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Alas…

I seem to have returned home bearing a nasty cold alongside the other souvenirs.

It’s kind of hard to believe that my five-week break from school is sixty percent over before it really even seems to have started. It was a really intense fall semester, and I was sort of looking forward to a few moments of calm. They sort of never came, what with the trip to Fresno in December, followed by the actual holidays, and the big road trip to Pittsburgh last week. I have a lot of things I really want to catch up on before things get crazy again:

  • The major renovation of Groceteria, moving it into the PHP world using a content management system (Joomla, to be specific) and integrating flickr photo albums to make the image hosting easier and more logical.
  • Back-correcting old links in Otherstream now that it’s a WordPress site. This is becoming less and less of a priority, I must admit.
  • Catching up on all the home video.
  • Getting a sports blog set up for one of my clients. While typing that, I had the brilliant idea that they might consider using Twitter, making it all easier for me and cheaper for them. We’ll see how that works out.
  • Posting about the just-completed trip, not to mention the one from six months ago that I never really covered either.
  • Reading about fifteen books I have piled up in the office.

I have my doubts that I’ll get it all done.

Muzak

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They apparently changed the Muzak at the cafeteria.

Before, it had been standard, easy to ignore, old-fashioned elevator music (think symphonic covers of “When Doves Cry”) but now, it’s some oldies channel from hell that is apparently programmed to feature all the most depressing songs of the 1960s that you never wanted to hear again, from Donovan to the Byrds, and beyond. In fact, “River Deep, Mountain High” was about the most upbeat thing I heard through my whole dinner, which is kind of sad. Literally.

After enduring twenty or thirty minutes of this, I think I finally know why so many people did so many drugs during the 1960s.

Moron of the Week: Nia Sykes of Oakland

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Protests over BART shooting turn violent:

The mob smashed the windows at Creative African Braids on 14th Street, and a woman walked out of the shop holding a baby in her arms.

“This is our business,” shouted Leemu Topka, the black owner of the salon she started four years ago. “This is our shop. This is what you call a protest?”

Wednesday night’s vandalism victims had nothing to do with the shooting death by a BART police officer of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day – but that did little to sway the mob.

“I feel like the night is going great,” said Nia Sykes, 24, of San Francisco, one of the demonstrators. “I feel like Oakland should make some noise. This is how we need to fight back. It’s for the murder of a black male.”

Sykes, who is black, had little sympathy for the owner of Creative African Braids.

“She should be glad she just lost her business and not her life,” Sykes said. She added that she did have one worry for the night: “I just hope nobody gets shot or killed.”

Nia, if you think vandalizing an unrelated, black-owned business is a fine and dandy way to protest against racism, and if you think that violent protests will ever result in anything other than someone getting “shot and killed”, then you’re such a fucking moron that rational thought is most likely a stretch you’ll never make. But maybe you could at least try…

Memories

Sometimes I miss the old days when all I had to do was call the landlord when the heat wasn’t working, never having to worry about how much it might cost to fix it, nor about choosing who should do the actual work.

Unfortunately, that’s not the weightiest thing I have on my mind today. Alas.

Marital Diss

Apparently, the development of a seething rage over the passage of California’s Proposition 8 is not altogether uncommon. It seems to have brought out the dormant activist in lots of people. It’s one of those big issues — a rather unexpected one at that — that just seems to bother people more than the other assorted failures and disappointments inherent to our burgeoning theocracy. And people seem to be taking this one much more personally.

I am too.

It bothers me that this happened in my former home state, a place I expected more from, despite my differences with the place. It bothers me that the measure passed with overwhelming support from a group of people who have faced discrimination (even with respect to marital rights) before and who should have known better. And as I mentioned a week or so back, it bothers me to learn that colleagues and coworkers believe that my rights, my life, and my marriage aren’t worth as much as theirs are.

My marching days are over, I think. I’ve done it before and I don’t really have the stomach (or the feet) for it anymore, although my respect and appreciation go out to those who do. In a way, I believe the most effectively activist statement some people can make is to live their lives as openly, honestly, and unapologetically as possible, taking (pardon the expression) no shit from anybody. But this one seems to call for a little bit more than that. And I’m not entirely sure what.

I’m pissed off. I’m not very much inclined to worry about the feelings and delicate sensibilities of my detractors at the moment. This is just a little political exercise to them, but it’s my life.