"Don't touch that thing, your mama gonna know." - Sylvia Hall, Don't Touch That Thing
I know I'm having a rough week when the fast food bags and containers start piling up on the living room table. When the random naps happen. When the workout motivation disappears. When I go 7 days without seeing people besides my co-workers. Yeah, it was one of those weeks.
I know what's causing these feelings. It's a mixture of things that I won't get into here but what I also know is that this is what happens when I let the world impact me instead of me impacting the world. I hinted at this in my post about to-do lists a few days ago but let's be explicit about it: I'm tired of waiting for things to happen. I'm going to be deliberate and emphatic about things I want and I'm not going to dilly dally.
I have neither the patience nor the physical or mental constitution for it. You know what time it is: Let's Go! Get Excited!!
- The best thing I saw this week: Catfish (Runner-Up: Season 2 of Fringe which I devoured this weekend)
- The best thing I heard this week: The shmoopy and honest answer is The Lady's voice on a Saturday afternoon but I don't do shmoopy so let's say Ra Ra Riot's The Orchard (Runner-Up: Bilal's Airtight's Revenge)
- What I'm Currently Reading: L.A. Noir (just started) and 100 Bullets Vol. 10: Decayed (I've loved 100 Bullets but my interest is finally starting to wane. After the strength of the last two volumes, this one's slow burn beginning has me wanting to skip ahead)
- The thing I read this week that most resonated:
What’s new and most distinctive about the Tea Party is its streak of anarchism—its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent style of self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns. In this sense, you might think of the Tea Party as the Right’s version of the 1960s New Left. It’s an unorganized and unorganizable community of people coming together to assert their individualism and subvert the established order. But where the New Left was young and looked forward to a new Aquarian age, the Tea Party is old and looks backward to a capitalist-constitutionalist paradise that, needless to say, never existed. The strongest note in its tannic brew is nostalgia. Tea Partiers are constantly talking about “restoring honor,” getting back to America’s roots, and “taking back” their country.
Why? Because as an outsider this is what it feels like. There's a bunch of anger, a lot of it misguided, with wild conspiracy theories mixed in with this very real and overwhelming fear that status and power is shifting. There's not really a way to fight that perception. People believe what they want to believe.
The only appropriate reaction is equivalent activism, primarily at the ballot box, and being overwhelmingly focused on seeking out and telling the right stories. Although, I find it very interesting that just two years after President Obama had everybody I know feeling active and engaged, the most compelling political figure today is Jon Stewart.
Hell, I'm trying to figure out if I can get to DC to Restore my Sanity at the end of next month, too. But there are weddings and such to plan and pay for, amongst other things.
It's hard being a grown-up.
