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I’m looking at pictures of Jenna Bush’s wedding, and I’m wondering what the hell is up with her sister, Barbara.

Why is she posing like that? With all of the thrusting?

I really don’t care how many kids Michelle Duggar has, I’m just so, so glad she got rid of that hideous hairdo.

I’m done. Seriously. I can’t take your bullshit anymore. Go ahead and have some more genocide and war or whatever the hell it is that you’re into. You’ve obviously lost your shit. I’m going to go look into colonizing Mars or something.

I have about 7 weeks left of this semester.

It might as well be 700 years.

In the fall I’m taking another core course and a seminar, so it’ll be about 1.5 classes. That will be very nice. I had planned on steaming through, taking two courses in spring 09 and two more in fall 09, but honestly I don’t think I can do it. I’m so unhappy. SO unhappy. There’s no point in pushing through this so quick if I don’t have enough time or energy to do quality work and I’m fucking up in all areas of my life.

I think I could probably handle doing one course in spring 09, doing this other required course in summer 09, one course in fall 09, and then one more in spring 10 (010?). So I’ll finish one whole semester later than I planned.

I WANT to finish as soon as possible, but I seriously don’t want to feel like this anymore. I oscillate between wanting to drink, cry, or throw myself off a bridge and sometimes all three. I only took one psychology class in college, but something tells me that’s not healthy.

Plus, the longer I take, the more time I have to figure out what I might possibly want to do with this degree…what I CAN do.

Ugh. Tell me funny stories, guys. I need some cheer.

Completely unrelated, I read the transcript of that speech that Obama gave yesterday. I was really glad that he spoke pretty bluntly about race and privilege and pretty much stated, “Guess what? Slavery fucked things up royally and the situation still hasn’t been rectified and continues to shape our economy and our society to this day,” because people need to hear that shit. But I felt uncomfortable that he kept driving home the point that his pastor was WRONG WRONG WRONG OMG HE’S SO STUPID. I wish he would have said, “I can disagree with my pastor because I have a mind of my own and surprise! You do too! And maybe we should stop making rules and laws based on what a very few religious dudes deem ‘right.'”

Hi, there.

So, the good news is that my tooth is fine. The dentist didn’t see any evidence that any of my teeth broke or chipped and thinks that it must have been some excess from one of my white fillings that fell out. The husband speculated that maybe it was someone else’s piece of broken tooth that fell in my food.

I think I’m going to stick with the dentist on this one.

In any case, he better be right because if I have to go have a root canal in three months, I’m not paying for it nor I will pay for the general anesthesia and the huge bottle of Vicodin that I will insist upon. (Read: I really don’t like painful dental work or oral surgery and do what I can to prevent it.)

In other physical malady news, the baby has some nice excema on his face. It’s not too bad; you can’t tell by looking at him that his skin is all gross. I only discovered it the other day when I was grabbing his face to squish it. My exclamation of “Ew!” startled him, but I reassured him and told him the truth about the situation: “Son, you’re turning into a lizard.” Anyway, I’m slathering him with cortisone as much as he’ll let me.

He’s watching Ultraman right now, which is totally educational: he needs to either learn to read much faster to catch the subtitles or figure out how to speak Japanese. I’m practically homeschooling the kid right now, you know?

We went to Incredibly Strange Video last night to take advantage of their liquidation sale. Sadly, Bruce, the owner, has decided to close up shop. We’re all very bummed about it, since the experience of going to the store and finding weird little movies to enjoy is very fun and, I think, very valuable for the baby. I want him to know that whatever is presented and advertised to you isn’t always the best thing available, that sometimes you have to search for the things that really speak to you.

I stocked up on a few campy cult classics because I think I have some deep-seeded desire to open a drive-in. The baby talked to Bruce about Godzilla for awhile and they posed for a picture together.

Of course, none of this ruminating about the loss of an indie gem has been helping my mood as of late. This crap was only the precursor to a few days of emotional fuckery. I feel better today overall. But a lot of times it feels like I’m short-circuiting.

Broken in a good way. It’s officially spring break! Ugh, such a relief.

Last night, we watched the first episode of this new show called New Amsterdam that we DVR’ed the other day. It sounded pretty intriguing in the CNN article.

About ten minutes into it, I realized something interesting: I fucking hate that show. It’s just so corny and melodramatic and embodies everything I hate about network TV. And I started ranting about, “What the hell am I going to enjoy watching after Sunday when The Wire ends? Seriously. How will anything ever compare to that show?”

Obviously, nothing ever will. The Wire really is sort of a freak of art and television. Something that monumentally wonderful and tragic and god damned true only comes along maybe once in a lifetime. But it got me thinking, and I was still rolling around some thoughts from an interview I did last night with the guy behind Tiger Lou, Rasmus Kellerman. His music is fairly upbeat but still kind of dark and he noted that some of the things that are inspiring him lately are the soundtrack to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the movie Wonder Boys, which is one of his favorites.

Think of some of the best movies that came out this past year…There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Radiohead released In Rainbows. And I’ve been gravitating to art that can only be described as bleak. Nearly everyone I know and read describes feeling a nagging blueness. Even with the upcoming election, which will finally free us from the shameful Bush administration and possibly give us a president who is black or a woman, something I never would have expected to see in my lifetime, there isn’t much optimism to be had. I fear that the change that we all crave is still years away, if it’s there at all.

I think we’re heading into an age that pop-historians might later call The Great Melancholy. Translation: everyone is fucking bummed out and disgusted. And I think we’re starting to see this in the art that we create. The only genuine feelings seem to be those of cynicism, especially since the people chosen to give us hope (memoirists of survival come to mind) turn out to be complete liars. We’re being sold fake hope, fake perseverance. And we’re so congested with bullshit that our resistance is low. Bring it on. We’ll buy it. Then we’ll get pissed for being duped because we’re idiots.

Am I getting too deep and morose for a Friday? Sorry. Here, have some Izzard (who we’re going to see on May 21st! EEEEEE!)

This shit is just the greatest thing I’ve read today.

Angela and I were all atwitter over this story. Want to know what’s so great about it? Several things (loosely transcribed from my chat with Angela):

me: on the one hand, fuck her. but on the other, no one would have TOUCHED that book if it was written by a black woman who had actually experienced that shit

Angela: I am utterly giddy over what this exposes about publishing and journalism.
This is awesome.

me: oh my god, this so ties in with the wire this season! and how good people lie and do wrong things in order to get the good things done…though i think she was more of a fame-seeking turd
but still

Angela: Oh, this story gets better and better. Fucking Inga Muscio referred this asshole to the editor in the first place!

Angela: “Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks” in South-Central”
Kelly. This story is making my day.

me: THE SOUTH CENTRAL STARBUCKS OMFG

me: “Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks” in South-Central, where “I would talk to kids who were Black Panthers and kids who were gang members and kids who were not.””
so the black panthers and the bloods and the crips all gather at starbucks.
compelling stuff

Angela: We should totally visit there and write a book.

me: oh my god, seriously
“g-money and i bonded over lattes. but i was intrigued by his choice of soy milk”
“and i thought, ‘someone should give these people a voice.'”

I used to hate Bill O’Reilly because I thought he was a horrible person, but now I hate the people that put him on TV every night. Because it’s obvious to me that he’s mentally handicapped and the producers and writers and directors that continue to broadcast his shit are obviously exploiting the fact that he will say things that are just, for lack of a better word, retarded. Honestly, I feel bad for him.

Semi-related: I’m now thoroughly convinced, and I’m not the first person to speculate this at all, that Ann Coulter is a long-running piece of performance art who has brilliantly infiltrated the Right to spew nonsense at them, which they LOVE and which befuddles the Left because we’re stupid and can’t take a joke. You can’t tell me otherwise.

Fred Phelps is also performance art. Seriously. Watch closely, people. This is a cultural revolution in progress. It’s like Cecil B. Demented but way fucking stupider. And I don’t think Stephen Dorff is involved.

The mother-in-law picked the baby up from school on Wednesday, and when we got to her house to pick him up, I noticed a smudge on his forehead. The mother-in-law had indeed taken him to Ash Wednesday services and had indeed asked the priest to “bless” the baby and, according to her, he just happened to bless him with his ash thumb.

Now, she’s pulled this subversive Catholicisim stuff before and I don’t appreciate it. Because while I’m not against the baby practicing some sort of religion, I really don’t want anyone besides me or the husband dishing it out with him. I don’t want him getting the idea that Catholicism, or any religion, is superior to any other, which is what I’m pretty sure will happen if I put his religious education in the hands of the mother-in-law. I say that because when we griped at her for the ashes, she snotted that it’s not like they were off doing witchcraft or weird rituals.

And, like…ugh. Dude. Just because you grew up with them and you happen to live in a country where Catholicism is mainstream, doesn’t mean that you’re not doing rituals and that they wouldn’t be perceived as weird to other cultures. I mean, doesn’t one of the main rituals involve eating the body and blood of Christ? Plus there’s chanting and incense and bells and dudes in robes. Shit. Put that outside on a solstice and add some topless bitches. THEN tell me how it’s not like witchcraft.

Anyway, Bolt asked the mother-in-law about this and the mother-in-law told her what she also told us, which is that we all used to go to church and loved it. And we should be repentant for our sins. God, back off lady. And then she added that when we discovered this thing called independent thought, we would surely return to the church.

Quoi? I mean, not to say that all practicing Catholics or whatever are devoid of independent thought, but, uh, my independent thought is what led me to peace out from the church quite some time ago.

But, seriously, if I’m doing my thing and being a good person and Catholics are doing their thing and being good people, can’t we all just get along leave each other the hell alone?

Anyway, I was thinking about the upcoming presidential election yesterday. I don’t know, it seems to be the hip, in thing to do these days. Also, this piece on Jezebel got me thinking, because I do think it’s bullshit that women’s tendency to cry more than men is perceived as a sign of weakness. I think it was Wanda Sykes who said that God made women the weaker sex because otherwise we would just go around beating the shit out of people.

I mean, I cry when I’m sad or devastated obviously, but I also cry when I’m angry and it’s so annoying. I wish I could stop because I think it gives the objects of my anger an opportunity to be like, “Oh, whatever, she’s not THAT angry.” And it’s like, “No, I AM, motherfucker. I just can’t box for shit and I’m furious and everything’s starting to, like, SEEP or something. Here, why don’t you just choke yourself with my hand and we’ll call it even. Cool?.”

But, yeah, the presidential election. Folks are grasping onto the two times that Hilary has managed to hint at crying and prove that this is why a woman can’t handle being president. Fuck that. Hilary is just as self-serving and psychotically ambitious and centrist-serving as any other person that makes a serious run for president…which is what makes her campaign and Obama’s campaign such a drag. I got to thinking about how I cry often about the state of the world. I mean, it just fucking bums me out, you know? I can’t imagine if I was the president and had access to ALL of the information of just how fucked we are…I would be splattered on the sidewalk outside of a tall building about 15 minutes into my administration.

Last night I read “Politics and the English Language” for class and one of the metaphors that George Orwell was already sick of way back in 1946 is “toe the line.” This irritates me because “toe the line” is one of my favorite metaphors ever. It makes me think of petulant people in black catsuits staring at a line in the sand in some version of nowhere. In my vision, these ne’er-do-wells mischievously tap the line with the tips of their toes much to the dismay of the people who drew it.

How can anyone hate “toe the line?” Look how much fun I’m having with it!

There’s also that scene in Three Amigos where Ned draws the line and says, “Men or mice?” At least I think that’s how it goes.

Also, for your consideration: CNN is the new National Enquirer. The 00s are the new 80s. The new recession is going to kick the asses of all previous recessions on American Gladiators.

Eh, whatevs.