Wednesday, January 30, 2008

one more timely post about john edwards...

when i got in my car after work today, NPR's "all things considered" was on the radio and i caught a bit about edwards' decision to withdraw from the race. you wanna know what the broadcast was concerned with? white male voters! WHAT?!?? the NPR folks were all, "what's going to happen to the white males now? do they support the chick or the black dude?" (that's not a direct quote, btw.)

i'm of the opinion that NPR crossed a line today. it ventured outside the weird and woolly realm of political correctness and into the vast sea of AYFKM.* the white male voters? really? NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE WHITE MALE VOTERS!!! except the republicans. and they're silly.

____________
*AYFKM:
duh! short for "are you fucking kidding me" -- my favorite little acronym to write in the margins of my law school casebooks. aw, law school! those were the days...

so much for "super" tuesday...

john edwards has withdrawn from the presidential race! no!!! i guess now it's up to me to wage the war on poverty in america...

i'm really sad about edwards' decision. i know that it was inevitable, given that clinton and obama have clearly outperformed edwards in the primaries so far (providing clear and convincing evidence that democrats are stupid), but i LOVE john edwards! i love that he gets angry! i love that he's not really a capitalist! i think his $400 haircut looks nice!

in my job, since i have no connection to the outside world (i sit in front of a computer all day, but i don't have access to the internet -- i found out that edwards had quit the race via text message from andrew), i listen to a lot of podcasts. and the vast majority of the podcasts i listen to focus on news or politics. this means i've gotten overexposed to and a little obsessed with the presidential election. obviously i'm not going to vote for any of the wacky republicans, who, although scoring high on the hilarity scale, are all kinda cartoony (they're like the rejects from a justice league parody -- including and ESPECIALLY ron paul, whom only foolish college kids think is politically legitimate). but at least the democrats have been dramatic!

but without edwards, what the hell do i have to get excited about in this election? clinton? obama? sigh... boring... now it feels empty. i can't care anymore -- it hurts too much!

i guess i'll just vote for whomever edwards endorses...

Thursday, January 17, 2008

can you smell what barack is cooking?

that should TOTALLY be obama's campaign slogan! if he were to go with such a slogan, i might even consider voting for him. but probably not. well, maybe if edwards weren't in the presidential race. but if edwards weren't in the race, i'd vote for clinton.

btw, i can't take credit for this politicization of dwayne johnson's old WWF tagline (or is it WWE? who cares!). my brother's friend kevin, who is quite hilarious, said it. and my brother told me.

emily, this is your life...

do you ever go through periods in which you don't feel like yourself? periods when you feel like your very existence is a burden? when nothing feels natural, everything requires effort? this is not my beautiful house/this is not my beautiful wife, et cetera...

no no no, this is not some cry for help. i'm just in a really weird head space lately.

i have this job right now doing contract work. document review. it's mindless, repetitive, tedious, but the money is okay. yet i literally sit in a little cubicle all day long counting the minutes until i can go home. or calculating how much overtime i'd actually have to work to justify buying an iphone. or daydreaming about snowboarding or knitting or -- jesus fuck -- or about LIVING. living! i don't feel like i'm living, and i feel this awful pressure to DO something with my life!

see, i think i'm having a crisis of faith. or a crisis of nonfaith. and i can pinpoint when it began -- the evening of friday, december 7th, over dinner at a stupid chain restaurant down at the waterfront. that was when my father and i had this truly terrible, erm, conversation (for lack of a better term), during which i basically admitted to him that i don't believe in god and i'm tired of being told to pray about everything all the time. and i might have also compared the holy spirit to a "magical little fairy". yeah. good quality family time, that.

here's an embarrassing admission: i think about death a lot. a whole lot. i've basically been obsessed with death since the fall of 1995. that was when my mom died. i think about my own death as if it could happen any moment. some people find that liberating and carpe-diem-poetic and all that. i, however, find it -- i dunno -- somewhat terrifying. but not because i'm afraid of what happens afterwards, because when i'm dead i'll be dead -- it won't matter a bit. but because i feel like the craptastic holding pattern that has been my life to date will have been a real waste of this one shot i got at living. because i don't buy the theory that there's an afterlife that offers some sort of glory or grace -- i'm of the belief that if you want to be happy, you'd better the hell make yourself happy NOW.

okay, lemme try to reign this in a bit. i feel static. this seems like one of those life phases where i'm supposed to take some important next step, but that thought makes me furious. i don't want to just do what i'm supposed to do, because that's what everybody else does. i don't want to be another person in a responsible job with a retirement savings plan and three weeks of vacation time per year. i don't want to push out a couple of kids who resemble some second chance to get right all the things i got wrong back when it was my turn. it's still my turn, damn it! and this whole working-for-the-weekend shit is not only fucking depressing as hell, but it's wasting my time.

perhaps this just a new manifestation of my anxiety, or perhaps this truly is some sort of post-adolescent existential crisis, but these days, everything feels like a neurological event -- a pre-seizure, a brain shiver, numbness of limbs, a short in the circuits. granted, the major neurological event of a few years ago is still a ghost that haunts me, so my objectivity is suspect, but every single moment feels...

...biological.

one of the reasons that i left the whole faith/religion/god thing behind is because of those damn seizures. you shut down completely, then you restart slowly until everything is back online. like a computer. like a machine. you begin to think about your body as mechanical, your consciousness as the delightful consequence of a series of cooperating and functioning systems. but you also realize that if something goes wrong and stays wrong, eventually it takes the rest of you with it. and the balance seems so delicate, almost accidental. and, well, what the fuck?

so, there you go. my weird head space. i just want to feel like what i'm doing with my time has some value. because time is a precious commodity.

sheesh. i need to lighten up.

hi!

i'm here!

so, if "podfading" is what happens when a podcast kinda stops broadcasting (i.e., fades away), did throckmorton just experience a near-blogfade? GASP!!!

no! i ain't going anywhere.

it's just that i have this job right now where i sit in front of a computer screen (with no access to the internet, mind you!) for at least 8 hours a day, but for as many as 12, and when i get home i'm exhausted and the last thing i want to do is, well, sit in front of a computer screen.

but i'm still here. and there's lots going on in my head. see the next post for details.

xoxo,
e