One truism about life: It gets worse. (February 24, 2008)

(Rampant cynicism follows. You've been warned.)


As you may have noticed, I am not by nature an optimistic and cheerful person, all things considered. The past few years have done little to support a cheerful attitude. Two car accidents, one failed lawsuit, and a dead-end job at Wal-Mart have culminated in my current status as an unemployed individual with a weight restriction and little confidence in my own success. My unemployment and all sources of savings have deteriorated to nonexistence, which means that our odd-job self-employment to various bands (and as Gather correspondents) is literally the only thing paying our rent at the moment -- which would go a long way towards explaining the alarming emptiness of our fridge when one of the bands is late on payment. (Incidentally, just because a band is signed to a major label doesn't mean they pay their contract employees on time.)

Unfortunately, this week has done absolutely nothing to improve the atmosphere around here. In one week, my brother-in-law's wife abruptly collapsed and went to the hospital, then died three days later. Last night, we had to make a rush trip to the hospital emergency room because our son had suffered a concussion while out with some friends. He seems to be okay, but the day after someone you know has died in the hospital is not the day you want to hear that anyone else has been rushed to the emergency room, especially if you have almost no idea what's going on. (Discovering that the kid who injured him lives in Maryland and that your other kids won't provide information on him because they don't want to get their friends in trouble, and being stuck in a hospital waiting for two hours for a doctor to actually take a look at your son, is not a pleasant experience either.) Fortunately, he seems to be okay, but I imagine that this is not going to help our stress levels, now or in the future.

I'm perfectly aware that things could be much worse, and other people are surviving under worse circumstances. I should probably be thankful that I still have a roof over my head, and that we have shiny toys to play with, and so on. I should be happy that we've managed to turn the online world into something that actually pays for itself and the rent, if little else. I should be hopeful about the future. But the 'you should be grateful' thing gets old fast when things keep getting worse, you know? It gives one a feeling of waiting for the next punch to land.

Add to this the stresses of an election year, in which the level of boneheadedness of our political system reaches an all-time high, and in which people become really hostile. I see where it comes from -- everybody wants to know why the heck someone would want to vote for politician X given circumstance Y. I try to avoid this, but I'm not immune to it -- I still want to know why anyone saw Romney's concession speech as a particularly good thing (aside from the people who no longer have to worry about him as direct competition, of course.) Still, I've seen plenty of articles that say, implicitly or explicitly, "You're an idiot if you vote for ___" in the past month -- enough that every person who votes for a candidate this year is apparently an idiot. (Political articles tend to not stay under ten comments for too long, although some of the more vitriolic ones do tend to start off at under an 8.0 average rating.) It's insane. And it's our political process.

For example, there are four major complaints against the candidate I prefer, Barack Obama. One, he is a relative newcomer to politics, with only ten years of experience, and therefore is too inexperienced to take office. Two, he may be a Muslim, based on the fact that he may or may not have been in a mosque with his father as a child. Three, he refuses to wear an American flag pin because he believes that doing so is a substitute for true patriotism. Four, the office of one of his staff members in Houston has a flag with Che Guavara's picture on it on his wall. Those topics are the only ones I've seen articles about so far, though I'm sure there'll be others. None of them particularly convince me to not want to vote for him. I suspect that the same is true of any political candidate -- you can think of several major complaints against them, and these complaints won't matter to the people who want to vote for them. The best anyone can really hope for with political attack articles is to so disillusion people that they don't vote at all, which in its own way is a form of voting for their candidate by eliminating competition. Sometimes, it even works.

Maybe it's the stress talking, but I'm not particularly fond of the status quo. "Stay the course" doesn't generally work for criminals attempting to evade the authorities; it doesn't serve gardeners when the weather changes; it's a bad idea when your party members are getting sick on the Oregon Trail; it's completely unacceptable to major corporations with shrinking profits. Regardless of which of these analogies you think is most applicable to our country, if any, I'm not a big fan of 'stay the course' right now. (Likewise, "it's okay because that was the past" is an excuse that wouldn't be accepted in a courtroom, a boardroom, or a living room, so it doesn't sit well with me either.)

Anyhow, I've got work to do -- it might not be much, but it's paying the rent, and hopefully it'll continue to do so. Sorry for the cynical rant -- but it's better to write this stuff down than to let it bounce around your head, you know?