Category: Personal

I’m doing well, still ahead of schedule, having written a bit this weekend.

Topic: Personal

As usual, Get Your War On is right on:

For those of you who are considering fleeing the U.S. to avoid another four years of life in Roveistan, Harper’s has a not very helpful guide to changing your citizenship, which suggests that moving permanently to another country is only slightly harder and will take only slightly longer than getting a Democrat elected president (Edwards ’08! Obama ’16! Chelsea ’24!).

If you’re seriously thinking about heading out of town, though, you’d be better off at Dave’s ESL Cafe, where you can find jobs teaching English in Ethiopia, China, Japan, Bali, Kuwait and especially Korea. Oh, so many jobs in Korea!

This is the first time that an election result has actually left me physically injured. I woke up Wednesday morning with a horrific pain in my neck and left shoulder. By evening I had some visible swelling and my left side was obviously drooping when I looked at myself in the mirror (and not just because my apartment is a little slanty). I hadn’t done any heavy lifting, so I can only assume I was wounded by some combination of jaw-clenching stress and sleeping funny.It’s a bit better today, though. I’ll get better. We’ll get better. Last night I got an email from Moveon.org, which they have up on their website, and it made me feel hopeful.

This last election was obviously a dreadful failure for Democrats and liberals, but there were also some important developments that could be the seeds of a more successful future. Let’s make this our Goldwater ’64: a defeat in the present that revitalizes our side of the political spectrum and lays the groundwork for a generation of victories ahead. Fuck it: no more triangulation, no more DLC Liebermanesque Republicanism lite. We move right, they move further right and kick our asses. We need to go back to what the left has always been about: fairness, justice, and living up to our personal and collective responsibilities. And we need to fight hard.

I know, this is less a strategy than just an exhortation to come up with a strategy. But this country has drifted right for thirty years — we’re now well to the right of Nixon and Eisenhower on many issues — and it’s time to push it back the other way. I don’t know how, but we have to.

Through my friend’s blog, Blissfully Enparadoxed, I found a link to a nifty toy with which to track my NaNoWriMo progress:

Because I can’t stand to think about politics anymore today, here’s a NaNoWriMo update.

Word Count
Goal Today: 2,400
Actual Today: 2,307
Goal to Date: 7,200
Actual to Date: 7,254

Yesterday’s writing felt like it wasn’t going anywhere, but I feel like I made good progress today, and I’m actually feeling good about the overall shape of the thing again. The protagonist’s emotional dilemma is sufficiently complex and ambiguous, and I’ve managed to get him to relax about it enough that he feels real to me, which I was starting to worry about. I don’t want him moping like a Romantic dork over his sorrows, I want him carrying them around with him as he tries to live in the actual world. And I’ve managed to make him recognize that his personal tragedy is rather small in external terms — not that this necessarily makes it easier for him to deal with, but it’s a requirement if I’m going to send him wandering around India, looking serious misery in the face.

I shared the plot with Daniel and was pleased that he seemed to think it works. He’s a skilled and experienced director, so this means that my story has some drama behind it.

But enough about my story. One day, hopefully I can just post my story instead of the story about my story.

So the Boston Redsox broke the curse — and under a lunar eclipse, no less. This, taken with this year’s quartet of hurricanes over Florida, must be taken as a sign that God is backing John Kerry for president. What other conclusion could one draw?