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Thursday, September 13, 2012

What I miss most is time
Posted by Jill | 5:41 AM
I'm sitting here this morning, rapidly succumbing to the Office Cold that's going around and has had everyone at work, even those not juggling three projects at once and dealing with teams with conflicting priorities who don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "deadline" and being told I have to "have patience", complaining of incapacitating, crushing fatigue. I was awake at 4:45 AM and will probably just go to work early today, not just to catch up on work but because, well, what the hell else would I do with an extra half-hour? And that's AFTER vacuuming up the cats' eating areas, which these days are all over the first floor, because I now have two old, sick cats and I'll get food into them wherever they'll eat it.

Maggie's had her methimazole transdermal gel dose (for hyperthyroid), which I hope gets her to eat, because if she doesn't start eating more she's going to have to go to the Hypurrcat clinic in the city, where for just shy of $2000, they will inject radioactive iodine into her, keep her there for 3-5 days, and assuming the treatment works and doesn't destroy so much healthy tissue that she ends up on meds for HYPOthyroid, should return her thyroid to normal state. This whole thing brings back too many memories of Certain Family Crises of 2000, which also involved old sick cats and separately, radioactive iodine treatment that did nothing for the person who had it and which I will always believe was administered erroneously because the cancer being treated wasn't really thyroid cancer. But that's just me.

I'm at a point where I don't even know what I like to do anymore. On weekends these days, I find myself leaving HGTV on all day while I'm sitting in front of a glowing screen working just to remind me of the home projects I want to do if I ever have a spare moment. Characters from my unfinished novel still live in my head, their stories still not fully told. And the less said about the cleanliness of my house, the better.

I really miss having time -- especially time to read. I have all five George R.R. Martin Song of Ice and Fire books sitting in a basket by the front door and I wonder if I'll ever have time to read them. I have a blogroll as long as my arm and rarely get a chance to read those, except when I skim them enough to put up a link post. But this morninig I decided, just for the heck of it, to pick a random blog to check out and ended up at the site of my old Cinemarati buddy, Vern. Well, actually that's one of TWO old Cinemarati buddies named Vern, but this is the one who's been doing movie reviews forever.

I've always suspected that Vern is someone like The Rude Pundit or the late, much-missed Jon Swift* -- a pseudonymous persona with varying degrees of resemblance to the actual person. But while Vern's specialty is reviewing tough-guy movies, he's also one of the best ranters around. And today's fortuitous random blog landing allowed me to read his response to the appearance of his hero di tutti heroes, Clint Eastwood, at the RNC this month. It's worth your time, not just because Vern is a hell of a writer, but for what it says about the dissonance between the people we see in the media and what they are in reality, how people will twist themselves into pretzels to avoid facing reality when their heroes turn out to have feet of clay, and how we try to work it all out.

A sample:

I’m not saying he did a good job, and I’m definitely not saying I agree with him. His main point, which is not unreasonable, was the idea that “when somebody does not do the job we gotta let them go.” I disagree with his conclusion that Obama hasn’t done the job, and even if he’d done worse I don’t see how that leads to wanting to put Romney in his place. The part that made me cringe the most was when he said “maybe it’s time for a businessman.” Not because of Clint’s aside making fun of Obama for being a lawyer, apparently forgetting that Romney is also a lawyer, but because he’s gotta remember that Bush was supposed to be the businessman, the guy that was gonna run the country like a business. You saw how that shit worked out, Clint! You’re mad at Obama for not fixing the economy well enough, but you want to repeat the thing that broke the economy in the first place?

It’s been pointed out that all of the Republicans who ran the country for the 8 years before Obama were carefully hidden away during the convention. Not like you would hide a laptop that you were leaving in your car, more like you would hide the bong when mom is visiting. They elected Bush and Cheney two times and they called us traitors for criticizing them and they hated us for disagreeing with their wars and now, well, you know what, let’s not have them speak or show them or mention that they exist.

So maybe they have buyer’s remorse, but then why are they not repudiating the Bush philosophy? They’re just saying the same shit – “maybe it’s time for a businessman.” They’re just not pretending it’s “compassionate conservatism” anymore. They dropped the compassionate.

In the speech Clint also says he doesn’t want to close Gitmo because it was expensive to build, and that the idea of trying terrorists as criminals (at least if it’s in downtown New York City) is “stupid.” He’s against wars but also against prosecuting it as a crime. But I’m not gonna argue with Dirty Harry on that one.

The whole premise of speaking to an empty chair, pretending that Obama is there and telling him to go fuck himself is too obvious of a symbol for the way they’ve been handling Obama from the beginning. They hate some guy they made up who’s a socialist and a Muslim and also an atheist and who cut work requirements for welfare and who closed an auto factory before he was in office and who’s so arrogant and looks down on them… I don’t know how they look at the actual guy and see all that, so they have to just pretend he’s sitting in a chair there.


Go. Read more.

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