stopping in here real quick to gain some direction for the ridiculous paper i've got to write tonight.

my life is not as depressing as this blog seems to portray. or at least not right now. maybe it was then...in hindsight everything is skewed. our brain plays that trick on us. but yeh, pretty sure maybe it was that sad...

i caught the news at noon today. it featured two successful business women who were so influenced by seeing the Dolly Llama (i find myself hilarious) two years back at Key Arena in Seattle, that they woke up the next morning, quit their 6-figure paying jobs and set out to make a difference in lives of others. I listened, intruiged a bit, waiting to hear what noble task their jobs were traded in for. my mind went to an orphanage in some eastern block country, or adopting kids or medical relief or you know, something of significance. um...they wrote a book. a stupid book. a worthless stupid book of inspirational quotes (because there aren't enough of those already?) what a serious bummer to miss the mark in such a disappointing way. keep your high-paying job and use your money for good sounds like a better method than marketing a useless book.

i find my capitalizations sneaking back in. blame it on school. e.e. cummings was so misunderstood.

last night was spent with nick reading Common Sense outloud. how simply it explains the purpose of government. most of all it brought reminder that in all of our social progress we really have left good vocabulary behind. it's might as well be a lost form of art.

amy graduates from kindergarten today! she is thrilled only for the fact that by it she can now say she is a first grader. simple pleasures :) i can't believe i've been her nanny for so long. geez...

i read the words to Cruel and Pretty last night. it's become one of our favorite songs with the rich, lazily sung..."meet me in the back streets of heaven..." but the title really sums up it's sad story:

He woke
He knew that he was dying
He spoke
And found that he was flying
Upstairs
High above the city
Through the ceiling of the stars
So cruel and pretty

Arms spread across the dark river
The night air causing him to shiver
Like the fluorescent lights in the Seven Eleven
Meet me in the backstreets of heaven

I don't wanna kiss you goodbye
I don't wanna kiss you goodbye
Hello, hello, hello, how the time flies
I don't wanna kiss you goodbye
otr

Read it.

Tim Geithner — Really cool guy. Super job on that bank bailout thing. Look at the way the stock market jumped. Way better Treasury secretary than last week’s Tim Geithner, who seemed a lot ... shorter.

Barack Obama — Kinda boring. Did you see the news conference? Same thing over and over again. Not that we mind. In these troubled times, we like stability. Thank God we didn’t elect somebody who was all charisma and exciting speeches.

Eliot Spitzer — He was the only one who got it, really got it, about A.I.G. before the big collapse. Great New York attorney general. What ever happened to him?

TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility) — This is the thing Tim Geithner is doing, and, you know, whatever Tim wants ... We like TALF much, much better than TARP, which was the brainchild of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who had that dumb idea about buying up all the bank’s toxic assets. Which is what Tim is going to do, except it’s going to be way cooler.

Financial industry — We still hate Wall Street. Although when it sends the stock market up, it makes us like Tim Geithner even more.

In summary, there appear to be only two constants in our ever-changing world. One is that Barack Obama is going to be on television every day forever. No venue is too strange. Soon, he’ll be on “Dancing With the Stars” (“And now, doing the Health Care, Energy and Education tango ...”) or delivering the weather report. (“Here we see a wave of systemic change, moving across the nation ...”)

The other immutable truth is that we always need to have somebody we can be really, really angry at. The A.I.G. bonus-takers have pretty much worn out their 15 minutes. In an Op-Ed article in The Times on Wednesday, Jake DeSantis, one of the executive vice presidents of the company’s dreaded financial-products unit, offered up his side of the story about how even though he had never met a credit default swap in his life, he had promised to stay around to help clean up the mess for $1 a year and a bonus at the end of the tunnel. And then, suddenly, there was the head of the company throwing him to the wolves, or at least to the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises.

It reminded me of a time when I was in college and got a summer temp job at the purchasing department of a widget factory in Brooklyn. The office manager, who stayed hidden away in his office, had given all the power to one assistant manager, the golden Colin from England, while Colin’s two co-workers, Bernie and Frank, had nothing to do but sit around grinding their teeth.

Colin was on vacation when I arrived, and as time went on, it became increasingly clear that he was never coming back. The manager stayed in his office — and in denial. The factory started running out of everything, including toilet paper. I invented a new filing system in which all incoming letters and phone messages were divided by the number of times the petitioner had previously attempted to contact Colin. It was a big hit.

The next time I came through Brooklyn, the widget factory was gone. But suppose that instead of a small manufacturing firm, it had been an international insurance giant and Colin was selling complicated financial products based on risky mortgages? Trust me, Bernie and Frank would have expected to be paid really big bucks for cleaning up after him.

The country needs a new, improved villain. This is not a problem in New York, since we have a state government so awful that we barely noticed this week when prosecutors revealed that the state pension fund scandal is intertwined with a deal to sell DVDs of a movie called “Chooch.” The governor is terrible, and the Legislature is terrible and — we need Eliot Spitzer! Whatever happened to him, anyway?

In Congress, the person currently giving the Obama administration heartburn is Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the chairman of the Budget Committee. But this is a guy whose biggest claim to fame is that when making a budget speech, he uses so many charts that the Senate gave him his own printing equipment. I am not seeing a great target for pitchfork-waving.

Something will turn up. If Tim (Great Guy!) Geithner’s bank bailout plan works, it will mean quadrillions of dollars in profits for hedge fund managers who are already billionaires, and I can absolutely guarantee you that we are not going to be pleased. Then we can turn on him again. And Eliot Spitzer can become the next secretary of the Treasury.

Roland Barthes, the French theorist and semiotician, once wrote that sex is everywhere in America, except in sex. For the past 40 years, the same has been true for socialism, which has been simultaneously nowhere and everywhere in America, falsely denied by its politics and falsely claimed by its popular culture. As the federal government puts the finishing touches on its plan to effectively nationalize America's banking system, Steven Soderbergh's four-and-a-half-hour epic Che is opening in select theaters, and its hero could have scarcely imagined that it would be America's first M.B.A. president who would oversee the proletariat's glorious march to the workers' control of the means of production. Alan Greenspan, meanwhile, the prophet of capitalism, has traded his coat of many colors for Job's sackcloth and ashes ("I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works"), and though Obama spent the month of October denying that he is a socialist, his inauguration is upon us and the point is moot. Socialism, real, perceived, or simply misunderstood, has exploded into prominence, and Americans are scrambling to make sense of it in this new age of Obama.

Since the '60s, the Hollywood Left has preferred its socialism vague and mushy — a feel-good unattainable ideal, preferably starring Warren Beatty — rather than a system of government that can actually be put into practice (as it is in Europe). And though Soderbergh has made a movie that even Castro likes — El Jefe approved it for screening at the Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana — Che will hopefully cause people to ask themselves whose face they're wearing. If you believe in the freedom of the press, the right to belong to a political party of your choice, the due process of law, and/or private property, then Che Guevara was a monster, plain and simple. But even with that knowledge, it's unlikely that Johnny Depp will get rid of his Che medallion. And it's unlikely that all the pseudo-hipsters who buy their Che T-shirts at Urban Outfitters will stop wearing them. No. These T-shirts send a message, which effectively boils down to this: I have vague left-wing sympathies but don't read history. I am educated enough to want nonconformity but not intelligent enough to avoid conformity. I believe in supporting the wretched of the earth but happily purchase products from multinational corporations.

It's all part of a long history of reducing the genuine struggles of peoples around the world for social justice to pretty baubles, from Jane Fonda's Radio Hanoi broadcasts to Madonna mugging in guerrilla gear to TV personality Tim Vincent wearing a hammer-and-sickle shirt on Access Hollywood. In 2007, Cameron Diaz carried a Maoist messenger bag while sightseeing in Peru and was forced to apologize — 70,000 Peruvians were murdered by the Maoist Shining Path in the '80s and '90s. At least with Che chic, the idiocy is dreamy and romantic and you can pretend that wearing his face is all about being young, riding motorcycles, and having South American-level sex; Mao was responsible for the death of 60 million people — he makes Hitler look like an amateur.

Cameron Diaz is not, of course, a communist. She's a ditz — that's her ideology. Her Mao bag was tasteless, not evil. And she's far from alone in her tastelessness. The coolest literary bar in New York is KGB in the East Village — the 92nd Street Y for young writers — and it's full of Soviet propaganda. In Toronto, I was once in a bar called Pravda that had, alongside Lenin and Che, a picture of Felix Dzerzhinsky on the wall: He founded the Cheka, Lenin's secret police, and described his own job as "organized terror." There are communist-chic bars and restaurants in Melbourne, Australia, and Singapore, too, and the trend has recently returned to its birthplace. In Berlin, the hotel Ostel re-creates, in minute detail, the experience of living under Soviet rule in the GDR. You check in at "Border Control." Images of party leaders stare down from the walls like the Big Brothers of yore, and Ostel even has a roll of GDR-era toilet paper under glass in the lobby. Hilarious. Nothing shows the defeat of tyranny more thoroughly than its reclamation by nostalgia.

And so dead politics return as public dreams, with the same process neutering the kaffiyeh, the cooling head scarf traditionally worn by Palestinian peasants that now warms the necks of trust-fund kids. Here's how this erstwhile symbol of solidarity with the downtrodden became a status totem: Yasir Arafat → sympathetic old-lady professors at Berkeley → their worshipful students → the guys they go to Sam Roberts concerts with → Rachael Ray in a Dunkin' Donuts ad. With each exposure, the political symbol loses meaning. Which is why Che's face isn't appropriate for community organizers anymore; it suits pro poker players at Vegas nightclubs much better.

Obama has promised fresh politics, new in substance, new in style. We'll see. Like FDR and LBJ before him, he has had to reject the title of "socialist." But let's face it: McCain was on to something back in October when he croaked in a radio address, "At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are up-front about their objectives." (Obama was busy texting his supporters.) BHO's predecessors cloaked their agendas with camouflage terminology, the "New Deal" and the "Great Society," and Obama may yet find some similarly palatable euphemism for his attempt to strengthen the core of the federal government through massive infrastructure overhaul, universal health care, and, yes, higher taxes and redistribution of wealth. But already the way we perceive and process world events is changing. Shepard Fairey's Obama posters have been the most successful political art in half a century — the grimy, brutalist images reminiscent of nothing so much as the socialist-realist propaganda from World War II and the Spanish civil war, the era when America crushed fascism and built the strongest middle class in the world. What the Fairey posters show is that Generation O is embracing the political aesthetics of their grandparents, and like many of their grandparents, they don't really care what you call them. Socialist, pragmatist, vegetable, mineral: Obama's followers want results, on the financial crisis, the environment, and the war in Iraq. Who has time to watch four-and-a-half-hour movies about dead guerrillas?

that's right.

life is what you make of it.

i love a night laughing with friends. i've changed so much over these years, in some ways for better (only because i know now that i don't have it all figured out nor are required to).

it has snowed far too much. all i want for christmas is rain. puddles and puddles of rain and no snow. i have not ceased to be fickle.

i bought kwanzaa gift wrap today. and giggled at the thought of wrapping all of nick's gifts in the seven principles of blackness.

happy christmas time! make happy fun memories!

i'm procrastinating...psych paper needs to be written tonight.

today amy and i watched Frosty the Snowman...??? how did that movie ever become a classic? seriously. just plain retarded. really. watch it and tell me you don't agree. i dare you.

and all day amy sang, "Jolly, the snowman..." everytime i corrected her that his name is Frosty, she just shrugged and said "I like to call him Jolly." Well then, there you have it. Jolly.

i entertained 73-year-old Doug today over coffee as he told me tales of his glory days as police commissioner, complete with shoot-outs and car chases. i like to think i made him feel 20 again. at least his smile looked that way.

tonight (after i write my paper of course) i put up my christmas tree :) i've already got dominic the italian donkey in my head. which means it will be a fine night....

election speak. deal with it. it's the last day.

what's with all the talk about how the US is viewed internationally, how Obama is going to change the world's view of america? really? so after today france will be our friend? all that nations that hate us will now love us? are you serious? what does that even matter! this is such a high school drama of an election. america has been liberally reduced to the 16 year old highschool girl who just wants everyone to like her.

for the love. come on.

you know, i remember the day when i realized my parents were not super human, nor were they even close to having it all together. i saw them as the confused, figuring-it-out-as-they-go giants kids they really were. the majority needs to have this wake-up call with the government.