what is the sound of a nation holding its breath?

i haven't posted in a while (understatement), but today needed one.

i always forget how every four years the shift from raucous celebration to tension, anxiety and seriousness happens so fast. this year in San Francisco the rain swept through in between Halloween and Election Day, clearing the streets of vomit and debris. i thought it was fitting. today has been bright and cold. it is excellent weather for waiting.

in just a few minutes the first polls will close, and we will finally have some data. we are hopeful. some of us are confident, but i can't give myself that luxury - i watched 2004 unfold like a bad movie where they got the ending wrong.

i don't think that i can ever really trust a politician, but i think that's a good thing. too many people want to hand over their responsibilities, want to find someone to elect who will just do all the thinking for them. i think we need to constantly challenge our political representatives to do better by us, to advocate for us and our best interests. it's an impossible job, and we must hold them to impossible standards. but that's the beauty of it - only when we make all our voices heard can our government know what we really, truly stand for.

so go make your voice heard today, and keep speaking up for what you believe in. we can cross our fingers and hope for one man today, but if we stop at that we're only letting ourselves down.

my company paid my phone bill

not on purpose, sadly. here's how it went down:

i originally called at&t and had phone and internet service set up back sometime in late november/early december. as of this wednesday i had still not received a bill from them, so, fearful of late fees, i called to see what the deal was. the nice customer service guy on the other line told me that they had sent the bill and received payment in december, to which i replied, "whaaaa???" i mean, no late fees, cool, but who the hell paid my bill? a few rounds of questions later, i determined that my bill had somehow been sent to my office. i realized after hanging up with the guy that i had given them the office address for shipping my modem, and they must have interpreted this request as "this is my billing address." my office, thinking it was the bill for the new store (that at&t bill also has my name on it, since i set up the utilities), glanced at it once and paid it. while it would have been nice not to pay the $110, i decided i had to let them know that a mistake had been made (i know, i'm so honest). so in the end, no free lunch for me. but it's good to know that our accounting department pays so much attention to detail. :(

oh, facebook

the new facebook applications, for anyone who doesn't already know, are absolutely insane. you can throw haggis at someone. you can give them a beer, pet their (fluff)friend, see where in the world they have visited and where they would like to visit, graffiti their walls, play games with them, and i'm sure five million other things. i have already wasted a good portion of a workday tooling around with the new applications, and am much amused.

oh, what a week...

i started writing this post in september and never finished. i thought i'd put it up anyway.


i have had an insane week. let's start at the beginning...
last monday, i was awakened at around 8:30 by the sound of the workers in my landlady/next-door neighbor's yard breaking up the debris from re-siding her house. as i sat in my bed poking around on the computer and reading, i started getting the distinct impression that the noise was now coming not only from the back yard but also directly over my head. i first called my dad, who denied any knowledge of construction planned on our house, and then my landlady who confirmed that yes, they were redoing the roof. since it sounded like the incredible hulk had taken it into his head to use our house as a trampoline, i decided i had best leave. after dropping my car off for a long-overdue oil change, i took the bus downtown to shop for shoes that i could wear to potential job interviews and/or eventual actual jobs. not being in a decisive mood, i thought that the solution to do would be to buy everything i remotely liked (on credit cards, of course) and bring it home to ask the opinions of everybody i knew, eventually returning the shoes that didn't make the cut. six pairs of shoes and $800 later, i took the most crowded muni bus i have been on in my entire life back to my car, drove home, and trudged upstairs to examine my purchases in a different light. the first thing that i noticed was that there was a large mess in the center of my room. it took a moment to register that the large mess was composed of paint, plaster and insulation. this prompted me to actually look up at the ceiling, which had a large hole with the sagging boards showing through, and half of my light fixture was hanging off. i first called my dad, whose response was something to the tune of "no. you're kidding me..." and then my landlady, who came over with one of the workers to take a look. she translated their explanation to me (they're not used to working with roofs like ours, whatever that means...one of the men had put his foot through the top layer...), but made no apologies. she's generally a kind lady, and she likes our family, but apologies are not really her style.

dawdling at the crossroads

so, i have concluded that i'm bad at this whole keeping a blog business. however, i will keep trying. in some ways, it's bad for me to be home. i tend to isolate myself out of sheer laziness, and end up bored, unhappy and having alienated all my friends. it's not that i don't want to hang out with people...it's just that it's easier to play computer solitaire than to pick up the phone and make the effort. which is sad and pathetic and really no excuse, i know.
likewise, i have been extremely lazy in the whole job-hunting endeavor. people (adults, mostly) keep telling me, "oh, take some time off, relax, have fun." the problem is, i'm not relaxing and i'm not having fun: i'm sitting on my ass, and i'm bored. i'm scared of becoming too comfortable at peet's and living at home and having no motivation to get a more interesting, fulfilling job. i don't want to be one of these people.
people (again, most of them adults) also seem very eager to reassure me that nobody is pressuring me to figure out what i want to do with my life. this is not true. i am pressuring me to figure out what i want to do, if not with my life, than at least with the next year. not having any sort of plan, goal, hope, or daydream makes me profoundly uncomfortable. for some, what i'm currently doing might be relaxing. for me it's anxiety-inducing.
the really silly thing is, i arrived at the end of college thoroughly and genuinely surprised that i hadn't yet figured out what i wanted to do. i always just assumed that the path would become clear to me, since every previous stage of my life had led naturally to the next. it really didn't occur to me until the about winter quarter this year that maybe the answer wouldn't just drop into my lap, maybe it required some thought and effort. to be perfectly honest, though i've devoted a fair amount of thought to the subject (and 2 blog posts so far), i've put in very little real effort. i meant to make an appointment at the career center, or go see the department counselor, or go to one of those seminars on campus that i kept seeing fliers for, but i never did. i've also been visiting craig's list regularly to check out the postings, but have yet to send in my resume. actually, i've yet to complete my resume.
something inside of me keeps screaming just take the plunge, just do it, do something, do anything, set your life in motion...but whether it's culinary classes or internships, i haven't been able to make myself actually take a step in any direction.
as a concluding note to a rather depressing post, i would like to state that i am not miserable. i am bored, frustrated, anxious and afraid, but i'm not dragging myself in agony through every day. if i were, maybe i would actually be motivated to do something about it.

sorry 'bout the wait

so, it's been a while...right now i am supposed to be doing research for a presentation that i have to give on margaret atwood on thursday, but i'm actually listening to ulca radio and playing spider solitaire, so i thought it might be a good time to revisit the cliffhanger post that i put up a week and a half ago. ooooohhh, and now they're playing waltz #2, which makes me sad, both because it's a sad song (duh) and because of the person that it reminds me of. and it's sad that elliott smith is dead...

but i'm going to shut up about that now and try and focus on the issue at hand. so. the "thinking vs. feeling" debate, as people have dubbed it...thinking has traditionally been aligned with a masculine way of approaching the world and feeling with a feminine way of same. of course, especially in these oh-so-enlightened times, this is not a strict either/or division; one can be (and should be) both a thinking and a feeling human being. but IGAOTW (which stands for In General And On The Whole, an acronym that i just made up. take note.), males are expected to value logic over emotion and females to value emotion over logic. and, since western philosophy is overwhelmingly dominated by males, logic has long since won out as the more "civilized" value. thus audre lorde, trying valiantly to counter centuries of hetero-, masculo-, euro-centric culture, champions feeling as the voice of the "black mother" (counter to descartes, a "white father"). when we remove the racial element that makes us all so uncomfortable (i know, this is unfair...but it's not the issue for today. another day, perhaps.), we still get thinking=masculine, feeling=feminine, we just have lorde insisting that the value of feeling should also be recognized. okay. let's set that aside for a moment and look at the quotes themselves. as ryan noted on my earlier post, "thinking" is presented as providing a certainty, while "feeling" makes no guarantees. the way he presents this difference (and he can feel free to correct me if i'm wrong, but i think it's probably the way that most of us look at it...the way society looks at it) is that this makes feeling a weaker force. thinking promises existence, but feeling only offers the possibility for freedom. however, i see this as being an essential and valuable attribute of emotion rather than a shortcoming. it is exactly the potential that is important. feeling does not and cannot guarantee freedom. you can even (rather easily, in fact) trap yourself in your own emotion. you must make your own freedom; feeling only gives you the possibilty. but you cannot be free if you do not value feeling. logic, for all its advantages (and it has many), is essentially and irrevocably rule-bound. logic is, in fact, a set of rules by which one progresses from one set or piece of information to another. if you live your life strictly by logic, you cannot be free; you can only do what the rules dictate. if you allow yourself to transgress these rules however, and act on emotion, it opens up whole new avenues for living. now, to return to the gender divide...i would like to posit that the idea that males follow logic more than emotion and females vice versa is nonsense. it is simply that society allows men to express certain logical and emotional patterns and women to express others. men are expected to hold to a much more absolute standard of logic, where the same rules apply to all situations; something is always advisable/right/acceptable or it is inadvisable/wrong/unacceptable. they are "allowed" to express anger and very little else. women, on the other hand, are expected to have a much more relative standard of logic, that seems to be much more conscious of social standards and each individual situation (i am not talking about "emotional logic" or anything strange or confusing like that. it is not "feeling mixed with thinking." it is abiding by a different set of logical rules that are largely based on social norms). women are allowed to express happiness, desire (but not too much, or else they're sluts), fear, sadness, but not usually anger (or else they're bitchy). now, neither of these characterizations are exhaustive, and clearly (being female) i have more to say about the female experience of the thinking/feeling dichotomy. i would not privilege one over the other. each has its function and its place - it is, as always, finding the balance that is important.

on a completely irrelevant side note, while i was writing this post, my friend's radio show ended (you should listen to it, by the way: tuesdays 10p-12a on uclaradio.com) and the next show came on. the dj is somewhat irritating to begin with, but when she started advertising the giveaway for the night, i had to turn it off. they're giving away free tickets to a shindig that a band is putting on that they have dubbed, for whatever reason, a "bacchanal." however, the way that she was pronouncing it was "back-anal." not to be snobby or elitist, but that just annoyed the hell out of me. i almost called in and corrected her (and should have, now that i've thought about it more), but i don't know if i could have done it without being rude. in any case...i had more thoughts, but they've either leaked out of my ears or retreated to the depths of my brain and will be fished out later. right now i've got to get some sleep...

the old debate

i think, therefore i am.
- Descartes

i feel, therefore i can be free.
- Audre Lorde



more on this later...