the irony is killing me

As if life weren’t complicated enough… It seems that every time I sit down, or turn around, or even think about doing something for myself for a change, the world hands me a pile of extra shit to deal with. It’s like “oh, you’re stressed? Well, I think you can handle THIS too!” and shovels all sorts of crap at me. Right now, suffice it to say that I’m finding life to be a bit overwhelming. I have a list and its longer than I will get into here but it can be borken into categories.

School: The list of all the little things I need to do is shorter now, there are only 2 things left and one is proving to be an extreme pain in the arse. Moving: the how, where, when and what of that is all up in the air and that makes me anxious. Not the least of which is how to get the cats over there with the minimum angst. Teenager and her particular curve ball at this moment (which is the source of my toxic irony). I have that image of Jack Bristow in Alias staring Vaughn down and saying “One thing you’re not, is wise,” before turning and stomping off to save his daughter. Then there is J and his health and my inordinate tendency to worry. And then there’s work.

Fuck… I need a holiday.

Posted in journal | No Comments » | Tags: obsessobsessobsess, random stupidity, rant, step-parenthood, teenage angst, wicked stepmother, wtf

I’m spinning it tight…

I was going to write a blog about how I detest some of the programming that’s on TV – how I think reality TV is watchable only in a train wreck sense: how it’s impossible to tear your eyes away even though you know that some television network is exploiting people for money, and that those same people are allowing themselves to be exploited for money and or whatever dubious fame they can achieve. It’s sick. And it’s a symptom of just how sick our world is. What’s next? A reality TV show following the next teen gunman? How far is too far? How desensitised can we be to violence, mistreatment and exploitation before we lose our core humanity?

Bre was watching Robot Chicken the other night and the disclaimer at the beginning said that it was for 18+ and I said off hand that she should probably not be watching it then and she threw me attitude. She doesn’t even get all the jokes and every other frame has someone being raped, beaten, stabbed or otherwise killed and/or humiliated, albeit in cartoon fashion. I remember when people were upset about the violence in bugs bunny. We have lost our subtlety

Granted I’m not one for censorship; people should be allowed to express their feelings and show how they see the world as they see fit. I’m an advocate of free speech – but at the same time I’m worried about how much is too much. There is a line whether we like it or not and mass media has left it far, far behind because sensation sells.

For instance, the kid who committed suicide on a webcam –what led him to such drastic measures for attention? How can a kid think that shooting everyone in his school will somehow end his pain? How does a man just decide to decapitate the man sitting next to him on a bus? Where did we get so disconnected? (No, I’m not blaming mass media for these behaviours any more than I can blame a violent video game - it’s how people process the input that causes the rift, the disassociation if you please - and there does not seem to be the tools available to help people differentiate and/or make sense of the crap versus the not-crap - or rather the people to teach these differences and supply the tools.)

I can see a prime example in teenagers today. Parents are either too self-absorbed or too busy to pay much more than the cursory attention to thier children. They end up appeasing thier guilt and/or the kids with gifts and bribes and by letting them get away with the most outrageous of behaviour, and now these kids have this sense of entitlement that seems to be a trademark of the generation. That’s oversimplifying, I know but the fault lies in thier upbringing, more than on the state of the universe. Though mass media: the Internet, TV, you name it, feeds the consumer tendency, that doesn’t mean anyone has to buy into it. But because it’s there and it’s so prevalant and, for the most part, unregulated by parents… they watch things they don’t entirely have the capacity to deconstruct in a useful manner and where does that leave them? (And if not regulated, then parents are not taking the time to deconstruct or interpret the content with these kids - I tell you I’ve had some interesting conversations about Robot Chicken recently…)

Why is it so hard to give each other attention? That’s all we really want and need at the end of the day: to feel loved and appreciated by someone. When we don’t get that we feel less than ourselves. Am I wrong? I don’t think so.

So we look outside of ourselves to reinforce the way we feel about ourselves. If we don’t have people to do this for us we turn to food, alcohol, drugs, media, to make us feel better. Food to fill the void, alcohol and drugs to alter our emotional state – though that never lasts for long- media because there’s always some poor sap who’s worse off than we are. It’s a weird kind of one-upmanship.

Whatever happened to those feel-good programs? You know, like ‘on the road again’ and such, where the host would visit these people with extraordinary tales of survival, creativity and accomplishment. I miss those! Where is our pride? We’re a mess, people.

listening to: Tori Amos - Strong Black Vine

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » | Tags: rant, thinky, wtf

i’ll be standing my ground, till the light’s out

You know, I don’t write here enough, and when I do it seems to merely be to bitch and moan about something or to update my nonexistant readership on the random crap of my life. Or to rant. I think I’d like to challenge myself to write something more than that. Or make my rants actually have a point. Or just maybe a little more interesting, because you know, lame otherwise.

On that note, I found my archives. I really did rename them something totally illogical. Go me. Seriously, where do I get off freaking myself out unnecessarily like that when I already have other crap in my brain. Heh… probably more likely that it was a symptom of the other shit in my brain, but no matter how you look at it, I freaked out for nothing. Nothing is missing. *breathes* (And no one cares but me really, anyway.) Not that it was a huge thing, there are only a couple of posts that I think are actually worth keeping, but it’s like a diary for me - a record of myself… and I’ve been better at keeping up with the blog than I have with anything that I have in a note book - those always turn into compilations of fiction, poetry and crap I’ve glued in. Those are also fun.

I’ve been a tad nostalgic recently because so many people I’ve reconnected with over facebook seem to have got married or reproduced and it got me thinking about the things we thought we wanted to do when we first knew each other in junior and senior high school. One of my girlfriends had this huge list of things she wanted to accomplish before she was 30, and she’s actually managed most of them, motherhood among them. Me? Well, I’ve not grabbed the bull by the proverbial horns. Granted I thought that by now I’d be a Marine Biologist, married and living on the beach somewhere, but hey, not all of it is totally unrealistic. I kind of wish for simpler times when I had life ahead of me, but most of me is just kind of fed up with myself. Hello! Time to get going on things. I’ve let life just go along. Yeah, my clock is ticking, biological and otherwise and it’s time I did something about it.

Random: I saw my first old lady mullet last week. Perm in the front, braid in the back. Way classy.

Oh, and a word of glee here: Kiddo also likes the smell of books - as in she sniffs them just like I do - she just did it while she was reading the back of my newest addition to my rabid collection. She is One Of Us. Mwahahahahaha. /evil.

listening to: Roisin Murphy - Modern Timing
reading: Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (Why have I not read this before??)
eating: macachee (ugh, whole wheat noodles are fail)
drinking: not enough
word count: 203
darling du jour: a decent boss kill in WoW. (Yes, I said it. Deal)

Posted in commonplace book | 1 Comment » | Tags: geek, just to say, oh smeg, random stupidity, wtf

in which I am foiled by the post office

Yesterday I was surprised to find in our mailbox one of those little flyer things that tell you there’s a package waiting for you at the post office. So I was kind of excited, I mean this is the first actual mail addressed to me that’s come to this apartment. Not a huge deal, but one of those things that makes a place feel more like home than just a place you’re living, you know?

So anyway, J has his boss’s truck so he offered to drive us over to the little plaza where the post office outlet is. So we scooted on over there before the office to close to pick up my package. We go in and the lady asks if she can help us, so I pass over the little card and she scans it and then disappears in the back room - and comes back out with a phone book.

A fucking yellow pages phone book. I mean that the hell?

We got a phone book the first day we moved in because there was a stack of them in the foyer of the building. I mean I suppose it’s a nice gesture from the farking phone company (who, by the way, took seven - yes, SEVEN - days to move our phone over to the right address and then a couple more to even figure out that they had to flick a switch so we could also have the internet we paid for…) upon our move from one place to another. But come on. Leave the thing in the apartment foyer, it’s not like anyone is going to steal the stupid thing is it? And if they did, I doubt I’d really miss it.

Total letdown. Cripes.

As for the phone company that hosed us on the transfer? Yeah, toast. We decided to move to the cable company for digital phone and cable internet. Of course, that means we now have basic cable and that the bloody TV is now on almost 24-7.

listening to: PMDawn - Paper Doll
reading: Stephen King - On Writing

Posted in journal | 1 Comment » | Tags: wtf