2 posts from January 2009

Once, I ordered these really kick-ass boots on the internet.  They were olive green and had big eyelets but they were preeettty expensive.  After I bought them, I remember thinking, "HMMM was that such a good idea?" Since it would take a while to ship I prepared to feel that way for many days.  About a week later, a salesguy called me and told me that they had sold out of these shoes in my size. I was sad, but relieved.

I am reminded of this sick sense of anticipation of something that could be great but have long term cost-consequences as the "economic stimulus bill" prepares to be passed.  Last year, as the news focussed on people's shallow electoral identity politics, I often felt like I had nothing in common with anyone.  Now, though I have a job and am free of debt and dependents, I feel as though people are paying attention to the important things (and how little they know about how to preserve them) same as me.  I'm happy about the election, but also to see as many vaunted Democratic elders as didn't pay their taxes fall before congressional hearings (JESUS GET IT TOGETHER), and I'm resigned to things being "bad" for part of my young-mid adulthood.  Pessimists are happily surprised, right?

I'm working my way through the Oscar nominees, whittling away at the honoree totem (till I get to the Benjamin Button angry lidded osprey head at the bottom and say f--- this) and my favorites have been "Gran Torino" and "Wendy and Lucy" --- oh wait neither of those were nominated ---- but I enjoyed "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Frost/Nixon" and "Milk".  My father said he didn't need to see "Frost/Nixon" because he lived through it and I agree, but that, even more than "Milk" reminded me that the world IS different from the time I was born in terms of personal, social freedom. 

I don't know if the comments are true, but there are two points in the movie where Nixon asks Frost two questions which are meant to, and do, intimidate him: once he asks if he and his girlfriend "[did] any fornicating" the night before and once when he basically says "your italian loafers are gay." The idea that anyone, even a former president, could belittle someone, especially a TV celebrity, with words like that is almost imcomprehensible to someone like me born in 1980, more insane-seeming than the hairdos and the metallic wallpaper, even.  Maybe that's a creepy example of the inversion in public respect for TV personalities and elder statesmen, but if it is, it is of course because of people like Nixon (duh).  I'll always have a sticky spot for Richard Nixon, sweaty non-photogenic nose-to-the-grindstone Southern California native that he is, but calling it a soft spot would be wrong.

I told Chance that politicians, like teachers, get short shrift when it comes to job performance - how many of your relatives and friends work their asses off at what they do; how many just do what's required?  The private sector has no monopoly on smart, hardworking people, does it? I don't know what will happen in this country in the months to come, but I hope, perhaps irrationally, that some jobs being lost were hateful anyway (show me a person who works at the mall who doesn't owe it to themselves to find something better), and that some good, new, organically needed ones will arise, unexpectedly, for the people willing to see their invisible outlines limned out in the freshly emptied space.