I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

1. Whales Weep Not by D. H. Lawrence.

Note: I was unfamiliar with this poem until I watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. William Shatner is not my usual go-to source for lyrical inspiration. Plus, I hear this is considered one of the worst movies. But it's such a good poem! I particularly like:

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

2. Nicki Minaj

She is seriously talented. (To maintain the theme: There's a song called "Beam me up, Scotty"!) My beloved Jay Smooth teamed up with Maura Johnston for a great series of pop music commentaries and the one on Minaj is worth a listen.

3. Le Loup's "Morning Song"

This is the current Blackberry jingle, but don't let that put you off it!

4. Neon Trees's "Animal".

This is from that stupid "Camp Vegas" commercial. It's pretty stupid pop, but it's so catchy.

One more week and it'll be a full year since I last updated! I think then someone comes and takes away my LJ credentials, yeah? I cannot let it happen! I kept thinking I need to write an entry about Maria (rattie who passed away nearly a year ago now) and put it off indefinitely and, well, here we are!

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File under things that make people hate me (like my inexplicable affinity for Ke$ha): I love Christmas ALL THE TIME. So this made me v. happy, even in August:

This is Catsby:



aldarsior's friend found him all alone in the bushes somewhere on the outskirts of Savannah, GA. aldarsior drove there and back in one day to pick him up and he's been terrorizing us ever since.

This is Daisy:



We adopted Daisy from a local rescue after hearing over and over again that the best toy for a kitten is another kitten. Incidentally, that is totally true. Since the acquisition of Daisy, Catsby is a much more functional kitten, which is to say he allows us to pet him without trying to bite us (sometimes). Daisy himself is as crazy as Catsby but also super sweet. He loves to curl up next to/on us and purr.

Job is meh. I spend a lot of my time e-mailing people and telling them to do things that I am perfectly capable of doing myself and then e-mailing them again to tell them what errors they made. This is time-intensive and dull. At least bosses are being tolerable/nice lately.

In other news, SK has friend-dumped me with no explanation to speak of. (I did get an e-mail, but it was vague and cold and horrible.) SK has been one of my closest friends (and I hers) for over a year and I am heartbroken and I don't know what to do. I mean, there is nothing to do. It feels just like being dumped.

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I mean, I guess everything's okay. I just miss her so much and I don't understand what happened.

This makes me all happy.

It's been a long time since I really talked politics, largely because I can never seem to find enough time to sit down and focus my thoughts and say something thoughtful and cogent. However, last night my Facebook feed displayed an article that so thoroughly pissed me off that I actually stayed up an hour late to construct a reply. (Yes, this is me.)

The most relevant parts of the article:

This [the knowledge and complicity of the Congress, media, and populace in general] is part of what makes applying a criminal justice model to those most directly responsible such a bad idea. The issue we need to come to terms with is not just who in the Bush administration did what but how we were collectively complicit in their decisions.

&

But pursuing criminal charges would be too hard legally and politically and too easy morally. Prosecuting Bush and his men won't absolve the rest of us for what we let them do.

The biggest problem with Weisberg's article—which is essentially composed entirely of problems—is the logical leap from positing collective social responsibility to concluding that we therefore should not be prosecuting those directly responsible. That does not follow. That does not, in fact, make any sense.

Rarely, if ever, is a crime committed in which society as a whole is not complicit, yet I somehow doubt that Weisberg would appreciate if a person who had, say, beaten and robbed him were not tried, the would-be prosecutors instead suggesting that we all contemplate our collective complicity. (Needless to say that if Weisberg's loved ones—or anyone named Weisberg or Cohen or Smith—had been tortured, he would never have written this article.)

Speaking of collective complicity, he doesn't grasp that too well, either. It is true and bears stating that Congress knew and essentially looked the other way and that many, uh, "liberal" media commentators outright endorsed torture. This does not, as Weisberg seems to think, make us all equally complicit.

The ACLU has been mounting continuous legal challenges since this first leaked. Democracy Now! has been covering these stories extensively. Millions of people staged protests or contacted their representatives and expressed their outrage and condemnation. That is not complicity.

Yes, those of us who pay taxes and didn't either leave the country or attempt revolt (somehow I can't see Weisberg endorsing insurrection, though) are inherently complicit, but that is not the same as being Complicit. Weisberg carelessly paints us all with the same brush—from Alan Dershowitz to Amy Goodman—which is totally disingenuous.

And for all this, he never even explores how we are supposed to address our collective culpability and moral lapse. (It would behoove Weisberg to examine the complicity inherent in writing such an article.) Because, ultimately, this article is nothing but a weak attempt to create a moral façade for something that is strategic and amoral. Centrist Dems are against the prosecutions because they have the potential to politically backfire, not because they are committed to tearing at their hair and shouting mea culpa. Trying to frame this as a moral imperative is ugly and low.

(Also, the Japanese Internment analogy is just pointless.)

As a sane/humane alternative, I suggest this:

The best defense against holding Bush officials accountable for torture is that September 11 freaked out the entire country and that we can't judge their actions by the standards of how they look "on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009," as Obama's intelligence director puts it. This argument would carry more weight if Republicans had changed their thinking on torture and could be expected to follow the law the next time they won the presidency. Alas, they show little sign of intellectual progress.

I. Things that have happened

• Old Job ended, though not before I had to work closely with Executive Director Asshat to hire my replacement (who was ultimately promoted from within) and nearly lost my mind.


• Went to NYC, then Niagara Falls, then Lancaster, PA with aldarsior, his grandma and her fella, and various siblings at various points.


• Came home and started New Job the next day (tomorrow will be a week). So far, so good.


• Twenty-five years ago today, aldarsior was born.

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V. Stuff I love about New Job

• I am officially part of the labor movement.


• Our style guide says things like "work-hours, not manhours" and "no longer use journeyman, use journey-level member."


• I have my own office.


• Health insurance paid for in full.

VI. Media I am consuming

• Finished McEwan's Amsterdam. Liked it well enough, but think that The Comfort of Strangers, which was short-listed for the Booker prize, deserved it more than Amsterdam, which actually won it in 1998.


• Began McEwan's Saturday this morning.


• Keep watching Love Actually, which probably speaks to my horrible taste in movies.


• Not really the news, except as it is filtered through my Google Reader.

I hope this has not been too terribly dull.

Zoologist swims with lioness to escape heat of South Africa



I should be a zoologist, y/y? I LOVE IT.

The world's only pink Bottlenose dolphin which was discovered in an inland lake in Louisiana, USA



See also: A pink baby elephant has been caught on camera in Botswana.



(Everything is pretty much going well, except that the hunt for my replacement at Old Job has brought me in close contact with Executive Director. Having to deal with him is so relentlessly stressful, infuriating, and degrading, I can't even properly talk about it right now.)

Saturday, I attended SK's mom's commitment ceremony, which was the first time I'd ever been to anything like a wedding. I got to wear my art nouveau dress (like the one in the middle, but in blues and purples), I cried profusely, the cake was delicious, and they liked the Kiva gift certificate we got them. Later that day, I dragged aldarsior to my former HS for a drama club reunion (which I largely missed) and their current musical (which was not as good as our musicals were). On Sunday, I caught the last day of a small Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Robert Adams exhibition at the NGA; also managed to see some of a retrospective on Robert Frank's The Americans, but will need to go back to give that the attention it deserves. Then, met up with ahappyphantom and her roommate to see Ion at the Shakespeare Theater. Dismissive of classics as I am, I would not have expected Euripides to be quite so engaging. Plus, I have found a use for MySpace(!)—e-mailing the composer of the final musical number to see where I might obtain the track. Almost a week later, it's still stuck in my head.

On Tuesday, I got sick of waiting to hear back from the folks at a union I'd interviewed with over a week before, so I gave them a timid call back and they sounded baffled to hear from me, like perhaps they had no earthly clue who I was. They said they'd call me back in the next two days, and I wrote them off. Instead, they called me back three hours later and offered me the position. In a little less than a month, I will be the publications production specialist at an international union. Hot!

I am kinda breaking my editor's heart by leaving, which is kinda breaking my heart. In her report for the staff meeting, she wrote that "somehow we need to find a replacement for the irreplaceable." [Between that and the glowing recommendation my former supervisor gave them (and forwarded to me), this process has actually been kinda warm'n'fuzzy. But also sad.] Hence, I am staying on a whole 3.5 weeks to find my replacement. The ad was posted yesterday morning and we've already got about 50 applications. Largely, though, they do not impress. (If you're applying for an editing position, you should probably proofread your application materials, you know?)

Once I do find my replacement, I'll be taking a mini-vacation with aldarsior, his grandma, her boyfriend (aaww!), and other assorted family members. We'll be hitting NYC, Pennsylvania Dutch Country, and Niagara.

I'm taking a nia class twice a week and I love it.

I had a two hour shopping/lunch/ridiculing job apps (yeah, this process evidently brings out an awfully ugly side of me) session with smiletara today. Then I deigned to work for an hour before checking out the [newly remodeled/ now confusingly neat] Second Story Books. While there, I discovered a new pet peeve: books mistakenly filed by the name in the title rather than the name of the author. Daisy Miller was filed under M instead of J, Tom Jones under J instead of F. I mean, come on.

On the bright side, I found a twenty on my way to the store, and promptly blew most of it on Soldiers' Pay by Faulkner, some book on Diaghilev for my parents, Falling Man by DeLillo, and On Chesil Beach by McEwan. McEwan was all I was planning on getting, as I am almost done with Atonement and I'm flipping obsessed with him.

This weekend: escorting (with smiletara), entertaining grandma and parents' rats in absence of said parents, hanging out with K (and smiletara), possibly attending the Super Pet Expo (!), hemming pants and watching Gilmore Girls at SK's (also probably with smiletara). Wheeee.

I have a few fairly minor (I mean, I hope!) health problems I'm trying to work out. But other than that? Life is good!

I keep meaning to post about escorting, but I find it very difficult to string together anything coherent in the state of exhaustion/frustration that almost always follows. Today, I was perhaps more exhausted/frustrated than ever, but I have spiked my mango lemonade with Stoli and will endeavor to continue.

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I really think that our presence makes a positive difference. I think that a lot of the time we help soothe people and give them confidence and make them feel safer. (We actually got quite a few passers-by thanking us or applauding us from their cars today, which is always really heartening.) But good sweet crap is this emotionally taxing.