Femme-ing the Vote

i think i mentioned this before: unmarried women are a huge source of political power for progressives.

In 2000, there were 16 million unmarried unregistered women and 21,725,000 unmarried women who were eligible to vote who did not. These women, with their vote, could dramatically change the political landscape in America.

we won the vote only in 1920 - we shouldn't take it for granted.

so this is to remedy that.

it's easy and online.

winning

thoughts are generally muddled this morning (whoops - overslept) but just to hold my place, there's this from a friedman column today:

If Mr. Zapatero goes through with his troop withdrawal from Iraq, Islamist terrorists will attribute it to the Madrid bombing. This big picture will absolutely encourage them to try this tactic, perfected in Israel and now imported to Spain, in other European or U.S. elections — to tilt the vote one way or another.

"The Spanish Civil War tested only weapons," said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. "The terrorism we have seen in Israel, and may soon see more of in Europe, is testing the fabric of democratic societies. What is being tested in Spain is this question: Does it pay for terrorists to try to hijack democratic elections? We have a clear-cut challenge here, and it must be met with an equally clear-cut response. Are leaders of Western nations going to reward the terrorists in their attempt to hijack democratic elections in a major European state or make them fail?"

still trying to figure out where my thinking is on this...

the news is depressing.

south texas town loses last factory jobs...shrub administration tries to rewrite history...us forest service discards public accountability for the sake of, um, streamlining - and hires a swank PR firm to spin itself in the process...stupid court case about 'in God we trust'...

and only 8 more months to go of ugly campaigning.

ASS.

it was a lovely morning - woke up early, dressed in a cute outfit, actually
combed my hair, felt all perky and happy (can't you tell something is
about to change this?) when i read an email from online museum guy who said he thought i was great, but wasn't expecting me to be so ... curvy.

he felt duped. (despite my ad and photos describing me as 'zaftig' . who the hell doesn't know what this means??)

you punk-rock posing-foucault reading-sawdust smelling-breadstick-bike riding arsehole.

mood is now murderous and dangerous.

reading of his weird offended feelings was like reading the sex & the city equivalent to the iraq WMD scandal: why was the intel so bad during the run up to their date with destiny??

because who knew that one's porportions would have to be disclosed like the warning label on a side view mirror: "Beware: Ass may be bigger than previously thought."

a new internet mag debuts this week: the gadflyer. progressives kicking ass without sounding lame and pretentious. (though i've never had a problem with the whole 'snob' label, myself.) already it's a fave. check it out.
...

oh, god, this week. so long. so lengthy. so interminable. so unending. so bleahhh. not even a pile of comic books could revive my ennui. yes, i've turned to comics, those crinkly leaves leftover from adolescence. no, they aren't preserved in plastic or arranged chronologically on a special shelf all their own. they're jumbled next to the latest phil rickman, trashy romance novel, victorian erotica and stanley elkin on my night table. that table is a symbol of my brain.

the elkin is taking some time to wade through - it's fun, but it's a hard-won fun. it's like the fun of drinking a bottle of whiskey on an empty stomach and then eating warm sushi. the drunken reeling is thrilling at first, but then the wet gurgle starts and, well, you know the rest.
...
life coach update:
i can't meditate for more than 5 minutes without falling asleep on the toilet.

another discovery - i'm too hung up on page count (thanks, grad school) and should really throw that over and just achieve getting some good words on the page. even if it's just five. it seems when i started treating writing like a job, i wanted to control it, instead of just letting it strike; i've been trying to apply the model from grad school and it doesn't fit my current schedule or temperament anymore, and so i've been stuck. and since i don't like my real life feeling like work, i'm avoiding writing because i've turned it into work.

thank god this is all free.

the coach said to me, "What's more important: writing or being a writer?"
and i didn't really have an answer to that.

(edited 3.23.04)

they always come back

when your past comes back it's a bit of a kick in the pants - one of those kicks that miss the meaty part of your ass and gets you right on the tailbone. and then the pain goes straight up and down your spine making your knees buckle. that kind of kick.

and when people talk about their past, it's always an ex-someone they're talking about, really. ex-lover, ex-fling, ex-boyfriend, ex-drunken reason why you don't go to a certain bar anymore. you think you know how to deal with it, even when you tell yourself they were inconsequential, but you don't really. how does one prepare themselves for a hard boot to the tailbone?

blah-di-blah-di-blah: yeah, a couple of old ones came back, fingering me over email, leaving voicemail messages that make my hands shake or rear back from the computer screen in horror - no!! i thought you were gone, buried in a cask behind a brick wall, chained and dumped in the north branch of the river! incognito latino found me on nerve again, despite my blocks, my deletions and refusals to be drawn back in to his lonely intensity. i immediately deleted his message without reading it; his is a place i don't want to revisit. i didn't behave particularly well and i regret that slightly.

i don't get particularly mushy-hearted over exes. they become such for a reason, and those reasons are usually good ones: boredom, sudden dislike, boredom, or the gradual dawning realization that this person will never be as fun as your girlfriends. and once you realize any or all of these things, you make a decision as soon as you can and extricate yourself as humanely as possible. (everyone has every right to leave everyone else, but it's not cool to be deliberately cruel.) once extrication has been achieved, whether neatly or sloppily, i don't think one should look back. the loop has been closed, the circle completed.

one girlfriend of mine was dumped years ago by a small-souled man named michael. it cracked her core and she took 2 years to recover. during those two years, she constantly asked, Why? i refrained from answering, Because. and during those 2 years she badgered him for an answer she could accept, tearing at him like a thistle. she said she was doing this in the service of some future closure but i disagreed: closure had already been achieved when he said those two words, 'it's over.' one might take issue with his timing and tact, but i'm pretty sure michael thought the door of that relationship firmly closed.

and even when those magical words aren't spoken, but acted, it's the same thing: someone suddenly disappears, drops from sight so quickly and thoroughly, you expect to see his face on a carton of milk. and so it was with MR. he's not technically an ex, but he is a past...someone. one day we looked around and we each weren't there. the loss was so clean, so fast, i barely registered it.

but now...he's back, even if it's just for a 3 hour stopover on his way to Korea in two weeks. this reappearance is more ... i don't know. bittersweet? no, not bitter.

it's more like...reading a novel, turning the last page and seeing a little epilogue where you find out what happened after all the main action's done. you see it, exclaim 'yay!' and when you're finished taking everything in, sighing, you put the book on the shelf until you need to read your favorite bits all over again.