My List

Tasks abound. I signed up for the GRE, and that should be sort of a light in my tunnel, since I love standardized tests and feel confident and capable in my performance on them.

Other tasks I could do: laundry, and making sex ed contacts, and emailing my resume around, and finding a place to live.

And if I didn't want to do all that stuff, I could watch tv instead, or I could find an interesting blog topic to alert you to, or I could relearn spanish for the 4th time. Or learn HTML. Or email 3,000 people back.

Also I need to buy laundry detergent, toilet paper, and milk.

What I would give to be a housecat right now. A cat's life is either short and miserable, or long and luxurious. You either get put in a bag tied to a brick and thrown in a river, or you waddle around an apartment begging for food and getting full body rubdowns.

One thing I'd really like to know is if fulfilling my life's purpose will happen by me driving my life forward in some chosen direction, or if I can wait for the world to act upon me, and my reaction will fulfill any heaven-directed duty I have to be in the right place at the right time.

If I could give up on this fixation on 'purpose' I could do the world some good. And if I could give up on this fixation on 'good' I could be a really fun person. And if I could give up on this fixation on being a 'fun person' I could be totally authentic. And if I could give up on this fixation on 'authenticity' I could sound a lot more sane way more often.

This doesn't relate to anything I just wrote, which is why I enjoyed it so much.

I love You, Mike

Skip to 4:15 to see Mike call out ABC for using permanent freelancers. Oh God, it's so so good.



I can't imagine a movie making the argument against capitalism better than "Sicko," but I'm still excited.

Stephanie Zacharek really ripped Mike apart for his "unwavering fondness for the sound of his own voice, and for what he perceives as his own vast cleverness."

She then slams Mike fans: "It's possible to agree with Moore in theory and still find his tactics sloppy and ineffective (though his zombie-like followers don't like to allow for the existence of any potential gray areas, maybe because gray areas tend to demand actual thought)."

Well, if there's one thing I don't think the American left suffers from a lack of, it's thought. We think think think all the time. We hire whiz kids at thinking from fancy colleges to run focus groups and test messages and run our numbers. And then a couple of foaming at the mouth psychos carrying assault rifles and painting Hitler mustaches on everything shows up to a town hall meeting, and they get the microphone for the next 4 months! Our reasonable, well behaved whiz kids slave away at their marketing reports and comfort themselves with laughing at youtube clips of the crazies and a nice cold microbrew. Sure we feel smart, but are strangers pulling up youtube clips of you making a well reasoned rational argument for healthcare? No. You lose.

I don't think Mike keeps on with the show up to corporate headquarters, pull a stunt, have the security guard kick you out theme because he is a raving egomaniac. He keeps on with it because that's what a direct action is supposed to look like, and no one, especially groups on the left, seems to be teaching that anymore. He keeps doing it to remind the country that direct actions are supposed to be a good time, that of course the CEO won't talk to you, but you feel clever and get your adrenaline up and get your viewpoint on the 6 o'clock news. Whoever is craziest or funniest gets on the news, and the right has us beat on the crazy, so we are going to have to be really goddamn funny.

But you know what Ms. Zacharek gets right about us Moore zombies? I actually do hate smart people. I really do. I think priding yourself on being smart is such bullshit. I think people who admire funniness are diametrically opposed to people who admire smarts. Because really, everyone's pretty darn smart. You make anyone think hard for a long time about anything, they'll come up with some pretty smart things to say about it. That's not true about being funny. Being funny takes guts, and you either have guts or you don't.

I think Mike has a lot of guts, and I'm totally zombie for him.

Not Out

Well, you know, I feel a little down today, but we're gonna power through it and push on through and one of these days everything will fall into place and I'll think, "Oh, this is what I was swimming towards." Or "This is where those merciless waves were dragging me." Either way, in the future, I will exist someplace, that you can count on.

I've been spending my unemployed time at a hip coffeehouse. The juxtaposition of
1) being worried about money, and yet
2) spending money on a luxury good like coffee, while
3) trying to figure out where I fit into making the world a better place, where everyone can afford luxury goods like coffee, not just unemployed americans

is too much for me. Too much.

I'm working on a project. Well, I've got two projects in motion, which means I think about them. Brainstorming counts as work. (No it doesn't. Not to a physicist.) I try to shower everyday, if a little late in the day. I email people. I check my email at a rapid rate. I get anxious, do a quick calculation about people's patience with or resistance to my anxiety reveals on the internet based on frequency of anxiety reveals and time of last reveal, decide whether to reveal anxiety, check Craigslist again.

Let's get real, when I'm old and infirm I will remember this time in my life as one of great happiness and health. Which is what makes life so cruel, I don't even get to enjoy the fun I'll remember having.

Another thing about the hip coffeehouse is that I keep overhearing conversations about being unemployed.

"Well, why not organize the unemployed then?" you professionally optimistic rabble rousers may ask. To which I would say, "Goddarnit, why am I bedeviled by anarchists in my head when in the real world I am a soft lazy bourgeois bunny?" A bunny who would like new alfalfa and a carrot and for you to stop putting your fingers through the slots in her cage.

Oh, the wonders we unemployed could inflict upon the world, except we won't. So much talent, so much education, so much forward thinking, so much fear of the aimless endeavor.

I saw "Jennifer's Body" last night and loved it. Really loved it. It really made my night. It made me want to write a screenplay. I don't think I actually will.

I'm reading "Bastard out of Carolina" and why? Why am I reading about kids getting beat and sexually abused amidst hopeless poverty? Oh, just cause. I guess to put things in perspective.

Also, I am reminded of how amazing Roseanne is and what a great piece of art her show was:

Gullible as Hell

There's a sucker born every minute, and one of them's me. Now here's the thing about personal drama and blogs: you either have to lay EVERYTHING out on the internet or not mention it at all. This coy hinting around is passive aggressive, but more importantly, a tease for all the innocent bystanders who just want the dirt, goddarnit!

Some stuff has happened to me which has taught me something very important about myself: I am not manipulative, and I am easily manipulable. It is excessively easy to talk me into doing stuff I never wanted to do. If you are openly aggressive I'll shut you down, but if you make sad eyes at me I will rush to comfort you and hand over wallet and liver.

I am really tired of being manipulated though. So tired of realizing that what someone likes about me is my lack of boundaries.

But since I am friendly and sweet and more than willing to listen to your side of the story, and more than willing to consider that I might be in the wrong, and really actually do what to help the people around me be happy, I am always going to have someone trying to sucker me into something. And it's just going to be a matter of identifying and kicking those people out of my life sooner rather than later.

Because if I'm going to get told I'm a bad person, it's going to be for doing some bad thing that actually benefited me, instead of for not agreeing to let someone loot my life away.

The mindf*ck of it all is that manipulative people really believe that you are being cruel by not giving them everything they ask for. They really believe you are bad for having any sense of your own self-interest. But the great thing about modern society is that you get to choose your fellow villagers. Thank the Lord on high for that.

Organizing Yourself for Fun and Profit

What do you do in an organizing conversation?
1. You find out what a person cares about
2. You agitate her on those isues, that is, make her experience an emotional reaction about the things she cares about
3. You educate her about what actions she could take to further the things she cares about
4. You push her to commit to taking those actions, by fully laying out the way those actions further her self interest
5. You inoculate her on the negative consequences of those actions, so that when they happen she is mentally prepared and won't be disheartened and swear that she'll never be talked into this pointless crap again.

Organizing is hard, because in the structure of that conversation is the acknowledgement that a person has a choice over what she does with her time and her decisions are her own to make. It is much easier, if you have any kind of power over someone, to talk yourself into believing you are in a position to lay down the law with them and create boundaries they must abide by to avoid the full terror of your fury. It's an abusive, untenable dynamic that destroys everyone involved, but it's also what we have experience with and feel comfortable in. Most of the time a person will walk away from you as soon as they can once they know that's the relationship you're interested in having with them.

It's fascinating how many people have been trained in organizing principles, and believe wholeheartedly in them, but revert to the hierarchy as soon as they possibly can. And when it comes to my self-talk, the hierarchy thrives. Thoughts like this happen fairly regularly:

"You didn't call up that rape crisis center to volunteer because you are a lazy, privileged fatty."

Well, now. When people do good things to avoid being bad people, they do the very least they can do and they save it for special occasions and they long for a release from morality altogether. When people do good things because they have articulated to themselves that they have principles by which they want their days on this earth to be run, because it is in their self interest to feel at peace with how they spend their time and the relationships they develop, and an action is the natural outgrowth of those principles, they will take that action and look for the next action they can take.

Why didn't I call up the rape crisis center yesterday? Because it was sunny out, and there was an apartment to look at, and then the library was there and I meant to get some books on sex ed out, then I got hungry, and....point being, it's not that I didn't call up the rape crisis center because there were so many puppies to kick. And if I called up the rape crisis center, it wouldn't be because I am a better person today than I was yesterday. It would be because I have some wishes for how my future days will be structured, and calling the rape crisis center is in accord with those wishes. It is in my self interest to call, and if I can work myself up emotionally that phone call will happen.

Now, you might respond, "Doesn't the rape crisis center need volunteers regardless of your emotional state?" Good one. Well, I know about myself that a thought like that will very quickly turn into an accusation of my inherent evil, and once I get that thought I seek to limit my effect on the world by holing up and reading the entire internet.

That's my thoughts on that. Also, I am not moving to New Orleans. Partly because of a new relationship, but mostly because there are lots of opportunities in Chicago that I'm excited about. I decided at the very last minute not to move and I think it was a good decision.

"I was part of the normal world where everything bad that has ever happened to you is blamed on you. When you are told over and over again, sometimes by people who are paid to help you that maybe it happened to you, well, because you wanted it to, somehow. Because you asked for it, or that's what you get when you...rock the boat, go out looking for some trouble, mouth off, think you know everything, disrespect the law, your elders, the rules. The kind of world where you're always told that you might actually desire being hurt, humiliated, beaten, raped, left. Because, you don't think you're good enough, or that you think you don't deserve better, the kind of world where you are told all your life not to be independent, but to belong, not to fight, but to conform. The kind of world where you actually believe that what happens to you happens in a chaotic, nonsensical fashion, out of the son of a bitch bad luck, instead of the truth which is that all that happens to you happens to you because it is systematically, politically, religiously planned like that, to be that way. When everything starts to appear to you as if it has been planned that way, that you don't deserve it, that you don't want it, that it has been forced on you, you go nuts. Nuts is a disease of women. Nuts is the truth. Nuts is a revolution. Quoting now from the Book of Revolutions I by R. Barr: Know ye the truth and the truth shall make you nuts."
- Roseanne Barr, "My Life as a Woman" pg. 82