A friend, who recently had her first child, reminded me today that I once shared with her my opinion that people with children should pay more, not less, taxes. Gods, I feel like such an asshole now. Not for telling her that, but for today lying and saying I no longer believed it. Because I do. Having children is not something the state should be providing incentives for, in fact, just the opposite. People keep trying to tell me I only think that because I don’t like kids, and I don’t, but it’s more the fact that I’m paying for the little fuckers’ schools, and I’d much rather spend the money on an iPhone, thanks.

Here you go, Barack, a honey-do list.

0. Make every single person appointed by Bush compete for their jobs against, say, people who actually know what the fuck they’re doing. You know some of those. Start with State, then Justice, but do them all.
1. Top job for the GAO: we are hemorrhaging money like no other time in history. Review every single contract awarded under the Bush administration, starting with the no-bids. When signs of wrongdoing are discovered, fine the shit out of them. Use this money to take care of our troops after you bring them home.
2. You are going to become privy to some criminal acts at the highest levels of government. Prosecute them. We are a republic of laws. When the rule of law is subjugated, we are nothing. We have been nothing; as I write this we still are nothing. The electorate sent Pelosi with a mandate to get started on this two years ago. So, um, get to it y’all.
3. Start thinking about the Court, if you have not. Appeals to California Prop. 8 will be getting there within a couple of years, and that and Kelo V New London need to be your litmus tests.

Gods, I know I’m leaving so much out. But we’ll keep in touch, right?

I really can’t say anything right now. I am crying so hard I can’t talk and I can barely type.

Holy shit, we did it.

I mean, really, have truer words ever been spoken? It seems unbelievably strange to me that when I was 19 years of age I managed to write, on average, three paragraphs every day about the truly, dreadfully dull activities of my life. I suppose that’s the secret to creativity: just never realize the shit you have to say is tedious and tired, and keep practicing until eventually your ability to say something matches up with having something to say. There’s a negative aspect to that as well, of course; this marks the second post in a month-long project, and already I find myself slipping back into the mindset of mining my every experience, positive or negative, for its potential usefulness as blog fodder.

All of the preceding was a long way of saying that nothing particularly interesting happened today.

I did read the entirety of Alan Moore’s Watchmen series for the first time, all in one sitting. I recognized its influence on other things I’ve loved, caught homages I’d previously missed. That was certainly distracting. I still experience a dissatisfaction with the whole medium, though, borne of the monoculture you can just sense behind the page. Despite my longstanding devotion to what I guess we’re now calling genre fiction, the cultural disconnect I often feel with its other fans, and its creators, seems to be strongest when I try to read comics. I still don’t think I’ve ever read a funnybook that wasn’t the product of a room exclusively populated with white men.

I just slept for 16 hours. Probably should have just Nyquil’d up and gone to sleep last night instead of going out to a bar, but I did have fun. I think. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

Wow, writing something longer than 140 characters is harder than I recalled. NaBloPoMo is off to a raging start.

There’s a passage in Exile In Guyville where Dave White ends up, unexpectedly and suddenly, in some vastly reduced estate. I don’t remember specifically, but he writes about how he always knew he was destined to live in squalor. I’ve been fighting a rear-guard action against the same sort of fatalism over this last week. It’s exhausting, primarily because at every point where it would be easy to just give up and learn to deal with it, some hope is dangled. That Pandora was really a grade-A douchenozzle.

Also, I’m dreaming in prose again. All the stories are absurdist and cold and alienating. Snappy dialogue, though.

Downgrading hubby’s laptop from Ubuntu to XP. Knew it was inevitable, but still. Sad. Sadder still, I kept getting the dreaded “Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer” error, as apparently even in SP3 XP install CD’s don’t comprendo SATA drives¹. There’s a fix for that, using a program called nLite to create a custom install disk with drivers specific to your hardware… if the manufacturer has made available XP drivers for your hardware. Naturally, no such drivers exist for this hardware. Twats. Fortunately the motherboard manufacturer is not quite so stupid², and you can set it to emulate IDE to the operating system. Not sure what sort of issues I’m going to run into down the road on that one, but at least I can, bare minimum, get an OS onto the hardware. Well, something not totally dissimilar to an OS, anyway.

¹ I fucking hate Windows.
² And Acer.

• Calmly perusing a dead tree while my dog does her best to stand on top of my head. It’s true: pet owners are all slightly insane. 1:49 pm

• Fuck pollen, and fuck my hyperactive immune system. Upload me into a robot already, it’s 200-fucking-8. 12:48 pm

• Clichéd as it may be, realizing you are no longer invincible is the single most horrifying thing that can happen to a person in their mi … 12:08 am

• Trying to organize over 4,000 photos. Apparently, 2001 is pre-history. There are no survivors and no written records. 1:03 am

• Managed to bork Ubuntu so bad I’m reinstalling. Massive loss of geek points. 7:21 pm

• Acer 22″ LCD Monitor AL2216W in Xorg.conf: So I don’t lose this again.
  » AL2216W acer hardware linux x xorg

• A phone with wifi + google reader is my perfect drug. I find myself reading feeds instead of books; in bed, in the bath, on the toilet… 12:58 pm

• “Downloading package files.” *sigh* 4:09 pm
• Assembling. Whoever invented drive rails deserves a Nobel. 9:26 am
• Expect unboxing and assembly photo-spam on flickr tomorrow. And he still needs a name. He looks like this: http://tinyurl.com/2ydwep 10:28 pm
• Super-sexy new PC was delivered… to the leasing office of my complex… which doesn’t open until 9 AM. Angst. 10:24 pm

• “Downloading package files.” *sigh* 4:09 pm

• Assembling. Whoever invented drive rails deserves a Nobel. 9:26 am
• Expect unboxing and assembly photo-spam on flickr tomorrow. And he still needs a name. He looks like this: http://tinyurl.com/2ydwep 10:28 pm
• Super-sexy new PC was delivered… to the leasing office of my complex… which doesn’t open until 9 AM. Angst. 10:24 pm

• Turning twitter off for the duration of SXSW. Not to be mean, but for crissakes STFU. ;) 7:43 pm