slouching towards bethlehem

since hitting my saturation point at 3 pm yesterday, have i recovered my appetite for devouring all news political, poll-tical and otherwise?

no.

however, i have continued to mull on a yeats verse i saw on the B train, the most eerie and prescient poem anyone has ever written about this election. and yeats is dead! here tis:

turning and turning in the widening gyre/

the falcon cannot hear the falconner

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction, and the worst

are full of passionate intensity.

does that send a shiver up your spine or what? even creepier, i copied it down onto the back of a card urging me to renew a magazine subscription. i got home and told ben only to discover his father had done the exact same thing. different magazine, probably, though.

most fun i’ve ever had watching baseball

and i’m by myself, watching in my pajamas, no beer, no peanuts. it’s like a mastercard ad or something. only 2 innings left. someone pointed out to me today that if boston wins (!!) and houston wins, the world series, starting saturday, will be MASSACHUSETTS vs. TEXAS.

now tell me that isn’t the hotttest thing you can think of. the world is one big echo chamber. / god has a sense of humor.

on an unrelated note, earlier today i got a strong flash of college while walking down the 2nd avenue. i remembered walking into the sunshine of swarthmore’s prettiest courtyard, kohlberg, wearing my gold pleather skirt with the blue jacket over it and stopping to laugh with one friend after another. that will never happen again. college was the best social experience i could imagine. better socially than academically even, and that’s saying something. over the course of college, i became a sharper and more focused student and thinker; but more importantly, i think, i became a stable person, a better friend, and a girlfriend who could take the position seriously. as opposed to the kind of girlfriend i was when i was 13 and i thought nothing of breaking up with someone in a letter on valentines day.

the red sox fans all look so earnest. it’s heartbreaking. i respond to earnest, if i’m not too busy laughing at it.

have i mentioned i now love my job? i have a job, an apartment, and a fella, all of which that i love — so maybe it’s no wonder everything else that could come into play has. first my laptop was stolen. then i got a bad cold. then, of course, i heard that my dad had decided to make a brief stop in cheney, clinton, and charrow country. his heart’s mostly fine but my dad has never been in the hospital before, to my knowledge. even though he’s out again now, i’m tense.

the future of this country, and now my father as well. at least it’s the 9th innings and very soon i won’t have to worry about the red sox anymore. one way or the other.

a time for vonnegut

i feel a little like something the cat drug in. gone, the lithe mood of friday, when i sent off my absentee ballot to sway PA firmly into the column of righteousness. gone, the buoyancy of thursday brought on by the purchase of adorable shoes. gone the general good feeling of liking my new position and the increased proficiency at editing that comes with it. and hello: sick.

how frequently does one have to be sick in this city to prove one’s worth? ugh, don’t answer that. i liked new york better when it was warm.

however, not all is lost. i have yet to meet an editing challenge i could not overcome (sound-editing, not the wordy kind: i’m working with voiceovers). my cold has not reached heavyweight status. kerry is still bouncing, at least in some polls, and currently both slate and electoral-vote have him in the lead. i don’t care if it’s precarious, i just want the man to win and this country to come to its senses. roughly in that order.

i’m giving up

… passivity, that is! i’m tired of sitting on the sidelines, mesmerized by minute-by-minute election updates and extolling the virtues of my candidate only to friends, well-wishers, and the television, while my brother, my parents, some of my friends, and now even my boyfriend are giving of their time to the democrats. everyone has exciting plans to help take down bush in the swing states! or, if not, they’re learning spanish in the bronx or providing pro bono medical care in ethiopia! why am i the loosely moraled one? why do i prefer analysis to action?

no longer. if you can walk, you can dance, right? by that logic, if i can make several dozen phone calls a day scheduling auditions for actors, surely i can make several dozen phone calls to strangers in the midwest urging their presence on election day. er, or whatever the dnc has me do. (sell girl scout cookies? babysit infants? wet my pants on command? just how far will you go for john kerry?)

once upon a time, i went a-knockin’ in west philly for al. i need to summon up that bright-eyed passion again, assuming four years of rolling those bright eyes at swat activism didn’t knock it out of me irretrievably.

“it was the dream!”



my life is becoming weirdly, but distinctly, third world. the door to our building has broken, allowing joe “cat burglar” shmoe to waltz in off the street. my land-“slum”-lord has tartly informed us, residents of what’s now the least safe building in lower manhattan, that in compensation for putting our lives in jeopardy, he’ll be turning off the hot water for several days. maybe longer. until the red sox make it to the world series, he said. (currently in game one, it doesn’t look too good: yankees are up 7-0.)

to add insult to injury, my laptop got stolen. details, shmetails. it’s gone. have i mentioned i have malaria? just kidding. no malaria, only gallows humor.

my housemate dina, after hearing about the laptop misfortune, totally called it: “ester! it was the DREAM!” — see, i had this dream the night before last that i couldn’t decipher. two kittens were gambolling, like they do. one started tugging on the whisker of the other. the other kitten didn’t resist, and the first kept pulling, and pulling, and pulling, until he had pulled the other kitten’s heart out onto the floor.

now, is that an allegory, or is that an allegory? if only i could have figured out for what. or rather, if only i could have understood that ben was one kitten and joe “computer thief” shmoe was the other, and …

the red sox are never going to win this thing, are they. i should stop watching and go back to caring solely about politics. politics: the sport that never lets you down.

subways: the new gathering place



a swattie walked right into the E today. i watched him from my seat as he took hold of the metal bar directly in my sightline and defiantly refused to recognize me. only a stalker could have been so persistent: he was a swattie! i totally knew him! not his NAME or anything, but that rumpled hair, that sun-deprived skin, those glasses only a geek could love.

i determined he was following me.

a seat opened up; he didn’t take it. nor did he so much as glance my way. well, two can play at this game (i thought to myself). also, i thought, i’ve run into enough goddamn swatties in this city. how many times do i have to marvel at finding some slight acquaintance with whom i share an alma mater in the same car at the same time as i am, or on the same east village corner walking towards the city’s best pastries? how many awkward “hey, i kinda know you; what are you up to?” conversations do i have to hold with people i probably didn’t know, when it counted, for a reason? new conclusion!: don’t succumb to the temptation of greeting familiar faces with “aren’t you a swattie?”

happy with my new conclusion, when he followed me off into the west 4th street station, and down to the b,d/f,v transfer platform, i didn’t panic and i didn’t give in. the only problem is he subsequently disappeared and i still, dammit, don’t know who he was.

monday-morning quarterback



i don’t mean to imply that i could have taken dick cheney in that debate. far be it from me to dispute the wisdom of the dnc and the kerry campaign in picking edwards to tackle dick instead of lil ol me … in fact, i have six whole years less experience in politics than edwards and a whole lot fewer folksy american dream stories to draw from. i do like to think, though, that in edwards’ position i would have been angrier, pointier, and more personal in my attacks in response to cheney’s attacks.

because come on! this is the man who told leahy to go fuck himself. how’s that for an answer why cheney unfortunately failed to make friends across the aisle: he was too busy flicking them off with one hand while manually pleasuring the religious right with the other.

when cheney waxed poetical about little girls voting in afganistan, i would said, that’s cuddly and all, but how many little girls have died in civilian casualties in iraq? when cheney admitted he didn’t know anything about AIDS statistics for black women in america, i would have said, “buddy, we could fill a metaphorical fridge with the things you don’t know, & that detail there would be the relatively innocuous iceberg lettuce in the veggie crisper.”

i WOULD have gotten in the dig about cheney’s gay daughter and how great it is that he’s great about it, because that was priceless.

(rudepundit does this better than i do.)

edwards was all right. he was fine. his final statement, particularly. who knows, anyway? kerry was great and people seemed to shrug it off, nation-wide, and say, We’d still rather have the jackass we know than the windsurfer/flip-flopper that TV tells us we can’t trust. oh well. we’ll get the president we deserve and i for one am not moving to canada.

the trouble with happiness on a sunday afternoon



at some point, after you’ve finished the sublime bel canto and you’ve surfed all the internet your feeble, stolen connection will allow, you content yourself with fixating on electoral-vote.com and WILLING those red states to turn blue. who knows whether it will be your effort, or the effort of the brave footsoldiers of democracy going door to midwestern door, that will loosen the crimson grip on ohio? who knows anything anymore about political progress, except that no one’s allowed to be apolitical at the moment, and if you try, some earnest young fresh-faced traveler will intrude on your peace, clipboard in hand, more persistent than the jehovah’s witnesses ever were.

oh, and i wish the democrats would stop saying that this isn’t a popularity contest. of course it is. of course every election is. the republicans know that: that’s why they run popular people. we sound peevish when we complain, peevish and naive. besides, i don’t remember any such complaining when clinton ran against dole.

miss manicure, or, the manicured ham

life is different when your nails are pink. you begin to entertain thoughts of buying a american flag label pin and a liveSTRONG! bracelet to go with it. you wonder idly about the plight of people to poor to afford lapel pins and liveSTRONG! bracelets and then realize you don’t care. the poor are ugly. you consider a lap dog, a beach house, candidacy on the Apprentice.

actually, finally getting my manicure & pedicure courtesy of ben’s step-mom’s gift certificate didn’t change me in any fundamental ways. too bad, no? i was half-hoping each stroke of the tiny paint brush would whisper republican ideas in my head and i’d have to struggle valiantly against the mind-control of the sinister foot jacuzzi.

i don’t even feel particularly girlier. ah well.

ben & i also took advantage of ben’s step-mom’s other gift certificate, one to whole foods. have you ever been to whole foods? has any other store ever made you more want to pirouette down the aisles? life is so good in whole foods, once known as fresh fields and forever known as The Only Place to Shop if You’re a Yuppie at Heart and Yearn for Organic Asparagus and Quinoa Cakes the Way Some Folks Yearn for the Red Sox to Finally Get Their Shit Together For Real. whole foods is a direct catapult into a good mood & whole foods with a GIFT CERTIFICATE is heaven on a stick.

so excuse my good mood going into this next week. kerry’s whuppin of w. was enough to keep me in smiles through friday, and i’m hoping my shiny tips, in conjunction with two more debates and the lingering aromas of whole foods, will prolong the condition.

and we have a winner in florida!

i mean, don’t we? wasn’t that clear, concise and obvious? it was certainly everything i was hoping for last night. true, there wasn’t one “knockout punch” & kerry didn’t tear into g.w. like a bengal tiger or, y’know, dean would have. gentlemen, i think that was part of his strategy. he wanted to prove that, despite his stance on iraq, he is not merely Dean v2.1, the Presidential Dean. he wanted to prove that he is Kerry!, as in Kerry, President Kerry, at your service, sir.

the tone remained civilized. and as much as possible in a civilized debate, i think kerry proved himself to be calm, restrained, intelligent, forthright, and as unflip-floppy as the empire state building, while bush babbled and blinked and repeated himself. ben and i were both thrilled. now, maybe the company won’t come waltzing matilda with us just yet; i understand, and have understood over this election, how far out of the mainstream i am. and not in a hipster way either. just in a way that means that, when i meet someone who isn’t sure about kerry or bush — in other words, one of the precious and coveted swwwwwwwing voters — i have no idea what to say. i become virtually bush, staring at jim lehreh, squinting and sweating and trying to figure out whether kerry has called me a liar and whether i have to defend myself. all i can do is chuckle awkwardly and say, i don’t take it personal.

in short, my friends, i felt like kerry proved himself last night to actually be a person a person could get excited about. to me that was what he had to do, and good lord, how exciting it is when a fella delivers!