Political Conspiracies

Alright, this might be my last political post for awhile especially if March 4 does not go well. So, I am just going to rattle off some things that I’ve been thinking as I read the big political blogs.

1. The Race in terms of Race

It is clear that America is ready for a black President. That is, of course, if by black you mean a charismatic, light skinned, interracial black President. But is America ready for a “Muslim” President as Obama is being falsely characterized as by some of those hatemongering fools who live in the underbelly of our nation. Barack’s middle name is Hussein and some ofthe right-wingnuts  have been repeatedly calling attention to this recently. Their middle name is, of course, “racist.” I don’t think that we should ever underestimate the amount of racism and prejudice that remains at large in this country. I wonder if, in the end, the die hard Clinton haters that many say make her unelectable in the general election, will be matched by misguided fools who will hate Barack Obama because of his name or skin color. I hope it doesn’t happen, but there are some real losers out there on the Republican side who can stir up fear and hatred. Even John McCain was a victim of a racist smear campaign against his young adopted daughter from Bangladesh in 2000. Shameful.

2. Great, you’re the nominee, but who’s your number 2?

Is America not ready for a woman President or for Hillary Clinton to be President? I don’t know why she inspires such vitriol, but she absolutely does. Some people may be uneasy having a woman in charge but find it easier to express it as distaste for her personally. I just wonder, if not Hillary, then who will it be?

An interesting thought occurred to me when I read Blogometer the other day and saw that some people were suggesting Alaska governor Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. If he does choose her and McCain happens to die while in office, wouldn’t it be something if the first female President got there by default and was a Republican? There’s something to chew on.

Regardless, I think that we should look carefully at the Vice Presidential picks for both McCain and Obama (Hillary is sturdy enough to last 8 years in office, says I). McCain is old and I know that Reagan was old and lived a really long time, but McCain does not strike me as particularly robust. Besides, there is absolutely no way to stave off death for political convenience, particularly over the age of 70. It could happen. So, if he chooses a really conservative running mate, we could be stuck with him or her rather than the moderate maverick that some independent might vote for. And, I certainly do not want to be morbid or dramatic, but Obama has been called the new JFK, so I suppose we must follow that thinking through to the end and be aware of the security risks that he faces, especially given the crazies that I mentioned earlier.

3. Stand by your woman.

Where the hell is Bill Clinton these day? Sure, he has a big mouth and did some damage, but did he drop off the face of the earth? I have noticed that after recent debates, Chelsea goes up to her mother to offer congratulations and a photo opportunity but Bill is nowhere to be found. I just find it funny that male candidates always have their wives come up to them, and the female candidate also must greeted by female, rather than spousal, support.

Winter Doldrums

For the past week, I have been told that I am certainly in a “mood.”  Indeed, I have felt like one giant mood.

I blame it on winter and the stress of two major commitments (training for a half-marathon and finishing my masters). The weather has put me in a funk and the stressful projects have compounded the funk because I feel all of this pressure to get things done and do them well and, you know, not fail and suck at life.

So, I’ve been running and running statistics, day in and day out. Both of these activities make me hungry. My body is all out of whack. My old macrobiotic body was not strong enough to run 20+ miles per week, so I’ve been eating other things. Like Girl Scout cookies. I hate those damn girl scouts and their delicious damn cookies. I’m on a sugar slide again. I crave it, my body demands it. The whole foods guru that teaches this cooking class that I’m taking says that my body is actually telling me that it needs protein and water. Funny, what I hear my body telling me is: “Give me another Girl Scout cookie, or else I am going to roll you like a philly blunt and smoke your bitch ass!”

I told you that I have been in a mood.

I don’t want to be bitchy or eat refined sugar for charity or hate the burdens of my life. But when I get this way, there is no easy fix to brighten my mood. All of the things that would make me feel better are extreme. What I really want is for it to be May and have my Masters signed off and have completed the marathon in great time. But, right now, even thinking about those things is not enough.

Instead, these are my excessive fantasies:

1.  Sunbathing in the Greek Isles

2. Having a passionate love affair with a rakishly handsome and outrageously hilarious man.

3.  Craving roots and seaweed as much as cookies.

4.  Smelling the fresh and warm air of Springtime instead of risking life and limb every time I leave my house because of icy conditions.

5.  Hillary Clinton becoming President of the United States and everyone being happy about it.

It’s just a sweet, sweet fantasy, baby…………

NBC is Disgraceful.

I am so angry and disgusted by this debate. A few days ago, I wondered, “What happened to Hillary Clinton’s campaign?” She definitely bears responsibility for some of it, but the moderators of this MSNBC debate made it clear that the media has never given her a fair shake. To his credit, Obama was very graceful to Hillary as she got slaughtered by the tone of the questions during the first half of the debate. She was very sharp in her criticism of him and for the first time in 20 debates, I think she finally drew the contrast between them. You could tell that there were times when he didn’t know the answer or couldn’t answer it better that she did, and he just simply said, “She’s right.” She is simply better prepared and more experienced and knowledgeable than he is. I wish that would translate to votes.

The bottom line is that Brian Williams and particularly Tim Russert were unfair and hostile to Hillary. It was like watching Fox News. The video slip up was clumsy and shameful. They threw softballs to Obama (except for the Farrakhan line of questioning which I thought was pointless) while they were extremely biased against her. I have never seen anything like it.

I hope that other people will become as enraged by this as I am and perhaps rethink Hillary as a candidate because of the mistreatment that she has gotten compared to the coddling of Obama.

P.S. Anderson would never be such a dick. “The best political team on television,” as pathetic as they are, look so much better now compared to those hacks at MSNBC.

Gonna Be A Professor, Oh oh oh.

I have been in graduate school for almost two years now, ostensibly being trained to be a scholar and a gentlewoman. To be honest, it has not been all that different from undergraduate days. I go to classes, I write papers, I doodle, I learn stuff.

I am purportedly doing all of this for the lofty goal of becoming a so-called “producer of knowledge” instead of a lowly “consumer of knowledge.” These phrases used to mean something to me. They danced off of my tongue and drew a smile to my face. They validated my life choice of spending the rest of my 20s in graduate school. Instead of reading, one day, I will write. Instead of being passive, one day, I will be active. Instead of being dumb, one day, I will be smart. Instead of regurgitating what others tell me to be true, one day, I will magically invent what is true and they will listen to me. Yes, instead of being a lowly, consuming parasite, I will eventually be a god-like purveyor of truth and knowledge. Oh, the power! The prestige! The production of knowledge!

There you have it. My motivation. But try explaining that to people outside of academia. So, to all who ask me what I’m doing with my life, I say, “I’m gonna be a professor.”

But like I said, for the past two years, I have been a glorified undergraduate with a producer-of-knowledge mantra that gives me a sense of false superiority. There has been no real professionalization for professorhood. They have told us how to be a good graduate student and explained the importance of publishing and research, but the whole professorin’ thing was just understood as something that happens along the way – namely, The Third Year.

Now that it is almost Year Three, I have gotten my first taste of the reality of “gonna be a professor.” Today, we had a book fair in the graduate lounge. A textbook publisher brought samples of their bestsellers and pizza. The pizza was very good.

As I stood there, reading the table of contents of these Intro texts, I realized that I was going to have pick a book for my class to use. I was going to have teach them this material. For 15 weeks of their lives, I and this book would be part of their lives, forcing them to consume knowledge!

I couldn’t handle it. I felt guilty. At first glance, I liked the massive, heavy, authoritative book. The number one seller. But then again, when I was an undergrad, two years or two hours ago-depending how you want to look at it, I would have hated that book. It would be expensive and would hurt my back as I hauled it around campus.

During the whole lunch, I was preoccupied with money. My concern was how much these books would cost the students. And I felt bad asking for the sample copies. I wanted one of everything but only asked for two. It seemed wrong that I was just being given these books. And that pizza. Two slices of pizza and two $100 textbooks. The perks of being a professor! So why did I feel so dirty? Taking books and then making 18 year old kids pay for the book that I choose, it just isn’t me!

I later realized that I should not feel bad about taking the books and the pizza at the book fair. If I choose one of their textbooks for my class of 70 students plus a course reader, it will be close to $200/student which amounts to me generating nearly $14,000 in sales for the publishing company – which by the way, amounts to pretty much exactly how much money I make a year being a consumer/producer of knowledge.

But I still want to choose the right book for my students – one that is both cost and learning efficient. I’m gonna be a professor. But I’m also gonna be a freaking cool professor.

Bitch is the New Black

Wow, I like Tina Fey so much more now.

Copyright infringement issues – Here is the link to NBC’s website to view it.

Comeback Clinton

I am pretty fed up with this race already and I’m ready for a big Clinton comeback. Barack Obama is really annoying me, and I am sure that his supporters wish that Hillary would go away. It is starting to get to the point where more damage is being done by dragging this out.

I am torn. People are starting to get sick of Obama’s speeches and flowery words and hope-iness.  Will we have the endurance to handle that until November or will it wear thin? Especially when you consider that Obama has been capitalizing on young and new to politics supporters who have been drawn to the shiny object but may not have the attention span to last. Obama-fatigue will set in and the Republicans will sharpen the arguments that Hillary could never make, and then what? John McCain wins?

But of course, for better or worse, you can’t really turn the Obama tide now. If Clinton does pull out a victory on March 4 and there is even a hint of superdelegate influence, people will just chalk it up to “nasty Clinton politics” and establishment triumphing over a fresh voice. It will be seen as disenfranchisement and disillusionment, and no one will talk about the way that she has put her heart into her political career and that just as many Democrats want her to win the nomination. The truth is that it is 50/50. But her 50% won’t count as much if she is nominated, while his 50% will be somehow seen as a mandate of the people. It all hearkens back to Bush-Gore in 2000. It’s never easy when it is so close that half of the voters feel cheated. In the end, Hillary’s supporters will support Barack, but I don’t think the reverse would be true. The uniter’s supporters would be very bitter, indeed.

It just burns me up. I am so over Barack Obama. I don’t know how this happened. If he is the nominee, I’ll even consider voting for John McCain. I won’t actually do it, but I’ll certainly consider it.

Meet Cute

Given the inclement weather and my supposed marathon training, I have been making daily visits to the treadmill at my apartment complex. For two days in a row, the same guy has been coming in at the end of my workout to ask how much longer I will be. Two consecutive days, but different times of days. Just a coincidence, right?

Except he is kind of a cute coincidence. He is tall and has an athletic slouch about him – you know, the way that athletic guys stand with their shoulders down and back as if they won’t let all of their muscles get in the way of being relaxed. He looks like that, and I find it pretty attractive.

Besides, I really want to “meet cute.”  (Oh, who am I kidding? At this point, I just want to “meet.”)

Wouldn’t it be great if we just kept running into each other, day after day, until finally he decides to take a chance on the sweaty, red-faced treadmill girl who always tells him “five more minutes”? We will go out to dinner and I will discover that he is also training for a marathon via the treadmill and then we can “run” away together to live happily ever after.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Pathetic. But let’s analyze anyway. There are two latent desires in this fantasy. First, I like the idea of having a romantic fate. The idea that the person that I fall in love with will cross my path and keep crossing it until we are together. Second, I cling to the hope that a meeting could be cute and convincing enough to make a guy actually ask me out cold. No introductions through friends, no prior shared activities, no pretense of the casual hanging out. Instead, just  asking a girl out on an old-fashioned date with no safety net. No coffee, no text message conversations, no playing it cool.

That would be very cute, indeed.

Strange dreamin’

I had a nap-mare today.

During my afternoon nap, I had the strangest, scariest dream ever. In the dream, I looked out of my apartment window and saw a woman looking back at me. She hesitated and seemed like she was going to walk away. I called after her, realizing that she had been watching me for some time. I told her that we may as well get this over with because I knew that she wanted to kill me. She agreed. She came into my apartment and we started physically fighting. She had her arm locked around my body but I managed to grab an old-fashioned umbrella with a pointed end and elbowed my way out of her grasp. As I impaled her with the end of the umbrella, she took my cat, Whiskers and strangled her. I knew that there was nothing I could do to save Whiskers and I just had to keep pushing the umbrella through the woman’s body until she died. At this point, my attacker picked up the phone and called 911 to report that I was trying to murder her. I took the phone, crying, and said that I was just trying to protect myself. The police arrived as I had both the woman and Whiskers in my grasp. I begged them to tranquilize Whiskers so that she wouldn’t suffer as she died, but the police said that they couldn’t do that because they weren’t animal control, and that I should just be grateful that they believed my side of the story.

The next thing I knew, I was at a church with the royal family. I was wearing an evening gown and garish earrings that looked like the British pound. People began to find out about my earlier violent ordeal and asked me who the woman was. I didn’t know, but I started going around telling the professors of my grad program who were sitting in the pews that I had a stalker but I had taken care of it. The police told me that my stalker confessed to being a woman that had hired me to babysit her children two years ago and had become obsessed with me. They took me to the hospital and I saw her family who apologized to me. The police then told me that they were not going to press charges against the woman because I had hurt her so badly. I became very frustrated and yelled at her family. I shrieked at them that I was going to sue them for the death of my cat, and that there should be laws against stalkers.

Then, I was back at the church and the Queen told me that I had to keep my chin up and return her jewelry. I tried to take off the earrings but by this time, the box that they had been kept in had disappeared. I went to a hallway where a student in my class came up to me and said that she had heard about my stalker and that she knew I had assumed it was her because of the threatening email she sent me. She said that she wanted to stalk me and hurt me, but didn’t have time to do it. I told her that was a relief and we embraced.

I woke up to Whiskers purring on my chest, alive and well. I fed her an extra helping of tuna, made sure that my windows were locked, and checked my email for threats from undergrads. My umbrella is within arm’s reach, but I haven’t heard from the Queen yet.

I probably won’t be eating guacamole before napping ever again.

Sentimental State of Mind

I have my moments.

I have my moments when I can really treat people like shit – and I usually always feel really bad about it afterwards.

I have my moments when I feel like I care so much about others, as though I am this deep well of empathy and compassion. My capacity to love and feel is so intense that sometimes I wonder if I am a bitch just to take the edge off.

I haven’t cried since the funeral. It is easier not to feel, to just go on with the daily routine and put the loss out of my mind.

But this weekend, I started feeling sentimental again. On Saturday, I locked my key chain that had both my apartment key and my car key in my car. I could not reach anyone at my apartment complex to let me in. It was cold in the early evening and I was just standing on my porch, dumb and helpless when my middle-aged neighbor happened to pull into the parking lot. I explained the situation and asked if she knew the phone number of the night manager. She didn’t, but she knew where he lived and offered to drive me to his apartment so that I could get out of the cold. Of course, the night manager was not there. We asked his neighbors if they knew his number; they didn’t. By this time, my neighbor and I were chatting and discovered that we have the same first name. I also found out that she is an aspiring opera singer who wants to move to Germany after she completes her degree at the music school. She drove me to her friend’s apartment, an older lady named Lulu who recently had gastric bypass surgery and makes “divine” fruit cake. Lulu has lived at my apartment complex for years, and let us into her eclectic apartment as we explained the story. She was perturbed that the weekend paging system was not in operation, but did not have anyone’s contact information, either. By this point, Neighbor Laura and I were bonding over our adventure. We were finally able to call a maintenance guy (Tommy, who oddly said that he knew who I was when I told him my apartment number. Apparently, the maintenance guys pay attention to my comings and goings more than I thought!). Tommy said that it would take him a half hour to drive in, so my neighbor suggested that we get coffee. I was so grateful to her for going out of her way to help me and she confessed that she was actually glad that this happened because meeting me had pulled her out of her gloomy mood. It is striking how much people like helping each other and how gratifying it can be to connect with someone new.

For some reason, strangers like to talk to me. All my life, on trains, planes, park benches, and grocery store lines, people completely unknown will tell me their stories. Maybe it is because I smile a lot. And I’m polite and interested. Regardless, I think one of my best qualities is being able to immediately connect to new people, especially those who are older and come from different backgrounds. I always learn so much and enjoy the conversations. I wish that there was a job being a random friend to a lonely stranger for an afternoon. I would definitely sign up for that job.

I was finally able to get back into my apartment after two hours. But in the meantime, I had made a cool, new friend and reclaimed my sentimentality. I have this overpowering desire to listen to people and feel connected and get emotionally involved and pull them out of dark loneliness even for just an hour. I want to be a compassionate giver who validates and affirms and use all of my energy to love others and make them feel good about their lives.

I have my moments.

Cavalcade of “Stars”

After a two month hiatus from the bar scene, I emerged from hibernation last night for a night out in Bloomington with my partner in crime, Jill.

Nothing has changed except there has been a sharp increase in the awkwardness quotient. You see, Bloomington has become a very small world. We go to a bar where everyone knows our names and our phone numbers. It reminds me of the Sex and the City episode when the girls are on the Staten Island ferry looking back at Manhattan and Miranda says, “Who would’ve thought an island that tiny would be big enough to hold all our old boyfriends?.” Although in our case, it’s hard to believe that one bar is big enough to hold all of the guys that we almost dated.

But it’s not just the bars. I see them at the gym. At the grocery store. On the bus. At wine tastings. In the elevator. On dates with other girls. At the ATM. I see them drinking coffee, eating sushi, on my birthday, outside of bars, and at Chocolate Fest. And then, when I haven’t seen one of them for months, they pop up online through Facebook or AIM and want to know when they can see me again. I wish that there was some way to corral away all of the guys who didn’t work out, who didn’t call, or who I didn’t want to talk to in the first place.

But no. They’re everywhere and there seems to be a complete lack of new people to meet. We have already met all of the people who want to be met. The rest of the single guys our age must be tucked away in non-bar settings, most likely curing cancer or playing Wii.

The upside of the already met guys is that there are some funny memories and good stories. There’s the guy who does the exaggerated point and wink when he sees us — which is strikingly often. Then there’s the guy who professed his love for me on the same night that he admitted to lying to us about his job for six months. And there’s the guy who forgot that he met us before and bought us drinks a second time.

But what to do when confronted with Mr. Awkward or Mr. Lame or Mr. Bullshit over and over again? One tactic could be to confront the awkwardness head on and say, “Well, this is awkward. How are you doing?” Or you could forget about the past and spend the night flirting like he is a new guy. Or in a regrettable display of immaturity, you could tell a guy to his face that he is a douchebag. Or if you are me, you could do all of the above as you come face to face with each of the Three Stooges of the past six months. It’s enough to make me go back into hibernation until spring!

The moral of the story: Bloomington isn’t big enough to handle the both of us — and all of our men.