January 12, 2010
-
1 I don't really know why, but yesterday was one of the best days so far this year.
2 Sometimes when you've been stressing, a day with NO stress you cherish.
3 I have SO much goin' on with getting semester grades done that I've taken to random bouts of insomnia, disorientation, and eating random things, like pickles.
4 Last night I had still more things to get done, couldn't find some important docs, and decided really to stop the world for a while and chill. Do nothing. Go to the gym and read some Roald Dahl, but his short stories, not his children's books.
5 At the gym, I re-read his immortal short story Lamb to the Slaughter, about a woman who uses a frozen leg of lamb to murder her cheating husband! She then throws it in the oven, and later feeds it to the cops investigating the crime. They spend the entire afternoon and evening trying to put the crime together, but can't find the murder weapon, get hungry, and wind up eating it for supper. Classic Dahl.
6 Oh! I didn't read it in the pool! I was having a GREAT day, and just wanted to get home a little earlier, so I got home, and then went to the gym by my house, and worked out on the elliptical, which I always want to call the ellipsoidal, which is a type of theatre light.
7 Lol. I don't know why I do that, but I find myself saying "lol" when I write these days.
8 Funny, because absolutely nobody really SAYS "lol" but everybody seems to write it. It's a way of taking out the awkwardness in comments. If you wanna be cute, you say, "LOLZ". Haha.
9 Haha is another of my nervous things. I never say, "haha" to people's faces, just when I try electronically to communicate. Because emails, twitters, aims, facebook comments, etc. are not human, face-to-face expressions, they can always be interpreted weirdly, so things like "lol" "LOLZ", "haha" etc. make me a lot more comfortable with modern communications.
10 Ah, yeesh.
11 The only thing I'm actually at home with in this age of one-sec/once a week communication is emails. I don't even hyphenate the things anymore. I know it's now considered wrong to write an email over 25 words, but I disdain that because I really think that someone out there wants us not to talk to one another anymore.
12 Conspiracy theory number 947. If we no longer carry on wonderful conversations, we can be controlled by "The Man" a lot easier.
13 Well, I enjoy conversations, communications, talking for hours on end with friends and family, and spending lots of quality time with people I love. I think we're losing that in this Age of Twitter (which I don't do, and will NEVER do!).
14 Years ago when IM-ing was taking hold, I thought it was the coolest thing EVER.
15 ...until I IM-ed someone, but was talking to so many people at once that I sent the message to another person, whose IM popped up before I could stop.
16 Younger people can do that. I'm old school, and really can't even fathom talking to twenty people at a time. It's like giving everyone you know short shrift. Not to my liking, sorry to say. I prefer intelligent conversations with people I'm close to. I cherish that, and always will. Sue me for being one of the last holdouts.
17 Ah, insomnia. It's around 4 a.m. as I compose this gibberish. Fell asleep early last night, but only because I had SUCH a great day!
18 Listened to the Costas/McGwire interview in the late afternoon. Yeesh. The second I heard Costas was going to interview McGwire, I knew McGwire's ass was grass. Bob Costas is one of the best sports journalists in history, and Mark McGwire is way too vulnerable and too much easy meat for that. Costas chewed him up and spit out the bones, and I'm guessing McGwire is probably just starting to get that right now.
19 It was TOO easy. And McGwire started CRYING during the interview.
20 Dude.
21 There's no crying in baseball.
22 I thought of going off on how utterly stupid McGwire's answers were, when I figured, "Everybody is going to do that." I tried like heck to see his side of things. Really couldn't, except that I could understand that the guy kept stuff bottled up for years, and just wanted to rid himself of some demons, which we all have.
23 On that, I actually understood the tears.
24 Also, I taught American Lit last year, and came to realize just how hypocritical and judgemental Americans are. We tend to find someone who has screwed up, and then throw lots of stones at them, to the point that we somehow feel that we are somehow moral crusaders who never do anything stupid.
25 We do that consistently with all sorts of celebrities, and even sometimes people in our own lives. I won't go deep, but if you ever read The Scarlet Letter, you know the darkness that is at the root of our national souls. We want to put a scarlet letter on anyone who makes human mistakes, and as a nation we have done it since the Puritans.
26 So as easy as it is to throw rocks at a guy like McGwire, it's much better to take a moment to pause and look into our own souls first. I'm the first to admit that seeing someone put on public display and so clearly lying and believing his own boushit is open season, but I also look back on things that I have done that are equally ridiculous.
27 I really think we all do. So I'm gonna move off this one. Don't know why, because I've done years of vilifying public figures. I just thought that McGwire was SUCH easy fodder that it was almost pathetic.
28 Where do we draw the line? Is Michael Vick a nice guy? How about Tyson? Lindsay Lohan?
29 Yeesh.
30 How about ourselves?
31 Goin' deep, yo.
32 Fear not. I'll still clobber national idiots. But McGwire was simply TOO stupid, and went before the leonine Costas completely unprepared, and Costas ripped him to pieces, which is what a good journalist should do. The sad thing was that during the ripping, I truly don't think McGwire knew just how astoundingly idiotic he sounded. I think he was genuinely trying to put a lousy past behind him, and was truly emotional.
33 I should really stay away from Camp Anytown.
34 Lol. ; ) <--------cool winky guy
35 Whew.
36 Got outta that one before 4 a.m.
37 Ha!
38 Have a grand Tuesday, if that's not an oxymoron.
39 Love youse.
40 Peace.
~H~
Recent Comments