the possibility of having a seating chart but hey, live and learn, right?)

And while on the subject of graduation...the best I can tell you at this point is just breathe and keep yourself in the moment. Don't think about what will happen during the next hour or next day or next year. Just keep yourself in the moment, force yourself to live it, no matter how hard it may be or how tempting it might be to do your best to ignore the full weight of it. Hold on. Smoke your last cigarette in Smoker's Corner, even though it will likely be the most awkward cigarette you've had in two years. Stick around to take a lot of pictures, even if you just feel like going and being alone or packing up the rest of your things. Stop in front of the fjord one last time and silently hold each other's hands because really, there's nothing else you can do. Look out the window of the bus because even though it is painful, it is better than looking down at that dirty floor during your last moments on campus and on those winding roads. And let yourself cry, whether you expect to or not. Accidental crying's not so bad.

While driving home last night from work

For some reason, the drive home from my new place of employment (an adorably hidden German biergarten) was empty. No one on the roads. Just me and my hundreds of thoughts on normally packed thoroughfares. And yeah, I turned to the cliched "driving down a long and dark road is like my life" metaphor. I started thinking about where I'd come from during the last 3 years in comparison to where I am now. I started thinking about how I am doubly relieved and nauseated by the thought of knowing what I want to study for the next 6-8 years (it's going to be international law, ideally with a Latin American and European Union focus). I mentally calculated the possibilities that this summer represents. I tried to project what next year means for us, for all of us. I listened to Spoon's "Black Like Me" and thought about how none of you were there, how quickly time is passing, how scared I am of failure in the next chapter of my life, how far away it all seems. I was sideswiped by the notion that everything is just always so damn frightening. And this, more than anything, made me cry the strangest tears of all, tears of nostalgia and frustration and fear but also of realization and satisfaction and hope. Mostly, they were inadvertent tears consequential of too much of emotion of any kind, not just sadness. Which is a good explanation of the cause of all of my recent accidental crying. Too much of everything.


Edit// Alright, now it is six incidents of accidental crying. The last 5 minutes of Season 2, Episode 1 of The Office just happened. And it's only halfway pathetic that The Office made me cry. Sort of pathetic, but not entirely.

Lightness and Weight.

Sometimes, I think I wish I could be everywhere at once. Or rather, I could be everywhere I wanted to be when I wanted to be there. I wish I could just will myself to be next to someone who needs it, wish I could do my makeup in my room at home then step out the door into a Norwegian cabin with my best friends, wish I could hear how you're doing and then find myself sitting across a table from you, holding your hand while you calm down, wish I could fall asleep in one place and wake up in another. I often think that I want to be able to do those things.

But then I start to really think about it. I realize that if I could do that, if I could be anywhere I wanted to be instantaneously, then life becomes absurd. Time and place drop away. Those things that keep me anchored to this world cease to mean anything at all. In the American folktale, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", Jonathan comes to understand so much that time and place mean nothing to him. He can fly to the past, to the future, to New England or India or Pluto....he can, literally, go to any thought. I avoid saying any place or any time because place and time mean nothing to a life lived outside of them. Jonathan thinks this is a beautiful thing, the moral of the story being that through knowledge and passion, we can all break our earthly chains and become bigger than our mere biology. This is implied as beautiful, as desirable. As much as I love the story (and honestly, read it if you haven't. It'll take you an hour), part of the message is wrong.

Breaking free from everything that holds you to anything is horrible, soul-robbing, and terrifying. It's inhuman. I'm sorry, Rousseau, but when you lamented that man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains, your emotions were misplaced. For the simple fact that we are free but yet not free, because we are anchored to time and to place, we are human. We are more than nothing. If an event happens over and over again into infinity, it becomes meaningless. Eternal return is not the heaviest of burdens, it is the absolute lightest. It is nothing. And nothing is not freedom. Nothing is a lonelier and more frightening prison than any that man could create out of something.

It is our inability to be anywhere we want to be that allows us to live a significant life, a life of genuine love and passion. Love could not exist in infinity. Love is our fitful grasping at happiness for we know it is temporary. Love in and of itself requires the temporality of human beings. Passion is what fuels us to do as much as we can because we do not have forever and because we cannot do everything. Passion allows us to prioritize, to focus, to do the most we possibly can while the ever-quickening pace of mortality tries --ultimately always does-- to beat us to the finish line. Because we can never be fully done, we are allowed love and passion. Both depend on time. Both depend on place. Both depend on certain chains. So when I start to think that I wish I could be anywhere whenever I wanted to be, I remember that not having that ability is what allows me to want to be anywhere in the first place. And for that, I am grateful.

Other people should stop blogging. Their eloquent, detailed, and anecdotal posts make mine look like crap. All of my blog-rearranging is a pitiful attempt to make my own blogging look better. I'm hoping that Simone de Beauvoir will inspire me from her permanent seat in Les Deux Magots now.






(other people really should not stop blogging. if they did, life would be just a smidge less interesting. and since some people have recently become much less entertaining on facebook, I count on all of you to fill that entertainment gap with some good blogging, ok?)

Stray dogs and Valeries

There is a dog in my house. To be more specific, there is a dog in my bathroom. My family is not a dog-family. We don't know the first thing about dogs. We have no idea what they eat or how often they go to the bathroom or how to walk them. We just don't. But nevertheless, there is a dog in my bathroom. I was driving down a road near my house today and I found her in the middle of the road. And no one with a heart could leave a dog in the middle of the road. So I picked it up and brought it home. My family has been running around all day trying to find it food and blankets, taking it outside, petting it, and generally just being so worried of doing something wrong and breaking it. It. I mean her. Whatever. Dog. But Dog is not staying. Tomorrow morning, Dog is going to the vet's office. Dog has a family somewhere and Dog should go back to that family. Hopefully the vet can find Dog's family. I feel kind of bad for Dog, because I think she's pretty happy here. But there's no avoiding the fact that she has to go back to her real life with her real family.

I feel like Dog. I feel like I had a good family and a good life for eighteen years. For eighteen years, beds were warm, people were good, food was always around, and I was trained pretty well. But then, somewhere along the way, I got lost. And I spent a lot of time just wandering the streets. With no direction, no purpose, no stability. I wandered and I wandered for a long time. But then, someone and some place picked me up and I found home again. I found myself again. And I was oh so comfortable and happy. But the whole time, I knew that I would inevitably be sent back to my real life with my real family. Not that that wasn't a good life, it was just....an old life. A "before" life. Not an "after" life. That life didn't grow with me. I readjusted, I changed, I grew, but it didn't. I found my "after" life, or at least part of it, when I got picked up and taken somewhere else. And I was happy. But then one day I got dropped off at the airport and woke up in the same bed I'd left almost three years ago. Now I'm still pretty happy. But that directionlessness is creeping back in. That restlessness, that lack of purpose. And it makes me feel bad for Dog, because even if her old family is a good one and she'll be happy to go back, it might only be half-heartedly. Okay, maybe that's me with the half-heartedly business, but whatever. I still think that Dog will feel kind of bad leaving us. Because maybe all she needed was someone to pick her up and put her somewhere else for a change, let her be a different dog for a change, be loved in a new way for a change. I know that's what I needed, and I'm starting to miss it already.