Unemployment

sucks ass.

We suck.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/09/mannahatta/mannahatta-animation

How can you look at that and think of humanity as anything other than a cancer on the face of the Earth?

Button, button, who's got the button?

Sometimes, things just bother the shit outta me. As an example, I give you the internet.

Now, in other countries, the internet is pretty much just that. You pay some money, you get a connection, log on, surf porn, enjoy. Over and done with. Yet here in the states, this is not the case.

If you live in the country, just don't bother. You're either stuck with satellite, which is either slow or intermittent at best. If you're in a city, you play games with providers that own the lines and who refuse to let any competition through. They decide when new lines get put down, and if it doesn't sound profitable, they don't do it.

So here we have a tool that is quickly becoming part of our infrastructure the way highways are. Here we have corporations protecting their best interests. And here we have the citizens bent over and constantly being asked to take it hard.

Everything in my day is decided by money. Not necessarily by me and my money, but more often by other people and their money. For instance, where I would've love to have, say, a good internet connection, I'm trapped with embarq because it's the only place in Gun Barrel that you can get hard wired internet from (which also requires you to pay for a phone line; sweet deal they've got going here). I have a 1.5 mb bandwidth cap. The high and mighty United States, useful technology capital of everything everywhere all the time, is falling behind every other industrialized nation in what is everyday a more fundamental part of our lives.

Now, you could say, "Hey now, Amira. Internet isn't everything. Why don't you just go outside and have some fun in the sun." To which I say, fuck you. It's my right as an American to hate sunlight and a hundred-ten degree weather. But more importantly, that's not the point. My point is that they don't run cable lines for internet here. More importantly, we only have one choice for cable here anyway (in this case, I said fuck you to Northland Cable and hello to overpriceDirecTV).

And why is this? Because we allow it. Because money is allowed to rule until it becomes such a menace to the average person's life that people have to speak up. Because if you let money rule, you may get in on the action some day. So where one man sees potential profit in the marginalization of the less financially endowed, I see the downfall of America. Even if it is something that seems as nonessential as connecting to every other person on the planet.

Of course, there are bigger problems. There's the continued and false sense of a need to prop up the companies and institutions that would happily see the ruination of John Q. Public if it meant a greater profit margin. I still believe we should've let them fail, the same way I believe that state's rights foster instability, and that people generally at least think they're good, even if they mostly just group together into mobs which are, generally, retarded (I defy you to find a mob that isn't).

But I don't really get a vote. I only get to pick the asshole that gets to pick another asshole that gets to vote. Which, really, isn't much of a vote at all.

Which is one of the reasons I brought up the internet. Because imagine the possibilities! What if all those shmuks who refuse to vote based on the fact that it might interrupt their day of couch surfing, could just walk two feet to the computer instead? More than that, what if everybody got a vote? That's what democracy is supposed to be. At the very least, stop lying to people. Stop teaching children that that's what we live in. Disillusionment only comes after being lied to. Stop telling kids that their voice counts. Stop telling people they can be anything and do anything with nothing but determination. Quit trying to convince people that the education system works, or there's nothing wrong with health-care, or that trickle-down is real. Stop the outright lying at the podium and then accusing your opponent of the same damn thing.

You can either make the lies real, or at the very least, just be fucking honest. Is that really too much to ask?

Sorry if this is disjointed and stoopid. I haven't been writing much, but I figured I should post something and start getting my head back to a place you might call semi-organized.

Fuck Michael Jackson

And the dumb cunt who tried to give him a national holiday too. He was a self-loathing kiddie fucker who OD'd. He moved to a country where everybody loved him and probably sold him little boys to diddle.

Even if he was as nice a guy as his fans like to claim, his only achievement is funky dancing. His music is not groundbreaking. His donations weren't groundbreaking (most celebs donate shit to charity). Nothing about him was groundbreaking with the exception of his exceptionally fucked up life. He doesn't deserve government recognition for a god-damned thing.

Sorry, but this is retarded. Farrah Fawcett died too, and you don't see her getting any recognition. And she didn't die of an overdose, did she?

Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

There's a poor understanding of that phrase. I've never read the Bible, so I can't really say why. I can only tell you that for every person who uses that phrase to shame hateful people, there's another person who will use it to shame them.

From what I understand, the passage meant that you have to examine your own sins so that you can be a bit more objective when you judge. Because let's face it. You have to make judgment calls all the time, and trying to judge without judging is confusing and difficult. We're human beings, and it's part of what we do.

But the Bible also says to pass judgment on the sin, not the sinner. They say that only God (Jesus, but I used God because Jesus is not God; he was just a man who happened to be pretty tits) can judge whether or not a person is saved. That men may only judge sins based on the word of the Bible.

But of course, if we really followed that, then everything that extreme right-wing Christians do would be utterly useless and irrelevant, and if there's one thing is far-right nutjob hates, it's acknowledging that he's irrelevant. Holding up signs that say "GOD HATES FAGS" is irrelevant. Whether he hates fags or not isn't really up to you. Especially if the sin of faggotry get's washed away by being a Christian (as all sins apparently do; which is something that I guess I can accept).

So maybe I just get caught up in semantics. Maybe they're not saying that God hates the person. Maybe they really are just saying God hates that some dudes like a little dick in their diet. Maybe when they kill gay kids, they're just trying to help them wash the lecherous sins away. But is it really any of their business to judge that I'm a sinner? We're all sinners. What difference does you adding a little hate into the mix make besides being a big fat downer on top of it all?

Life

So I know that I have been terribly remiss in my duties to update this thing for the one or two people who pay attention to it. I haven't been especially inclined to write anything, as I'm still not sure I have that much to say. That, and I've been spending a lot more time trying to encourage someone else to be a little more creative (without much success).

So here goes.


I don't like to jinx things by saying life's been good, but the fact of the matter is that it has. I know that the last couple of life updates I've posted have been... well, less than inspiring. There was a death in the family, and that was hard. But life rolls on.

Big news would be that I moved. Well, the beginning of big news would be that I got myself a girlfriend. Danielle and I met at Blockbuster, my first job. She was my manager, but she left the company back in June. We were friends before that, but it was sort of an acquaintance kind of thing. Part of the reason she left Blockbuster was another person who is not to be named. I'm ashamed to say that I did my very best to swoop in an pick up the pieces. Long story short, a few months later we were a couple, and a couple months after that.... well, continuing.

Shortly before Travis died, I joined my girlfriend in Gun Barrel City, Texas. It's a small town (population: 5,989, status: Meth capitol of Texas), and options for entertainment are limited. At first, we were living in the spare bedroom of her parents house. That was difficult at best, because Danielle and her mother... well, they have hard time getting along sometimes. Her mother can be a bit of a drama queen, and although Danielle doesn't like to admit it, she can be quite... reactionary. In any case, by Valentine's Day, we were sleeping in our own house. Her Dad had spent the last six months rebuilding a squalid home that Danielle's "Uncle" Gene lived in before moving to a home (he hasn't been doing well lately, but I don't know too much about it). He turned this place, which reeked of old smoke and critter droppings, into a beautiful craftsman home.

This house is on the same street as the homes of her parents, her brother, and her grandmother. We own this street.

Danielle and I have been getting by on basically nothing and credit cards, but that is looking to change soon (fingers crossed, but pretty much a certainty at this point). We have an ailing wiener dog that Danielle rescued from the people at the end of the street (she basically stole him). He has heart worms and emphysema, but we take care of him and he's a sweetie. His name is Kaiser Von WienerDog (actually, we haven given him any official name besides Kaiser, but it doesn't matter because he only responds to "Wiener Dog").

On Valentine's Day we went out to dinner at the local Italian restaurant, which was very good. When we got home, I opened the door to candles and rose petals leading the way to the bedroom. She got down on one knee and asked me to marry her, and my response was a happy yes with very little hesitation. We don't have a date set or anything since we don't really have to money for a proper ceremony yet, but once we've saved up enough, we'll make it a good celebration.

School is still out of reach, since we only just barely have the money to eat, but a good opportunity just popped up, and it looks like it's coming back into the spectrum of a reality.

Things are still a little unsettled. The house hasn't been perfectly set up yet. I haven't really even gotten to unpack yet. But that'll sort itself out.

In the mean time, I'm taking some things with a grain of salt. Yesterday, for instance.

I woke up and found that the wiener had pissed a trail from our bedroom door to the front door. Then, having gotten off to a bad start, Danielle and I decided to go get some cigarettes. This is bad, because we both need to quit (her especially; she's had horrible asthma since she hit puberty, and the smoking definitely makes it worse). I went to check my bank account and credit card to see if I could swing it (our paychecks hadn't come in yet). I was quite upset to see that I was in the red by about $90. I had told Samia a couple of weeks ago to take my debit card off of her Xbox Live account, and she apparently had not. I only had about $2.57 in the account, and was waiting for my check to come in. When the fifty something dollars for the year's subscription was charged, I not only overdrafted, but was immediately charged a $35 fee. I called Samia as soon as I saw this, and bitched her out over the phone, which she did not take lying down, though she did immediately offer to transfer enough money to cover the cost of the subscription and the fee. I'll be honest, I cried a bit.

After that, I had to go to work. That's never fun, especially since they don't give me enough hours, and I'm the only one that actually gives a shit about the store being presentable. When I got there, I spent the entire day reorganizing the Television section (total intake for my till: $98). When I finished about 15 minutes before closing time, I saw that we had accrued a hefty number of movies that were checked in and needed to be run. At this point, I had to tell my manager that next time I was farting around in the sections (which I wasn't actually farting around, I was doing what I was assigned to do), that she ought to feel free to tell me to get my ass up to the front and do what needs doing. It's sad that I have to tell my managers what to tell me, but this store is a sorry excuse for a business. Anyway, all that work having not been done meant that we were still there an hour after closing.

When Danielle picked me up, we stopped at MeMe's place (MeMe is Danielle's grandma) for some goulash and had a nice chat for a while before heading home. When we got home, nothing really special happened except for this one thing.

Danielle was leaning down to give the Wiener Dog some lovin'. They were both on the couch, and I was standing behind it. I leaned down to give her a kiss on the head, and at exactly that moment she sat back up. Very quickly. She knocked me in the nose, which at first didn't seem like much. I was a little dazed, but it didn't feel like anything was broken. Then suddenly it felt like my nose was flooding and Danielle rushed me to the bathroom to stop my nose from bleeding all over the place.

That was a dizzying experience, but nothing was broken, and it was safe to take the frozen bag of mixed veggies off my face withing fifteen or twenty minutes. Danielle made me pudding because she felt bad, even though I repeatedly told her it wasn't her fault that I was an idiot. Then we watched a movie and then went to bed. That was it.

Honestly, after reading all that back, it sounds pretty bad. But it wasn't. If you look at it all together, yesterday sucked. But nothing was left unfixed. Nothing really was a lasting trouble (well, except for the nose bleed; when we were going to bed, I kept getting all queasy and uncomfortable because I couldn't stop thinking about blood vessels in my head breaking and bleeding out of my nostril). So I can't really complain about it too much. The Dude abides, you know?

It's all a part of....

"Some viruses, like Ebola or the new avian influenza, are basically runaway replicators, effectively burning their own life bridges in the process. But the majority, as Villarreal puts it, strive 'to persist, not make a lot.' Those that do persist eventually become both stable within, and staples of, evolution. The overwhelming majority of viruses are not harmful to their hosts. Each of us is infected with a huge array of viruses. The human genome, considered as a mass, contains more retrovirus sequences than actual genes.

"'They're not doing anything,' says Villarreal. 'They're just persisting. And they were around long before humans evolved. The better part of the human genome is composed of viral DNA. That's true of nearly all eukaryotes, and the more complicated the organisms, the more of those sequences you have. We aren't sure exactly what they all do, but they are part of our genetic identity, this stuff we dismiss as junk. "Junk" and "parasite" are both words that will get you into a fight if you use them improperly. And yet they are where all life's creativity lies—its very origins.'"

-From Unintelligent Design

Bobby Jindal

Two things ol' Bobby's GOP response did not do for me:

1. Make sense.
2. Stop me from laughing.