tilapia again	bacon sandwich

Perstonal shtuff    Memorial Day is here now, I guess. I think that it and July 4th (Independence Day) have become my least favorite national celebrations—they’re just pure feel-good propaganda, especially under this disastrous administration. Bill Moyers had a wonderful episode of his Journal air on PBS on Friday, where he interviewed Maxine Hong Kingston on her new book project, giving voice to soldiers’ experiences through their writings. That’s certainly an encouraging change from the days not so long ago when Tucker Carlson got his “equal time” on PBS’s airwaves in the name of “balance,” not to mention the right-wingnut Wall Street Journal editorial page yahoos. And I’m watching the ceremony now and it makes me want to puke.

Perstonal shtuff    Man, being dead-dog tired and perpetually out of whack is not just arduous but can be tough to turn around as well. The last week or so was darkened by bleak, morbid thoughts about dying and stuff. Mostly just maudlin mental meanderings, but I think they also go back to a feeling that I always have, to some degree, of being more a walking bundle of memories and experiences than a real person. Whatever that is.

At least there’s a long weekend and a payday coming up, though.

It’s getting warm again—not miserably hot yet, but that’ll be here soon enough.

Late nite frugal din-din    Tilapia, rice, scallions, ginger, shiitake mushrooms. About $2–$3, all told. Now for forty winks and a wank (not necessarily in that order).

News shtuff    Watching Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales struggling to save their jobs and reputations would be fine sport, if it what they represent weren’t so disturbing and infuriating. Frank Rich, excellent as usual, had a column in the New York Times on Sunday before last that echoed some of what Banyuls quoted from Le Devoir about Tenet and his bio, about the enablers of the Bush administration’s malfeasance making a pathetic spectacle of themselves as they try to duck for cover.

Is Condi Hiding the Smoking Gun?
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050607D.shtml

Watching high-profile casualties like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzales, and Rice get their comeuppance or at least finally feel the heat would be ticklish enough to make me pee my pants, except that the dishonesty and incompetence they exemplify is so complete and pervasive in the entire executive branch under this president that it’s scary. Department after department, agency after agency that provide important goods and services for us all are riddled with idiocy and corruption. The likes of Shrub, Vice Dick, and Rummy were supposed to bring us CEO governance—and that’s exactly what we got, Enron-style. The federal prosecutor purge started out seeming to me like the sort of thing you’d expect by now: bad, but not terribly surprising, and maybe getting attention, compared to the ten zillion other examples you could find, because it comes up just as the Democrats take control of Congress. I thought it’d be a little ironic if this becomes the focus that puts the heat on the Bushies, because there’s more serious issues already out there (like domestic spying). But the more we hear about what’s been going on at the Justice Department, the more infuriating it gets. Gonzales’s top deputies weren’t just ideologues, they were inexperienced, unqualified dolts.

Colleagues Cite Partisan Focus by Justice Official
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/washington/12monica.html

Wolfie’s squeeze may be a favoritism flunkie, but she has recognized skills in her area of expertise, and whatever you may think of their ideology, the legal professionals in the Federalist Society are exactly that, and undeniably of a certain caliber. Battling these types of stooges is what our messy American form of democracy is all about. But how the fuck did a graduate of Pat Robertson’s law school with no prosecutorial experience get to be making decisions at Justice? Scares the fuck out of me, and should do the same for everyone else who has a brain, whatever your political sympathies, to see this going on everywhere in this administration. Long ago I mentioned on a certain other Web site’s message boards that Shrub’s style would make for an OK big-city mayor or state governor, where the issues are local and practices that technically qualify as corruption (patronage, oligarchism) are tolerable, but he’s a disaster on the national and world stage. I’m not pleased in the least to have been right, and beyond my expectations. I’d much rather be eating crow, because of what it means for all of us. And ironically enough, the Republicans, in their riding-Dubya’s-coattails inertia or their folly (or both) are lately making themselves captive to the extreme fringe of their constituency, while the Democrats are starting to better reflect the moderates in the middle, if reluctantly. And of course Rich brings it all into focus in his latest piece:

Earth to G.O.P.: The Gipper Is Dead
http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2007/05/frank-rich-earth-to-gop-gipper-is-dead.html

News shtuff    We are such an ADHD-afflicted society, as a whole. The U-Texas sniper event, Kent State, etc., and the images there­from—they defined a time and still raise questions today. But a scant three weeks after the Virginia Tech shooting, and the largest campus massacre in U.S. history is off the collective radar already. Those understandably and rightly controversial, provocative, and painful-to-see self-portraits of Seung Cho—unlike the images from other tragedies not so long ago, they not only exist in the ether, but consist of it. Whatever insight and challenges they offer was drowned out by the 8-hour news cycle that makes you react rather than think and lets shallowness and idiocy substitute for the kind of reasoned reportage and commentary that used to be the obligation of media professionals to provide.

Talk Radio Tries for Humor and a Political Advantage
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/us/20radio.html

(You can google and find Boortz’s rejoinder—which is pathetic, even if you grant the point he makes, and ignore that it stinks of deliberate and premeditated plausible deniability.) We all crave understanding in a case like this, and the most I’ve seen comes from these two articles, which are enough to break your heart.

Before Deadly Rage Erupted, a Lifetime Consumed by a Troubling Silence
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/us/22vatech.html

When the Group Is Wise
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/weekinreview/22carey.html

Perstonal shtuff    For the better part of many weeks I’ve been constantly tired. It’s been a combo of getting up to speed on a job that takes a little more time than is available for it while juggling other things, and of my just generally not having time management as my strongest point. As Ian pointed out, one could be a lot worse off than that, but it’s also not the right way to be living. The annoying part here is that it’s constantly been one thing after another in the office, making it so tricky to get (back) on top of everything and stay there. The slow summer season is coming up, so things will eventually get more manageable, but I’ve been in the old, familiar, grueling scramble-during-waking-hours/go-to-sleep-for-too-brief-a-time/wake-up-and-stress-over-the-same-thing-again mode that makes you go crazy after a while. I’m not sure if I should be worried that it’s happening again, or heartened that this time ’round I’m a little more experienced (if not wiser) and recognize it as something to cope with.

That excerpt by Barbara Rohde came from a compilation of writings out of several meditation books published by the Unitarian Universalist Association that the church will be presenting in a few weeks to the graduating high school students in a “bridging” ceremony. There are a bunch of interesting little essays like that in it. Me being who I am, the chapter titled “A Time for Darkness” piqued my interest. Rohde’s piece caught my attention particularly because Daniel’s hospitalized friend has been in his dear weaders’ thoughts (including mine) and because anger was such a characteristic feature of the bad old days for me—and Sis the psychiatrist says that anger is a better indicator of depressive mood than sadness, although sadness is what people commonly think defines depression.

Some of the other meditations in that chapter pointed out that earth-based faiths caution against viewing darkness as negative or as an evil, and consider that it has a time and place, just like there’s a time and a place for the light. You can say the same thing about the dark and bright sides of our human nature—at the risk of slipping into the teleological fallacy, you might say both belong in us. It’d be going too far to say anger, hostility, frustration, desperation serve a purpose, but they must have some value, or else they wouldn’t be part of our basic human mechanism. Evolutionary theory teaches that if a trait exists in a population, it has to confer some survival advantage or at least not diminish the overall fitness of an organism that has it, but that doesn’t mean the trait is “good”—like the gene causing sickle-cell anemia demonstrates. Likewise, the shallow but popular notion that to improve our lives we should purge our psyches of all negativity and embrace the positive is a bunch of simpleminded pablum.

Extreme anger signals a mortal threat to physical or spiritual well-being (or both), and—just as not having the sickle-cell mutation is “good” only if you don’t need to reproduce in a malarial environment—unless you’re so comfortable and secure as to need no defenses, negativity is a thing to heed and respect, not a thing to avoid. The trick is to interpret the signal it provides correctly—especially if it’s a false alarm.

THE RAGE TO LIVE    While lying close to death in intensive care, with a dozen tubes stuck into my body—to drain me, to nourish me, to help me breathe, to monitor my heart—I was surprised by how much anger I felt. Later, when the things done to me made rational sense, as part of the regime to keep me alive, I was embarrassed by my anger. But at the time I merely raged inside.
   One morning, I woke up and, for the first time after the surgery, looked around the room. One wall looked out on the nursing station in the hall. Ahead of me was a blank wall with only a darkened television set. I did not know what was behind me. I hadn’t the strength to turn around.
   In the fourth wall was the only window, which I assumed must look out on the green hills of Oregon. I did not know for sure because of a “thing” that blocked my view. “Isn’t it just like this dumb hospital,” I thought to myself. “The only window I can look out and they park this thing in the way.”
    Later I realized that the “thing” was the respirator that kept me breathing—and alive. I was angrier still with the rocking bed, which was to help me avoid pneumonia. How I hated that bed. Each time it rocked I was sure it would throw me out onto the cold floor. I found myself looking forward to the painful changing of dressings, merely because the bed would stop rocking.
   After I became well, it occurred to me that the anger had been a good thing—one of the last struggles of my spirit to stay alive. I resolved to remember that lesson. In my dealings with angry people, it might help me to keep in mind that there is wisdom in anger even when there is not rationality. In my better moments I might try to see beyond red-faced anger to see what this suffering spirit might need so achingly.
—from BARBARA ROHDE, In the Simple Morning Light

Perstonal shtuff   

The pay­ment for my last in­voice arrived a few days ago, and to­day was a pay­day—so a bit of long-await­ed money has finally mater­ial­iz­ed. What a re­lief to pay the due/over­due bills and have a reason­able amount left over. The situation might even per­sist. Who knows?

When I get a little money I buy books, and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.   ERASMUS

I won’t be jet­ting off to the Carib­bean any­time soon, but I could at last spend some money on some­thing be­sides the bare ne­ces­sities of life. In the spirit of Erasmus, I went to the used-book stores. The skin­flint in me had to wince a little—it’s bred in the bone, dear wead­er; the racial stereo­type of the penny-pinch­ing Chinaman (the so-called pake, in the Hawai’ian pidgin/creole) didn’t come from no­where—but even when you enjoy being fru­gal and thrifty, like I do, it can cor­rode the spirit to only spend for what’s needed in order to sur­vive, if it goes on for too long. Erasmus’s com­ment often gets quoted, as an ex­pres­sion of the book lover’s “gentle mad­ness,” but now it strikes me that it has an­other, more uni­vers­al sense too: all us peeps pur­sue sources of solace and di­ver­sion from pure want, in some way, shape, or form—be it book collecting, or building ships in bottles, or filling the house with Elvis memorabilia, or whatever.

A long time ago I wrote about my language-learning strategy.

Alas, less important but more essential worries (like tryin’ to make money by workin’ for idjits ) have kept me from chasing it properly. Also, as men­tion­ed, there’s a dearth of good in­struct­ion­al texts to base the effort upon. Well, on the “new ar­rivals” shelf at the used-book store down­town, there re­cently show­ed up a whole run of the lan­guage self-study titles from the Brit­ish “Teach Your­self” series that I’d men­tion­ed—the one pub­lish­ed by English Uni­ver­si­ties Press and dis­trib­ut­ed in the U.S. by David McKay, with the dis­tinc­tive yellow-and-blue dust­cover design. They were all ex libris one fellow’s col­lect­ion, so I guess I’m not the only aspir­ing lan­guage maven there ever was. I was es­pecial­ly thrill­ed to find a Por­tu­guese course—there aren’t many of those to be found in the book­stores, and what is there is most­ly of the worth­less, Berlitz-style “repeat-these-phrases-after-me” variety. Any­way, I guess I’ve now got a fair­ly com­plete col­lect­ion of basic in­struct­ion books on the Romance lan­guages and the German­ic lan­guages (that one without a dust jacket is Teach Your­self Nor­wegian). Now if I can just find the time to embark on that long-intended mission, to expand my German (such as it is) to the rest of the Teutonic Sprachfamilie as well as to learn a Romance language and hence get one or two others for free. There just aren’t enough hours in the day! And of course you also need dic­tion­aries. Next goal: acquire the store’s Portuguese-English lex­i­con.

Separated at birth?    Scrumptious Roberto Bolle, whom biggles show­ed us on the ropes ear­lier, is not a bad like­ness to porn actor “Tom Steele.” At first I thought it was a pic­ture of Steele.

Roberto Bolle (La Scala)	Tom Steele in Hard as Steele (In Hand Video)

OK, so that wasn’t work-safe. But me dear weaders should know better. And no one should be reading Xangas while at work in the first place! Some more:

Steele	Bolle

According to the Adam Gay Video Directory, Mr. Steele has a ten-inch schlong that he’s claim­ed is too large for any avail­able con­dom size and has even taken act­ing classes, ear­nest­ly but probably gra­tu­itous­ly, to im­prove his less-than-masterly-thespian screen presence. Signor Bolle’s artistic prow­ess of course is be­yond question, but now we’re curious (even more than we nor­mal­ly would be) about the size of his en­dow­ment.