a posting potpourri

Here's a few interesting things I've read online recently. (I hope these links still work.)

'No, there are no F***ing postcards' - This is a story on The Telegraph's website (the UK newspaper) about a peculiarly-named town in Austria. As far as I can tell, it's real - I got the link in one of my daily A Word A Day e-mails - but when I sent it to the DH, all he could say was that it sounded exactly like something that you'd see in The Onion, America's Finest (Fake) News Source. I kind of have to agree.

Reading With Our Ears - much as I hate to think about formal writing (because it's something I generally hate to do), occasionally it's nice to contemplate writing as a craft (because, man, do words rock). It's nice to remember that writing on a higher level than blathering blog entries doesn't have to be a chore. Tho' honestly, to a certain extent, it'll always feel like a chore to me. If I can't just type whatever pops into my head - if I have to actually plan what I'm going to say, then edit myself (ugh) - it just never feels worth the effort.

The first article I read about how most of the people trapped and suffering in New Orleans were poor and black (from USA Today via Yahoo News). Later, I read a lot more at Slate.com. There's also this guy's take on Rehnquist's death in light of the hurricane disaster.

Speaking of Rehnquist, I'll admit it now - I'm a big Supreme Court geek. The DH and I have actually spent more than one dinner discussing court rulings, who's on the court, who used to be on the court, who was appointed by whom, just how batshit crazy Scalia and Thomas are (our verdict: Scalia is not so much insane as an asshole; Thomas = creepy wacko nutjob), etc. We were not surprised by Rehnquist kicking off (tho' I was surprised to learn about his drug habit), but I was a bit perplexed that Roberts got the nomination for chief justice. WRVO has been playing the confirmation hearings non-stop for the past few days from 9 or 9:30 in the morning until whenever the windbags on that committee decide to stop talking, but I just can't bring myself to listen. First of all, I don't trust Roberts as far as I could throw him, and I think the fact that he's so "likeable" (I'm sure my grandma loves him, because he's moderately good-looking and his wife dresses conservatively) just compounds the problem of his inner weaselly-ness. There is just something about him that makes me uneasy, and I'm betting if he does get confirmed, we'll have a much more freaky-conservative judge on our hands than some people bargained for. That, and dammit, there oughta be more women on the court! There oughta be at least - at absolute least - 4 women. I'd really prefer 5 or 6. Even if some of them are freaky-conservative, like Janice Rogers Brown. Dammit! Even Sandra Day O'Connor said it (about Roberts): "He's good in every way, except he's not a woman." I will so miss Justice O'Connor.

While we're on the subject of my somewhat-odd interests in government figures, let me post these links I found about Alan Greenspan. It all started, as with the F***ing story, with an A Word A Day e-mail. Each day's word is accompanied by a quotation, often from a newspaper story, showing the word as it's used in context. The quote for September 9th's word ("Wall Street" - scroll down a bit to find it) mentioned something about a woman who'd done some paintings of Alan Greenspan, so I looked for the story from whence the quote came. I found it, and this one, and this one (if you need to register with the sites to read any of these stories, check bugmenot.com for info on bypassing compulsory registrations). I also found the artist's site, www.alangreenspanpaintings.com, which has links to a few more stories. She's dead-on when she says Greenspan "has a great face for portraiture." I've thought Greenspan was pretty cool for a while now, but I saw a picture of him in the paper sometime this past spring that just totally sent me over the top. I cut it out - I made color copies at Kinko's. He just has this fantastic expression on his face. As soon as I can get the DH to stop playing his silly hockey videogame long enough to let me use his computer and the attached scanner, I will get that picture posted up here. Don't hold your breath for it, tho' - getting to that scanner could take a while.

Anyway, in the meantime, I've been searching for Alan Greenspan pictures online. I found the Google cache of this page from a message board, and also a Fark.com Photoshop contest from a few years ago which still has a small number of working image links on there. Please do let me know if you see any other good Greenspan pics floating around. I also found this article from foreignpolicy.com about how Greenspan may not be the economic genius many people believe he is, and how some of his policies that have worked out well in the short term may end up being detrimental to the world economy in the long run. I'm definitely not that into economic policy, but I found the article thought-provoking. The world economy's headed for total collapse - it'll be global chaos. Well, maybe not. But the evidence the author gives just adds to my theory that the US today is like the last days of the Roman Empire. I can't escape the feeling that this country's glory days are behind it, and it may not happen in my lifetime, but there will be nothing but hard times ahead for America. Cheery thought, huh?

There's a couple more things I want to post - about genealogy and my family - but I need to get to school now, and that stuff kind of needs its own post. If I'm lucky, I'll get to it tonight - if not, I'll get to it this weekend.

sour times

Yes, I know - it's been a while since I last posted anything (in fact, as someone is fond of reminding me, it's been over a month). There's no promised trip recap - there's no promised photos. I swear I'll get to it eventually. First, tho', you get to hear my excuses.

Y'know that new job I started over the summer? It really takes a lot out of you to get up at 6:00 every morning when you're used to getting up around 11:00 a.m. (especially since you crash to bed at 10 p.m., whether you want to or not - or at least, I did). I'd have maybe half an hour of actual time to get anything done in the evenings, once I got home from work and had finished eating dinner and all - and a blog post, I've discovered, takes me about 40 minutes to write up, unless it's really short and mindless (what can I say? I'm a slow worker, I always have been). I have no idea how you people with kids ever get a damn thing done, because lord knows, I didn't have that kind of extra demand on my time, and I still didn't manage to ever do anything. I'm still not entirely unpacked from that last trip we took - and we've been back a month! Because as soon as I finished my last full-time week at work, school started up again.

Ah, school. It's such a love-hate relationship I have with school. I like being a student, and I really love learning new things and getting to do cool stuff like going to anime club, or seeing artwork and thought-provoking films and stuff on campus. I like feeling that I'm not letting my brain atrophy, and that involves more than just reading highfalutin' magazines and doing the daily crossword puzzle. But - I'm not so keen on half the subjects I'm taking right now, I hate feeling like a total idiot when I just can't get it no matter how often stuff is explained to me, I hate being on campus surrounded by all these kids who are either younger, prettier, skinnier or smarter than I am (or some dreadful combination of the above), and most of all, I hate doing homework. It's the end of the weekend now - I have piles of the stuff I should have done. Did I do any of it? Nope, not one bit. Not my reading for my Ethics & Value Theory class (it's Plato, blecch), not the problem sets for Organic Chemistry or Biology (double-blecch), not the post-lab write-up or the pre-lab write-up for the Organic Chem lab (triple-blecch), not the dictation exercises or the flash cards I desperately need for Japanese. None of it. Wow - come morning, I am so screwed. I should be in bed now.

But I haven't even gotten to the heart of why I finally carved out some time to write this post tonight (or why I called it "Sour Times," after the Portishead song of the same title). My two trips in July and August both included some time spent back home in Hampton Roads. The trips themselves were great - really, by and large, loads of fun - but being home again was kind of sucky, because it definitely forced me into the realization that the hometown where I grew up, which I knew and loved, is fading fast. It'll always be my home geographically, but I don't think I could move back to Virginia Beach and settle there anymore. The whole area is so much at the mercy of the developers, who are building these huge, ugly, useless things just because they can (which is why I was so appalled at the recent Supreme Court decision on eminent domain - they just handed whole cities to developers, particularly cities like Virginia Beach where the City Council is totally in the developers' back pocket, and I don't even think they realized they were doing it).

It hurts my heart to be there, and drive around, and say "Oh, there used to be tracts of tall pine trees there," or "This was a perfectly good field before they built that monstrosity," or "They demolished a bunch of mom-and-pop stores to build this soulless shopping center," or "There's a local landmark they're going to knock down to build some more damn condos." They can say all they want about the area needing to "grow" and people demanding all this new sprawl, but I know there are plenty of people who don't want it. We're just not organized properly to fight the greedy bastards. It seems like a hopeless struggle anyway, so people just give up. All I know is, being there makes me feel like crying just as often as it makes me exult in what's great about that place. My hometown isn't just a place anymore - it's a place and time. And that time is just about gone.

I've always understood the old "you can never go home again" saw, but that doesn't make it hurt any less when it's your hometown that's disappearing. So I honestly spent most of August in sort of a mourning period. It wasn't the kind of specific grief you feel when someone you love dies, but it wasn't entirely dissimilar either. It was just sort of a low-level background bummed-out feeling that I couldn't shake. So perhaps you can understand why I didn't feel too much like writing for a while there. It's not really all that easy even posting this truncated, glossed-over version of what I was feeling. And I was just coming back from that when all this hurricane business started up, and really, it's the same thing happening there. Gulfport, Biloxi, but especially New Orleans - they're not just places anymore. They're a place and time. And that time is over. Sure, they can rebuild, and maybe the spirit of the people will be largely the same, eventually, and things will seem to get back to normal. But there is no way to truly recover from this. The New Orleans we knew is gone. I've only been there once, but I feel its loss acutely, because it's one of those places (like Austin, TX) where, if I were from there, I know I'd love it with all my heart and soul. Just like I loved my hometown. And all those people who loved New Orleans, who are coming to the realization that their town as they knew it is gone, and that even if they rebuild it'll never really be the way it was, ever again... I feel it.

I know - I take the news too hard. It was the same way after all the recent big tragic events: the tsunami, the London bombings, the 2004 presidential election. I get depressed, and I know I should just turn it all off, but I can't make myself stick my head in the sand. I almost feel worse when I'm out of touch and don't know what's going on. The big, horrible things, tho', they just give me this feeling like I'm watching the end of humanity starting to unfold - or at the very least, the end of American civilization. I just see no way out of the mistakes the Bush administration has made. It's hopeless - we're doomed. Fleeing to another country won't help, because this is a global crisis. Nobody else has any answers, either, and there are so many other bad governments out there destroying things and making people's lives miserable. There's no escaping human fear and greed. We're all in the same boat, sinking into this mess together. It's like the end of the Roman Empire - there's going to be chaos until someone else steps in to restore order. And who knows how long that'll take? We could have a modern-day Dark Ages on our hands in a decade or two. I wouldn't be too surprised.

Portishead didn't write their song about shit like this, but I can't think of a better term than "Sour Times" to describe right now.

Wow - this post really degenerated into some depressing territory. I'm not like this all the time, seriously! Obviously, I wouldn't be able to function if I dwelled on this stuff too much. But these thoughts are always sort of there in the back of my mind, fluttering like a moth at the edge of my consciousness (thank you for that metaphor, Richard and Wendy Pini), or like an Edward-Gorey-sort of nameless dread. Sometimes things just seem so bleak, y'know? That's especially true when it's way past one's bedtime and she's got an 8:52 bus to catch in the morning.