This is a rant, but since you appear to be about as interested a reader as our beloved 43rd president, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter what I say - you’re busy readin’ all those newspapers and magazines that were in front of you over all these years.
But anyhow, I’m going to say my piece here.
We get it, already. You see yourself as the future of the country. Forgive me if I don’t agree, but what is clear is that you’ll say anything to keep yourself in the spotlight. You can read a good speech, sure, but so can I. Hey, *me* in 2012!
Seriously, though… Given the stupid, awful things you said during the campaign, I’m not inclined to believe you’d be honored to work with Obama or that you’re now denouncing extreme partisanship, because um… two weeks ago, you didn’t feel that way about either. You were much more interested in implying he was a socialist/terrorist/n00b who was going to send the country into the hole and stirring up as much hatred as possible in the more extreme segments of our society.
And now you just keep talking, and talking, and talking. I have to tell you - your voice is bloody annoying, and as someone from the upper Midwest, that’s sayin’ somethin’.
Today it was about Joe the Plumber (enough of this guy already - his 15 minutes are so over), and Tito the Builder, and whatever, last week it was at least three different explanations of your clothing issues, and after saying you wouldn’t define yourself as a feminist, now you’ve decided you are one. And after hinting at 2012 with the subtlety of a brick for days, now you’re saying you’re not thinking about 2012, you’re concentrating on 2010 for the good of your party, blah blah blah.
Frankly, Sarah, we know exactly what you’re concentrating on. It’s not the nation, it’s not Alaska, it’s probably not your family, and it’s certainly not God. It’s Sarah Freaking Palin, America’s new Queen of Hubris.
I’m sorry, Ms. Palin, but I’m just getting really tired of you opening your mouth and the elite liberal media who seems to think it’s newsworthy.
Look, you may have learned from Senator McCain, a guy I used to kind of like and respect about eight years ago, that the way to get ahead in the world is to say what you think people want to hear, even if you say four things on the same day which are absolutely mutually exclusive. But I promise you, that’s not how it works. As you may recall, it was not a winning strategy this year. That’s probably not going to change.
Now, I can hear Dems saying, “Great, you should run in 2012, Sarah - that’ll almost guarantee that we stay in office.” And it should. Anyone who is as clueless as you were during the Couric interview alone has no business governing anything beyond the confines of her own house (regardless of whether or not she can see Russia from it). You’ve already risen to the level of your own incompetence, and should you spend the next few years “doing your homework”, as the press puts it, so that you can run, you will scare me no less than you do now. The products of ambition don’t cure a lack of intellectual curiosity or a closed mind.
But we remember - the Republicans have been really good at getting real bozos into office. We’re not even rid of the last one, and you make him look like a Rhodes scholar (and, what’s scarier, you both make Ronnie look like a Nobel laureate, which should scare the crap out of everyone). You do represent a particular extreme segment of the population who wants to continue the culture war forever and forever (and is probably waiting for the rapture right now), and those people have been hanging out on the fringes of power for at least thirty years now.
The religious right isn’t going to give up that easily, and discounting them is a dangerous thing. That’s what you’re counting on, Ms. Palin. And I hope it doesn’t work.
Quite frankly, as a woman, as a thinking-person, and as a human being, it makes my skin crawl every time you open your mouth.
Could you please not just accept that you’ve risen about as high as you’ve any right to and be grateful for what you’ve had? My above fears of the religious right notwithstanding, if you don’t realize that the election did not go well for McCain in large part because of you and that you managed to look like a complete idiot on the world stage completely without the use of gotcha questions, I just hope (to borrow your analogy) God can help you see those big “Do Not Enter” signs on the locked and barred doors of national politics soon.
I’m not against women in politics at all - I’m against you in politics.
And as an aside, what were the voters of Alaska thinking?
Sarah Palin, I wish you no ill, but please go away. Right now. Or perhaps even yesterday.
Pardon me while I pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming… finally, the American people chose intelligence over posture, temperment over bluster, and vision over fear.
About… damned… time.
I’m proud of us. But mostly, I’m profoundly relieved…
The bio is still a bit incomplete because they wanted to confirm what I meant by living with my “Evil German”, but I’m still tickled that they liked the story of Torsten’s and my heroic finish last year!
So my blog-buddy Sarah (a.k.a. Mrs. Mustard at Cheeze Whiz and Mustard) is into guilt-free blogging, and I’ve decided to join in. Guilt-free blogging is where you refuse to feel guilty for not posting for a long, long time, for not being able to keep up, and for generally disappointing those five regular readers you have.
Me, I can’t even keep up long enough to write the monthly letter to my adorable son (I’ll be cheating again this month and doing another multiple-months-in-one post), let alone write about much else. Plus there’s been some other stuff going on, but then, there always is.
The point is, for someone raised on the premise that guilt is the sole motivator for everything (an idea which I intellectually reject, but emotionally have trouble telling to f*&$ off), saying “I’m not going to feel guilty about this” is really tough.
But I’m not going to. I’m going to accept that I can’t catch up, that it’s ok not to, and that I’ll be back when I’m back - and in the meantime, Internets (i.e. those five people who read this), I’m not dead.
Oh, and my kid can walk now. Seriously. He is Teh Awesome.
That’s right, folks… it’s October already, which means it’s time to sign up for National Novel Writing Month.
And this year, I yet again challenge all of my peeps who have no time and even less sleep to go on the thirty-day odyssey of insanity and caffeine that is National Novel Writing Month to produce something that will surprise even you.
This year, I’m still trying to decide between writing sci-fi/fantasy or a cheesy romance novel, but fortunately, I still have three weeks to decide. How I am going to write another book between laundry, Torsten, and my own insanity I don’t know, but I am totally going to do it.
And for those that don’t know my story last year, I was 700 words from finishing when I ended up being in the hospital for a C-Section. Bugger! And yet, at about 11 pm, November 30th, I finished the novel with my newborn son on my lap.
Because I am totally a winner
You can be a winner too - do it with me! Go to http://nanowrimo.org, sign up to write 50,000 words in November, and become my novelling buddy.
You might want to have a look at this before you vote:
I don’t think there’s any question that this all by itself tells you that he’s the absolute wrong person to steer the ship during this economic disaster.
Ok, so me publishing three months of Torsten posts in one was cheap, but seriously, it was never going to get written otherwise. For those who can’t get enough Torsten action, his 10-month and exciting German baptism posts (complete with a dress(?!!?!?!?!?) - sorry, little guy) will show up soon. And then I’ll be all caught up to get behind on his 11-month post
(N.B.: This post contains way too many (approx. half-a-billion) pictures, because I didn’t post for three months and I had a lot of catching up to do. People who read via the RSS feed, if you’re lucky, the feed will use the cut tag I inserted in the middle of the post, but if not, I’m sorry if your reader sucks down such a long entry. So sue me.)
Dearest Torsten,
Mama has really sucked the last few months and didn’t finish her seven- or eight-month updates. Part of this is because we were in Europe with minimal internet access, but most of it is because I’ve been just so busy with a certain Mr. T to get them finished. I’m not going to try to take too many bits and pieces from what I did write, because it seems a bit silly now, but what I can say is you have blossomed since my last letter to you.
Surprise!
Seriously - wow, have things changed. Two months ago, you were only sort of able to roll around and rotate on the ground to get to things, and it was mostly random. Even at eight months, when we were just leaving for Europe, you seemed to be only minutes from crawling, but still hadn’t managed to get any forward momentum.
But then… then Mama took off to London for five days. And when I came back, you came crawling across your grandparents’ floor, squealing with delight that it was Mama and that you could get to her all by yourself.
And then, oh boy, was it ever on.
(If there’s no more text showing after this, click on “Read more” below (if it appears) or the link to the original post to continue reading this entry…)
Wow… so apparently, not only is Palin an expert on the Bush doctrine *snort*, foreign policy (shut up about Russia already, woman), and of course, hockeymomitude, but she’s also a mindreader.
She supposes he wishes he’d picked Clinton (although she had earlier dismissed her as a whiner), but my feeling is that she has that just ever-so-slightly wrong.
Judging by the enthusiasm with which she’s been sucking on her own toes this week, I’m wondering if she’s picked the wrong presidential candidate as wishing he’d picked Clinton as veep…
If McCain isn’t already, I’m pretty sure he will be when Palin debates Biden, no matter how well they prep her. Joe ain’t one to let ignorance slip by, and say what you like about Senator Biden, but he knows him some foreign policy, yessiree…
Governor Palin, I may not be a huge Hillary Clinton fan, but you are no Hillary Clinton. You’re not even qualified to stand in her shadow, so quit acting like you’re sisters-in-arms already.
(I’m starting to wonder if Palin’s political tombstone will read “hubris” rather than “scandal”…)
So except for LinkedIn, I’ve avoided social networking sites like the plague. Given my experience with the Great Mudding Intelligence Suckdown of the early 90’s, I really didn’t want to do the MySpace or the Facebook thing.
I’m not trendy, and it wasn’t really my goal to be found by people, but after pressure from various quarters over the past, well, let’s face it, while, I gave in. I’d already given in to the MySpace thing (but barely) in order to contact the PimpMasta (whose real identity cannot be disclosed), but I rarely log in anyway, so that doesn’t count.
But sadly, I finally succumbed, so if you know me (as opposed to stalking me), let me know who you are and I’ll add you to my friends’ list.
(I’m actually rather astounded at the number of people I know who use it - I thought it was one of those things the kids these days (who need to get off my damn lawn!) use and everyone else ignored. Remember, I said I’m not trendy…)
So anyway… there you have it. The apocalypse is nigh.
In better news, the Wii Fit arrives today! Woo hoo!
As much as it annoys me to know that if Obama or Biden had daughters that were pregnant, the Republican and Evangelical blagosphere would be aflame with accusations that the parents clearly had no morals and had raised their child poorly and blah blah blah (I would never say this about the Palins, by the way, or anyone else), this does not give anyone a license to do the same.
Come on, guys. We’re better than that.
But before I say what I’ve got to say, let me just say this to the media: everyone knows already. Let it go.
God only knows that after the last four years, I’m not for sweeping crap under the rug, but seriously? The only reason this is still such a story is because you people are keeping it there. Yes, I’m sure the McCain campaign did do a nasty by releasing the information when everyone was worried about Gustav, and I could say a whole bunch of cynical (and probably true) things about that move, but that is all beside the point.
The point is this - a young woman is pregnant, she has chosen to have the baby, and it is none of anyone’s business but hers and the child’s father’s. Period.
Being pregnant is hard enough. Having a child is even harder. Being a new parent? I don’t think I know of anything in the world harder than that, quite seriously. It’s wonderful, but it’s very, very difficult. And doing it all at 17 is going to be enough of a personal challenge for this young lady - the fact that she is going to have to do this under a microscope is unfathomable.
It’s ok if you want to look at what the campaigns may have done based upon their bases’ anticipated reactions to the news, but I think you’ve done enough looking.
Can we not move on to important issues?
(And, for the record, I think it would be equally shameful for the McCain campaign to point to the pregnancy as an example of Palin’s conservative values - this is about what Bristol Palin has chosen to do with her life, and while it’s criminal to use it to attack anyone in the presidential race, it is no more acceptable to use it to laud them.)
Seriously, guys - leave the girl and her upcoming new arrival alone. All of you.
In a blatant display of the fact that half of my brain is only 12 years old (and the other half is 60, so it all averages out), let me just say that my
Once upon a time, I was a professional X, where X is a number of different things, depending upon which part of my life we’re talking about and where the jobs were.
And now that Mr. T is almost nine months old (?!!??!!) and we’re back from Europe, I am about to dip my toes back in to being a professional X, Y and Z again.
I am not, in any sense, prepared to give up being Mommy at home with Torsten, but since many of the things I do can be done either from home or part-time (and all of them privately, if I so choose), I will soon be firing up the old brain and integrating some work (some combination of programming, writing and teaching - you didn’t think I got that CELTA for nothing, did you? ) into my weekly schedule.
We’ve always planned that I’d start working on getting this together once we got back from abroad, but now that we’re really back and Christian has Torsten for the day, I’m finally sitting down over a cup of coffee to work out the details, and I must say it feels pretty good. At the moment it’s low-pressure while I work things out, but it’s still nice to be on the path.
Apparently, my Wii is on the way already! The questions I had last night still persist in terms of the Wii Fit, as my status is now “backordered”, although trolling through various user forums to see what this weird status combination of pre-ordered + backordered means in the Gamestop/EBGames world seems to indicate that all this means is that the items are not in stock right now and that with other stuff, the items were still shipped on the ship date (pre-order date being when stuff should be coming in from Nintendo, i guess) even when listed as backordered before then.
I don’t know if that’s true here, but we’ll see. I could have a Wii as soon as tomorrow, which is very bad, because tomorrow I also have the house to myself (and a shitload to do)…
I haven’t had a game console since um… my Colecovision. Which was an Atari 2600 knockoff. In 1983.
I’m old.
But… um…
Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!! (Yes, I know, you think I should get a PS3 or XBox 360, but I can’t afford more couch potato ass. That’s sort of the point.)
So, Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!! Well, except this… and this is where I solicit information from the Internets and will probably get no answer and just have to wait and see what happens.
EBGames/Gamestop (.com, not the store in the mall) offered Wii and Wii Fit bundles for preorder, shipping this Friday. Now, this is not about a launch, so it’s not the same thing as the usual preorder stuff, but nevertheless, there was an extremely cryptic bunch of crap about limited quantities and shipping on a first-come first-serve basis, and blah blah.
Now, they don’t charge my credit card until the order is prepared for shipping, and so I can cancel the order anytime, but I’m sort of wondering… does that message mean they take preorders until they have enough preorders to fulfill with the number of expected units coming from Nintendo, or do they just keep a huge rolling list of preorder backorders? Or do they just fulfill as possible and cancel all the rest?
In other words, if they took my preorder for the Wii, does this probably mean they’ll be shipping me a Wii on Friday, or does it probably mean I should have seen this “preorder” (sounds more to me like “backorder”) six months ago, and am going to get zip?
I actually mailed them asking, but if anyone has any experience with gamestop.com/ebgames.com preorders, I’d appreciate any translation of this cryptic crap I can get
Because, um, I want my Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!
Sorry about the travelogues - they stopped first because I was so busy in London, and then when I got back because I was absolutely seething about a couple of things that happened that are probably going to have some unpleasant consequences but that I can’t seem to talk about without filling two screens of furious text (did I mention I was seething?), and finally because we were busy with family around Torsten’s baptism and didn’t have internet access anyway, even if I’d had the time to write.
So anyhow, we’re back, and our trip was good (London was fantastic for both getting work done and giving me back my perspective) except for about 48 hours of it (and the last leg of our flight home, where a United stewardess decided to be a real jerk to the family with the baby, which will likely lead me back to my 2000 promise never to fly United again…). We’re trying to readjust (Mr. T has jet lag in this direction, which sucks for me, as the early-morning shift person…) and get back into a routine, and I’ll write more when I have time.
Be proud of me - I finally managed to write this entry without getting into the details of the bad 48 hours…
I'm a jack-of-all trades programmer, linguist and EFL teacher living in Denver, Colorado with my übercute little boy and evil professor/mad scientist husband.
I'm overeducated and underprepared for life without sleep.
He is Teh Awesome.
