(no subject)

Dude! There's an IHOP in Manhattan now, in Harlem. I know I'm weird, and I know it goes entirely against my healthy habits kick, but IHOP! That's just too exciting.

Anyway, not too much else going on other than general preoccupation, trying to figure out what to bring to work for lunch, etc.

politics from the vaults

I am looking at a debate from 2000 as practice for the work we'll be doing on this year's debates, and I want to share with you several choice quotes from this event.

If you doubt my veracity, I'm sure you can find transcripts online -- these are all from the second presidential debate in 2000.

GWB: "I'm going to be judicious about how I use the military. It needs to be in our national interest and the exit strategy needs to be obvious."

GWB: "I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is how it's got to be."

GWB: "I don't think it's the role of the United States to walk into a country and say we do it this way and so should you."

GWB: "There are other kinds of racial profiling that go on in America... and my friend Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan is pushing a law to make sure Arab-Americans are treated with respect."

I think the hypocrisy of those statements in light of the last four years speak for themselves.

total random hodgepodge

Okay, just as an aside, I hate this new screen for new entries. It's just aesthetically displeasing.

Fandom find of the day in which I don't really talk about the story. But guede_mazaka (who is an insanely prolific writer) posted a story that contains the following line:

I never said I knew why I was doing something. I only said that I knew what I was doing. And now I know something else.

I’m an idiot.

I think I've said those _exact_ words to Kat, at least a half dozen times, probably within the last month. I'm sure about 3 dozen other people feel exactly the same way, except presumable they weren't all talking to Kat. Anyway. Entirely amused.

My audition was eh, at best, but since I could barely stand up my cramps were so bad and it wasn't something I cared about, it's AOK as far as I'm concerned. On to bigger battles.

Also, they are replacing all the stoves in the government housing near my subway stop, so for the last week, there's been two fleets of stoves out on the street -- lined up by a fence three rows deep of old beat up stoves with their covers all stained or removed and their hookups all gnarled and curled up like petrified cranky snakes, and then a similar number of bright new shiny stoves that don't look nearly so angry hanging out in the courtyard. The stoves have been my favourite moment of object anthropomorphizing in months. Cranky stoves!

P.S. -- Lost is brilliant.

Love Actually

I loathe romantic comedies. But for whatever reason I got Love Actually in from Netflix and finally watched it after it glaring at me from atop the stereo for a week. And I bawled my eyes out. Granted, I am menstruating.

Some of it sucked. Some of it was much better than it had any right to be. There were weird loose ends, conflicting styles, misplaced emphasis and certain unfortunate patterns (I remember when this came out and everyone I knew sort of freaked out about class and status issues in it, and I do get what they are seeing, but I think mostly they are seeing it as Americans and as Americans we deal with class and class humour differently -- so yeah, it was weird in places, but I think not so much as we think, maybe?)

But oh I just cried and cried.

It's like, that freaky looking little kid is sprinting through the airport, and it's beautiful in the fucked up way that Gattaca was porn for the age of AIDS. This was like porn for the age of bogus useless security and a world we finally noticed was scary.

Oh cry cry cry.

And the other DVD sitting in the house... Maurice, which I've seen, but even so, I think I'll wait a day to abuse myself with that.