| heycecilia.com | |||||
|
| the blog - September 2004 |
|
Finally! A Debate Drinking Game!
*** 40 Days Until Election 2004 - Debates Are Coming
Watch, listen, possibly learn, groan at the canned responses, laugh at the attempts to sound knowledgeable. If you like debates, and who doesn't, check out CNN.com's Presidential Debate History (2000), Poynter Online - Presidential Debates, George Washington University Democracy in Action - Debates, and wordIQ Definition of American presidential debates. And until someone comes out with a 2004 Presidential Debate Drinking Game, tide yourself over with Slate's Democratic Debate Drinking Game from last fall. Oh, and by the way, register to vote because, you know, enfranchisement is so much cooler than disenfranchisement. *** 50 Days Until Election 2004 - Random Assortment of Links
*** New TV Thingies Also the new fall network television season is getting started, although of course ABC, NBC, and FOX are on their hoity toity 52 week seasons, which seem to be defined so far by throwaway shows in the summer and average ones as usual the rest of the year. There are only a couple of conflicts that I have to work out. MSNBC had a good rundown of the dramas and the comedies. My only question is why was Joey's Drea de Matteo (31) okay with playing mom to a kid (almost 26) who's five years younger than her in real life and whose character is 20 years old? I'm confused. Too Much Information, I Know My brief training and tenure as a goalie also came in handy as I smartly did not endeavor to break my fall with my elbow or hand, instead landing on the outside of my arm (bicep/triceps half) whose inside was pressed against my side. I was kind of glad my coach repeatedly insisted in his typically intimidating manner that if I didn't want to break my arm, I better learn how to land with it close against my side. Luckily, only the bath mat slipped and my foot went along with it because I could have easily hit my head on the wall opposite the faucet (and how lucky I slipped in the direction I did-yay! slightly slanted bathtub!) or the end of the tub. Instead, by the time I hit the ground my head was about a foot from the end, perfectly safe. Lying there on the tub floor, kind of stunned, I took it all in. The shower was still going, which was kind of annoying, but I realized it wasn't going to stop of its own accord. My ribs sure hurt, both on the side I landed and right in the middle of my sternum. My eyes were closed and the second I tried to open them I got soap in them. I tried to lift myself up, but my elbow hurt a bit because I did land on it a little, it being part of my arm, so that didn't quite work as expected. And my good knee hurt from actually being the first part of my body to actually hit the tub surface. My hands were quite soapy, complicating matters further. I was rescued by Mr. Sassy who had heard the disaster in a bit of good timing. I'm okay, but I had the pleasure of being sore the whole long weekend. Lazing around allowed me to watch four movies of varying quality, but they were all fun. Some campy, but all fun.
And Another One Gone I know that I'm a victim here, but I didn't feel victimized because I've already done that. This was the fourth major theft in my life so I've kind of used up all the stock reactions already. I came to realize last night that I'm just tired of it. First, in the seventh grade, my strings class (I played the violin) had a full orchestra rehearsal with the woodwinds, brass, and percussion classes. We left our bags in one music room while playing together in another. When we finished, no one had any money left. I knew I had but a few dollars in my backpack so it was not a huge loss, but I felt incredibly violated. Wasn't school supposed to be a safe place? Who knew we were all off away from our bags? Who steals from fellow students? Didn't the thief know it was wrong? No one was ever caught. Three years ago, my parents' house was robbed. Everyone's was home for the summer, but it was the first time all six of us had been out of the house, so it was pretty clear someone had been casing the house. Real comforting for a neighborhood with zero crime. It appeared that a couple of guys broke in and stole my laptop, my sister's laptop, two of her very expensive cameras, money, checks, and various other things. They were particularly thorough, though they missed a wallet packed with credit cards and another laptop (admittedly one that was at least eight years old). They pulled everything out of everyone's dressers and closets and flipped all the mattresses, leaving masses of stuff just strewn across the floor of every room. It was just overwhelming and depressing. I really felt violated. It took me a couple days to clean my room-I just didn't have the energy. All my class notes, my writing, things I couldn't even remember or replace just gone. (To add insult to injury, it took two trips to the police station and multiple calls for my mom to get the report actually filed. Nice work, OPD. No one was ever caught.) Then last year I found out that my identity had been stolen in November 2001. That was a real treat. I never found out because the person opened four accounts, closed three within the month, and then paid the fourth one of every month, until well, (s)he stopped paying. And then the collection agency started calling me. There was a very mean guy who found it unbelievable that someone would fraudulently open account in someone else's name and then pay it off, which actually seems pretty smart to me-go undetected for a long time, get the benefit of a card, and ditch it when you're done. The collections guy also lied to me, which delayed me figuring out what I needed to do. I eventually got wise and filed a police report, wrote to the credit reporting agencies, and wrote to all the credit card companies and it was resolved, but it was pretty stressful at the time. No one was ever caught. And then Friday. My bike. It was good thing I went for one last ride the Saturday before. This probably was good and bad because at least I had, but then it also got me thinking about riding more on the weekends, which is out of the picture for now. I'm not angry really, I'm just tired of it and it's not worth wasting energy, particularly negative energy, on it. There's nothing I can do, I'm not getting the bike back, and there's no one to be mad at. And I know this happens everyday. The refrain in my head in the last couple of days though has been from Stephen Sondheim's brilliant Into the Woods, from "Last Midnight":
I don't think it's that bad, but I'm just gonna let this one go. There'll be a report, things will be done, a statistic will be added, but the culprit's going to get away with it and I just can't get too upset about that. At Least Someone Is Thinking Of The Children And then these Halloween costumes really made me feel warm inside. Classic. Via Jack Bog's Blog. 60 Days Until Election 2004 - Are You Ready? I also recommend applying for an absentee ballot, which you can do right now if you're already registered or as soon as your registration is confirmed, if you have yet to register. That is also often required as much as 30 days before the election. It's extremely convenient if you don't think you will be able to get to the polls on Election Day or you don't think you'll have enough time on November 2 to give voting the attention it deserves or you just don't want to drag your butt to the polls. I know I won't be able to get to the polls and because of work I'll generally have a tough time from this election on so I'm taking advantage of California's permanent absentee voter status option. Emily sent a link to Venus' "Why Ya Votin? contest", but I was too busy to enter, so here's what I probably would have written about why I'll vote on November 2:
That's where the essay would end, a few hundred words too long. But I have to acknowledge how hard voting is too. In a perfect universe, everyone would have time to evaluate every issue, every candidate, every measure, every initiative, but very few people do. So what do you do? The statements in the voter information guide can be so contradictory as to be confusing so that's not much of a shortcut. Ads are all spin and half-truths or just negative. So where to go? My solution, which is not very helpful, is to just always be at least a little engaged and make time to learn before you vote. And, this kills me as a nerdy, civic duty and privilege loving fool, there's no law (as far as I know-I've never actually looked into this) that you have to vote for every category on the ballot. If there are 30 things, and our monstrous California ballots get that way, and you know you reasonably can have a position on only 20 of them, leave the other ten blank. It's not the best solution, but . . . it's better to vote on 20 than none, right? Maybe not. I don't know. Just register and vote. And some links that I find helpful: Annenberg Political Fact Check *** Better Memories Than I Thought It's especially odd that it was so pleasing because it reminded me of my second o-chem lab. Thinking about organic chemistry even now makes me a bit ill. I sucked at the class Chemistry 3B and I sucked at the lab, but I remember it was one of my more fun labs of all the science courses I took. Usually, my chemistry and biology labs were filled with a friend or two and then tons of people I would never hang out with because they were . . . weird. The o-chem lab my first semester sophomore year had a bunch of people I didn't hang out with, but who were really cool and just ran in different circles. Rosanna was my lab partner, if I remember correctly, or we were right next to each other, at any rate. And there was a guy, whose name escapes me, who used to sing that Toto song of the same appellation to her to annoy her—a frustration I know all too well. I don't remember much about Rosanna, and I probably couldn't pick her out of lineup today (even though it's only been a few years). We never had any other classes together and I don't think we ever sat near each other in lecture. But the guy who sang the song—he was the resident Tupac expert. That's right, he had more knowledge of Tupac Shakur than anyone you could ever meet, more than you would think could even exist. Down to tiny details, he knew about the music, he knew about Tupac's life, he knew about Tupac's death, and he knew about all the conspiracy theories. He was mocked and teased, gently of course, for this extraneous wisdom, questioned for devoting so much time and energy and passion to the subject. We eventually got our comeuppance when this guy started getting noticed. He was getting interviewed locally and even ended up talking about Tupac on national television on one of the network morning shows. Crazy. And that all came back to me in the Shoe Pavilion after not thinking about any of it for years and it made me happy. Even cooler/weirder, this memory made a cameo in a dream. comments? e-mail me. |
| ©2003-2005 heycecilia.com |