Stuff You Should Know: I might die edition

It's been ages since I've put out a good edition of Stuff You Should Know. My records indicate that the last installment was way back in March, when I informed you about some treasures on the Internet. And you know, March is too long ago because I have it on good authority that at least half of my readership (1.5 persons!!!) relies solely on Catherine the Greatest for 100 percent of their news content. You can see why I start to feel really bad when I waste your time writing about hippy festivals, majestic Nabisco products, and borderline sexual assault.

So, here I am, lighting up a cigarette, furrowing my brow, and taking up my role as a modern-day Edward R. Murrow. Seriously, where would you guys be without me?

1) Um, have y'all been keeping up with this Mexican drug cartel business? Shit's whack. NPR is obsessed with it, and it's also all over newsprint (what's that!) and TV news. 60 Minutes just ran a chilling report on the situation tonight. It's a complicated issue with a lot of gritty details, but I did want to draw your attention to one point. Crackdown efforts must be having some impact because reports surfaced this week that the Mexican navy seized more than a ton of cocaine that was hidden in.... wait for it... wait... 20 SHARK CARCASSES.

WHAT?!?!? Slabs of cocaine hidden in sharks. Man, if only this resource had been available to me during childhood games of "Hide the Thimble."

In many ways, I guess, this shark news is a good thing. Traffickers can no longer just ship boxes of cocaine in and around North America willy nilly, and surveillance efforts are keen enough to smell something fishy during checks in a cargo ship. But holy smokes. Can the Discovery channel include this bit of news in their next Shark Week? I need more details.

2) Onto lighter fare... It's summer time and that means TV networks are busy rolling out a bunch of new shows we probably don't want to watch. Um, hello, I have Netflix? But one show I have become obsessed with is Expedition Africa on the History Channel. It's kind of like Survivor, but if Survivor was actually about surviving, and no one gets voted off. (The shows share a creator, Mark Burnett.) The show follows four modern-day explorers who retrace the steps of Dr. David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, the American journalist who went to look for him after his disappearance. Expedition's team members make the trek across Tanzania with virtually no modern comforts, and face many of the same perilous danger, exquisite beauty, and unpredictable adventure Livingstone and Stanley did more than 140 years ago. The true treat is seeing how the cast (who, with the exception of a journalist, are all expedition experts) clash and communicate with each other in the face of real survival situations. They actually know what they're talking about, and along with learning some history, the audience also gets to learn some wilderness first aid, navigation know-how, and tips about how not to get eaten by giant hippos. Don't miss this show, it stands along side Intervention and The Amazing Race as one of the three "reality" shows I can stomach.

3) So have you guys been paying attention to this moon landing business that's under way? I know, I know, it doesn't hold that same do-or-die appeal when Prez. J.Ken isn't yammering on about space races and the Russians breathing down our necks. It also lacks glamour because NASA is sending robots to do our dirty work, although I guess that's a good idea since these space crafts will be crashing into the lunar surface at 6,000 mph. That's pretty fast. Definitely more speed than my colander space helmet could withstand.

Anyway. As you probably know I'm so un-scientifically minded that I barely can wrap my pea brain around the very idea of space, but I do take special interest in NASA's efforts partly because they're pretty cool sometimes but mostly because I think they're a huge waste of money. But what strikes me about this mission is the sheer simplicity of it. I mean, heck, I could have thought this one up. They're sending up two crafts, one which will orbit the moon and generally check things out. Look for hot babes, good real estate, you know, the usual. The other one, called the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Spacecraft, duh) is going to intentionally CRASH INTO THE SURFACE OF THE MOON with the intent of kicking up a lot of shit to see if any of it is water. Still hoping for water on the moon, guys? Hope springs eternal, I guess. Ugh. I feel like there should be more progress in this department by now. And I mean, I'm probably right because I slept through a whole course in astronomy and NASA calls me sometimes to ask me what I think about things. Yeah, they do.

Have you come across any new stories you feel the need to share? Unleash the burden of your knowledge in the comments section.

Is Simon Cowell's soul more tender than mine?

It can be so lonely when you're on the wrong side of a trend. Trust me, I've been there more than once. Many of my peers had closets full of Beanie Babies before fifth grade, and sure, I had a few, but frankly, they were too small to hug, too limp to assume much of a personality, and I was always a little overanxious about whether I should keep the tags on in anticipation of the millions that could await me in the future. I've never put my hair in a side ponytail, didn't feel threatened by Y2K, and haven't seen an episode of Lost, 24, or even Seinfeld. Better still, after four years at SU, I still have never donned a pair of leggings.

Which brings me to this Susan Boyle craze. In case you're entirely oblivious to pop culture, her audition from Britain's Got Talent has been all over the Internoodle, and I mean all over it. If you're just resurfacing after a weeks-long coma, let me first say it's great to have you back! Second, you can view the clip here. She sings beautifully, and apparently this is groundbreaking news for everyone because HOW COULD SUCH A LOVELY VOICE COME OUT OF SUCH AN ORDINARY-LOOKING PERSON?

Ms. Boyle is showing up in the Trends on Twitter. A fan site was created. Her name is the second fastest-growing search term in the world; there is talk that she might be the biggest YouTube sensation ever. Debates are flaring up about whether she should be made over, if it's true that she's never been kissed, blah blah blah.

I just don't get it. Columns at HuffPo and Boston.com go to great lengths to explain the phenomenon, and have me wondering if I'm the only one in the world who didn't have an earthshattering revelation when I saw the clip. There seem to be two basic schools of thought on the Boyle Bonanza:

1) When she shuffled out in her frumpy dress and nervously told the world that she lives with cats and volunteers with the church, the audience expected another formulaic "Let's-laugh-at-the-freak-show-with-big-dreams-and-a-small-brain" audition that would leave the audience giggling and the contestant humiliated. But lo! When we heard her sing, everyone realized how shallow they were for assuming a somewhat awkward, but otherwise regular-looking person wouldn't have anything to offer. Oh the soaring heights of humanity! We met the depths of our shallowness and then basked in the glory of a shared humanity!
Or...
2) We all relate to Susan. She reminds us we all have something to offer, even if as the Boston.com post quotes, "Without classic good looks, without work, without a spouse, living in a small town, people like Susan Boyle may not seem particularly 'important.'" That is, we all feel like Susan on the inside. And we all feel loved when the world welcomes us with open arms. Journey style.

Well okay. That's nice. Maybe I feel underwhelmed because I assumed she would sing well when I saw a link to the video. I still can't help but feel like I'm missing out on some of the life-affirming ecstasy that everyone else seems to be experiencing when they watch it. Will someone help me? Are people so sad that a spirited Scottish woman with a sublime singing voice can offer the perfect mix of escapism and hope to put the spring back in their steps? Have Lindsay and Britney disappointed us all so sorely that we want to handpick a new icon from the common folk? Or is this society's rejection of airbrushed, hungry models in favor of someone who looks like the neighbor we wave at but don't really talk to?

It's possible I've put too much though into all of this.

Pots of gold and rainbows, and me red balloons!

So, tomorrow is April 1st, and jobless college seniors everywhere will whimper quietly as the dawn of a new month reminds us all of the unstoppable gallop toward graduation. A lot of you probably never imagined you'd be dreading graduation day so much, but sometime between now and our freshman year, the world collapsed, and suddenly it seems we're left in the dusty fallout of four years of hard work, inflated dreams, and accumulating student loan debt with no hope in sight.

I'm sorry, is this outlook too dreary for you? You can tell me if it is, but I get the sense from all of my friends' increasingly anxious Twitter updates that I'm not the only once facing nightly quarterlife crisis anxiety attacks. It seems unfathomable to me that after I've tried to do everything right during college and taken all the advice of people who told me to volunteer, get good grades, get involved with campus media and organizations, and immerse myself in new situations, that I'm still just another unremarkable faceless wanderer in the way overcrowded jobseeker purgatory.

Then something occurred to me, and hey you, yeah, the one weeping at the computer screen, I want this to occur to you too. Let's not get depressed. Lend me your ear, sugar plum.

So am I the only one who feels like every time someone (granted, these are mostly stories from journalists, so make of that what you will) tells me how they found a job, it always involves some freak occurrence/unexpected twist of fate? I can't count how many people have described finding a job in a way similar to this: "Well, I was walking down the street, feeling bad for myself because I couldn't find a job as a reporter at any New England newspaper. I decided to stop at a farmer's market, and got to talking with a local farmer who was selling a kind of fruit I'd never heard of. He told me it was the only thing unicorns would eat. Unicorns? I thought this guy was crazy, but then out of the corner of my eye, a real, live unicorn emerged out of a shady thicket and beckoned to me. In a leap of faith, I got on its back and it flew me to a Chuck E Cheese, where the owner happened by with a free pizza for me and my new unicorn friend, and mentioned that years ago, he'd interned at the Hartford Courant. His old supervisor works for The Providence Journal now and is incidentally looking for a new health beat reporter. And you won't believe this, but at that very second the editor from the Providence Journal walked into Chuck E Cheese with his daughter. It was her sixth birthday. We had an impromptu, and obviously informal, interview in the ball pit, and I was hired on the spot. No clips, resume, networking, or cover letter required!"

Have you heard tales like this? Any speaker to ever come into one of my reporting or writing classes seems to relate some type of "I slipped on a banana peel, and the man who helped me up is my boss now" sort of story. It's not exactly helpful advice for people involved in old-school, rigorous job searches, but there is information to be gleaned from these tales. Here's my advice. Don't feel bad about yourselves just yet. Let's look for four-leaf clovers, throw spilled salt over our left shoulders, and make even more eye contact with strangers than usual. Make wishes on gingersnaps, keep your eyes peeled for leprechauns, and spend sleepless nights looking for shooting stars.

This is how you find a job.

Beyond Belief

A good documentary should leave you unhinged.

It could blow your mind by exposing a new culture, or uncovering the the unfamiliar in your own. Maybe it strikes an emotional chord, reverberating in a dusty, forgotten recess of your heart. Maybe it confirms something you always knew but never considered closely enough.

You should watch Beyond Belief . It will do all of these things, and it will unhinge you.

The film tells the story of two women, Susan Retik and Patti Quigley, suburban moms from Massachusetts whose husbands were killed in the planes that hit the towers on September 11. Both women were pregnant at the time. The documentary delves deeply and intimately into their grief, showing the endlessness of the heartache that follows the unfathomable death of a loved one.

But what makes Beyond Belief so remarkable is how Retik and Quigley transform their sadness into a cross-cultural journey to help the widows in Afghanistan, who have suffered through decades of war and a lifetime of oppression. Retik and Quigley founded Beyond the 11th, a foundation to raise money to support Afghan widows by providing them with chickens, coops, and incubators. With such simple tools, women can feed their families, and forge some economic independence by selling the eggs. With the money they make, most send their children to school.

You'll follow Quigley and Retik on their trip to Afghanistan, a country which before 9/11, Retik confesses she couldn't have found on a map. You'll watch as they realize the remote country is inextricably linked to their own, and the universality of the grief they find there. The warmth with which they are received, and the candor with which the Afghan women tell their stories of loss and hardship will leave you both wildly hopeful and devastatingly discouraged.

More than half a million women in Afghanistan are trapped in cycles of poverty, because they are illiterate, economically disenfranchised, and the sole caretakers for their children. (In Afghan culture, if widows remarry, their children must go to the deceased father's family. Women stay single in order to stay with their children.)

This is a must-see movie. It will reveal the nuanced, painful truth behind the triumphant headlines of Al-Qaeda captures and little girls going to school. It will remind you to look for the human faces that are all too often left out of war coverage. It will make you feel guilty for forgetting them in the first place, and implore you never to forget them again.

(image from: http://www.principlepictures.com/beyondbelief)

Linkfest: Soft News

I've been remiss in blogging this week. Schoolwork picked up and my computer was back to its old troublesome tricks. Here are some things I've read or written(!) to keep you occupied until I come up with an original idea:

This Newsweek article investigates organ trafficking around the world, and most shockingly, at top hospitals in the United States. The good news? Your kidney can fetch a pretty penny. The bad news? ORGAN TRAFFICKING IS TERRIFYING. If breaking the law isn't your style, you could also sell your inner business on Craigslist. (At this rate, if I sell a bunch of my eggs, a kidney, and half my liver, I could make a real dent in paying back Sallie Mae.)

Can you tell that I like health reporting? Campus magazine What the Health allows me the honor of posting about health policy on their blog. This week, I ran off at the mouth about all of the recent food recalls and how the FDA and USDA totes don't care!

Earlier this week, I talked to Chris Myers Asch, co-founder of the U.S. Public Service Academy, for a story for my magazine class. In case you're unfamiliar, he has put forth a propsal to Congress for a four-year civil service academy, which will train students for government work. Tution is free, but graduates will be required to fulfill a five-year committment in the government sector. I think it's a great idea, and will undoubtedly bring more prestige, intellect, and energy to the public sphere. I've been following the Academy for a while, and it's gotten a lot of media attention recently. Keep your eyes peeled.

I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. Mostly I love it, but there was a time when I was less than convinced about the wonders of the 140-character-or-less networking site. But whenever I stumble upon an awesome Twitter profile, like that of a fake Dr. Tobias Funke of Arrested Development, I fall in love all over again.

Speaking of loving people I don't know, my girl over at Dooce is preggo again. Just another good reason for you to start reading her too. (Hi, Meaghen.)

Paul recently reminded me of the wonderful oral history project, StoryCorps, through which people interview family and friends and ask them to tell a story about their lives. Thousands of stories that would otherwise be lost will be recorded for everyone to hear and stored in the Library of Congress. I heard one on the radio over the winter, in which a popular NPR reporter interviewed his mother. Her story was simple and sweet, but by the end of it, I was weeping behind the wheel of the minivan. Call me a softy, but I hope you find one that touches you too.

In honor of Valentine's Day, the International Herald Tribune is encouraging commenters to write "limericks of love" to their favorite public figures. They write, "Now's your chance to submit a cheering rhyme to a lonely public figure. It can be a sonnet, a love letter, or an ode to Alistair's eyebrows." Y'all know how much I love haikus and penning the occasional epic rhyme. I think it's great fun when papers do things like this.

And hey you, tell me what you've been reading.

Losing faith in humanity, finding it , then losing it again

I'll be the first person to rail against the newslessness of cable news. CNN even managed to dampen my inauguration enthusiasm with their CONSTANT!!!! REMINDERS!!!!! THAT THIS!!!!!! IS THE BIGGEST DEAL EVER!!!!!!!!!! for weeks before Obama's big day. But I must admit that every time I turn on a 24-hour cable news station, I come across a story I wouldn't have read in the papers or online. Yesterday's items:

First, some soulless bottomfeeder named James Salcedo thought it would be a good business venture to make a Caylee Anthony Doll, fashioned in memory the murdered two-year-old whose remains were found in December. He probably thought he could get away with it because he planned to donate $3 of the $29.95 pricetag to charity. Apparently the doll was designed intentionally to look nothing like Caylee, and Salcedo said he hoped it would raise awareness. Awareness for what, exactly? I think we can all agree this is one of the worst, most insensitive ideas ever. Thank you for letting me know about it, MSNBC.

Then, I turned to my attention to the next television on the Headline News Channel, and saw this story about a group of firefighters in Massachusetts who saved a struggling deer from icy waters. I was only watching the screen and reading the headlines because my headphones were not tuned to that channel. I thought it was a happy story, but my fact-checking has indicted otherwise. Read to the bottom of the article, and you'll find out they shot the deer because she had a broken leg. There is no where for rehabbing deer to go? Fun fact: Audrey Hepburn had a pet deer!

Needless to say, I experienced quite the roller coaster of emotions during a few short moments on the elliptical machine. I can provide no moral for this anecdote, except to tell you all to be on the lookout for all the WTF moments you experience in your daily consumption of TV news, and please tell me about them, so I can yell about how watching people yell at each other is never informative.

I'd also like to announce the kick-off of a new 20 posts in 30 days blogging blitz. I hope you'll join me in another round of regular posts, filled with all sorts of information you never knew you wanted to read until I wrote it, and even then, you weren't really so sure. Check back soon for my Top 5 Biggest Fears. They will surprise you.

"...and begin again the work of remaking America."

"Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and promise of citizenship."

Both the government and the people are finally paying attention. They noticed the trouble our country is in and are willing to take action. With Obama's inauguration comes a wave of relief, and a surge of hope that we have a president who will commit himself to the betterment of our country. I trust him. I never trusted Bush. Hearing Obama's speech today and looking at the national mall filled with millions of excited Americans is the most heartening thing I've seen in a long time. Progress will be hard and slow, but today, let's just be grateful it has begun. 

(Full inaugural transcript here.)

O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of graaaiiinnn

Our impending graduation has caused me to think an awful lot about my future lately. I might use the phrases 'existential crisis', 'anxiety attack', or perhaps 'crippling self-doubt' to describe my state of mind on any given day. One of the decisions I've been mulling over is whether to pursue the whole journalism thing, or head more toward the non-profit "save the world" side of things. For a variety of reasons, at this point, I see myself doing more with my policy studies degree than my magazine journalism one. A few days ago, Maureen Dowd's column affirmed my horror at the current state of job opportunities with the media.

You should read it, but I'll summarize for the word-weary or functionally illiterate. Basically, Pasadena Now, a lifestyle and news site in California, outsourced ALL OF ITS REPORTERS TO INDIA. I thought maybe it was a dinky site, and the outsourcing only meant that Indians would be surfing the Web, compiling event listings for the peeps in Pasadena. NOPE. It's a pretty legit site, and now, all of the stories are written by Indians, using Web searches and telephone reporting. Pardon me? I thought the whole point of city/regional sites, papers, and magazines was to give readers an insider's guide to where they live, dispensed by people who live there. But apparently you can provide that perspective from any corner of the globe?

I don't stand a chance.

Think I'm being pessimistic? Maybe. But two weeks ago I read this article, which says children of Indian parents, who moved their families to the States for more opportunities, are now going back to India. Because that's where the jobs are. To give you an idea, a quote from the article: "Exact data on émigrés working in India or spending more time here are scarce. But this is one indicator: India unveiled an Overseas Citizen of India card in 2006, offering foreign citizens of Indian origin visa-free entry for life and making it easier to work in the country. By this July, more than 280,000 émigrés had signed up, according to The Economic Times..."

Okay.

So what does this mean for me? India here I come. Although, maybe now isn't really the best time. Oooh, what about China? It's the future!! No, there's that whole censorship thing. I don't know how kindly they would take to my outspoken diatribes.

Maybe there's another solution. I have always been fond of harkening back to the days of the Depression and riding the rails. There's a lot of country out there to see people, and it's about time we took a look. I might look rather fetching with oil smudges on my face, and rocking a little Newsies outfit. And it really is about time I went farther west than New Orleans. Who's with me?

Wistful Election Roundup

I'll leave it to the pundits and analysts to delve into the numbers and statistics relative to Election 08. None of that is going to stick with me; I can tell you that now. What will are the memories of how it felt. All day yesterday, people were excited. They were smiling at the thought of going to the polls and casting a ballot, finally being allowed to say something, after years of watching the country slowly twist into something none of us wanted. The relief and excitement that swept over everyone when the results came in declaring Obama the winner was overwhelming. I sat on the couch next to my mother who cried from the second it was announced until Obama wrapped up his speech an hour and a half later. People screamed on streets, hugging and yelling, even diving into the occasional urban water feature . For me, this election was about getting back something we never should have lost in the first place: pride in where we're from and confidence that we have a government that is working for the greater good of the country and the world. And this is just the beginning. Obama makes people want to be better citizens. He already ran a pretty flawless campaign and mobilized voters to a point we didn't believe possible, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

In the meantime, I am going to revel in my memories of yesterday.  The electricity in the air when voters breathed a collective sigh of relief, the shared sense that we all have something to hope for, and a real chance at getting it, made me so glad that the first presidential election I could vote in, was one that has meant so much. 

Assigned reading

A round-up from where I've been on the Internet and what you might have missed.

A Rolling Stone profile of David Foster Wallace, famed author who killed himself in September after decades of battling debilitating depression. This is the most thorough, well-researched, and beautifully written profile I've read in a while. The piece is long, but more than worth it. I read it in two sittings and cried at the end. It makes for an absolutely aching look at a life that ended in a way that seemed inevitable to everyone who knew him, which is the most heartbreaking aspect of the whole story. I get the sense that the writer absolutely nailed this story in a way that happens hardly ever.

Someone put together a Sarah Palin's greatest hits video on YouTube, which I posted originally, but then I listened to this, and found out it was real. I actually feel bad for our Alaskan mental midget:




New York Magazine compiled a photo slideshow of the best doggy Halloween costumes. You can be the judge about which dogs you feel most sorry for.

And this week's "What the fuck" science moment, scientists want to put robot ants on Mars to build houses for us.

You're so vain, you probably think the Super Bowl is about you

A gal named Amy Borkowsky is single and desperately seeking a husband. She is in her 40s, and living in New York, where she says it's harder to find a guy than TV shows like Sex and the City make it seem. Her solution? Raise $3 million so she can advertise herself in a commercial during the Super Bowl.

This is a horseman of the apocalypse. This woman is asking people to give her money so she can advertise, and in my mind humiliate, herself in front of the tens of millions of people who tune in to watch the Super Bowl. In the LA Times article, someone criticizes her lofty goal, noting it seems like such an act of desperation; but I was struck more by the mindlessness of such shameful self-indulgence. What makes you think you deserve people's money? Have you exhausted every other avenue? How did you possibly arrive at this as a solution to your dateless existence?

Three million dollars is a tremendous amount of money. If Amy was so determined to get herself a public audience, I wonder if she ever considered something other than blatant self-promotion. The thought of this much money being given to a woman who wants nothing more to do with it than buy herself some ad time and try to catch a man, who's probably a six-pack deep, stuffing his face with nachos and salsa, is mindboggling to me.

I am glad to report she has only raised about $2,800, according to her official site. Now, I could maniacally rattle off some statistics about how many hungry people could be fed with a cool $3 mill, or how many children could receive life-saving medical treatment for conditions no one in the U.S. typically dies from, but tonight I am feeling weary of the world, so I am just going to paste a little image I Stumbled Upon recently. May it sock Amy in the gut as forcefully as it did me:

Top Ten Unanswered Questions of Election 2008

Let's thank the good Lord in Heaven, this never-ending election cycle is finally wrapping up. It's been a long and trying two years to say the least. I'm excited to watch the end of the race unfold and am hoping desperately that things will go the way I know they have to. In some aspects this country has grown unrecognizable, and this election serves as a chance to bring it back to where it's supposed to be, and to propel it forward in ways we've been always capable of , but never realized. And even though I've followed this presidential race with a keen interest, and tried to digest as much news and analysis as possible, I still have some unanswered questions, and I present them to you below in a list format.

Editor's Note: For the sake of my mental health, this list assumes that Sen. Obama will be elected. Please, Fate, I am not tempting you, and I am definitely not counting my chickens before they hatch. I am merely estimating as to the general number of chickens without making any assumptions, just looking closely enough and admiring the poultry, so that my head doesn't explode. Do you get what I'm saying? No? Okay, then let's get started.

10) Why does RFK Jr. always sounds like he's dying? It's one thing when you seem him in a video clip, so you can know that at least the man on the other end of that horrifying haunted-house caliber whine is indeed somewhat able-bodied and can breathe without assistance. But today I heard him on NPR and kept waiting for the interviewer to ask if Bobby needed an ambulance. NPR hasn't posted the interview anywhere yet, but if they do, I'll post it because his voice is 100x more strained and alarming than it is in the YouTube clip.

9) Do people ever measure the girth of John McCain's cheeks? Particularly, do they ever graph the rates of the growth on his left cheek? What's in there? Can someone please one day ask him to see how many nuts he can store in his cheeks over winter? I bet a lot. And you probably wouldn't notice. It's not like his jowls could become any more protuberant. Unless maybe you were this kid.

8) What planet does Elisabeth Hasselbeck live on? And not only her, but every other one-note talking-point spewer who insists Obama is bad for the country and Palin is "experienced"? If I ever met Elisabeth, I hope to maintain my composure long enough to ask her: What would it take? What would a Republican have to do to lose your trust? What would it take to get you to think an independent thought?

7) When Obama takes office, will we still get to see him shirtless?

6) Rather than fade into obscurity (and/or grandmotherhood), could Sarah Palin please host some type of benign cable advice show? I would love to hear that whacked-out folksy accent dispense advice such as, "You gotta kick that clown to the curb, honey, God bless ya!" I could tolerate her (like she tolerates the "homosexuals") in a format like that, as long as I don't have to stomach her in the political arena.

5) Can we send a linguist to Alaska to map the dialects? There must be a buttload. I, as well as everyone else, had no idea Alaskans talked like Sarah Palin, and I am still not entirely convinced more than a handful of them do. And please, don't think I am saying this because I am a "liberal elite" Massachusetts resident. After all, we gave you guys Barney Frank and Tom "Mumbles" Menino. I know a messed up voice when I hear one. I am just curious.

4) Will Michelle Obama be hosting any Jackie O.-caliber White House dinners? And if so, will the lovely Jill Biden be co-hosting? And if so, CAN I COME PLEASE?! What I am about to say is revolutionary: I want to have tea with those women WAY MORE than I ever wanted to go on a date with Kate Walsh and Diane Lane... COMBINED.

3) After this election is over, can we stop talking about race for a good, long while? I realize it is a factor, and I know there will probably be some books published on the topic, and that's all well and good. But can the day-to-day "race factor" conversations stop? To be fair, they've died down a lot since the primaries. And please people, don't get me wrong, I like to harp about racial inequalities as much as the next liberal-arts-educated white Northerner, but even I've had my fill. After taking at least half a dozen classes about the subject, and sitting patiently through all of the election coverage, I am again extending a plea for a moratorium on race-talk unless it is something revolutionary that we've never heard before.

2) While we are on the subject of moratoriums... Lately reporters have been throwing in the phrase "talking point" at every available opportunity. It's as if, all of a sudden, the press realized it was okay to acknowledge the fact that presidential campaigns send out memos with the exact lines pundits bring up and repeat verbatim on cable networks. I would like to request that people stop sticking to talking points all together, but then no one would have anything to say, so I am just going to ask reporters, politicians, and other media personalities to stop saying "talking points" in public because hearing that phrase just annoys me. We know the Obama and McCain camps tell people what to say. We know your interviews follow a very rigid formula. So stop acting like you should let us know that you know that we know and just get on with it. Can you do that for me?

1) When this is all over, can I take a vacation? I have spent endless hours fretting over polling data, scrutinzing every last word in a New York Times op-ed piece, and trying to school dozens of people on the intricacies of health policy. And I don't come anywhere close to any of those obsessive poltical junkies. I am just a girl with a social conscience and a mind of her own. So for everyone who has gone gray, shed tears, yelled at a stranger, or had to go on blood pressure medication because of the stressors of this election cycle, come November 5, MEET ME IN FIJI.

Ruining your day with an election resource round up

One of my favorites, Joan Didion, with a blistering essay about this election cycle's failures and the deleterious effects of what she calls a national coma. (I'm not entirely won over by some of it, but it's certainly worth a read.)

Stomach-wrenching ignornace in Pennsylvania, that will make you embarrassed to live on the same planet as these people:


Five articles from the New York Times centering on racist Americans, best summarized in quotes on Gawker.

I'll spare you the rest, because if you find these items as depressing as I did, you'll need a few minutes to pour yourself a drink.

Good morning America, how are you?

I know that writing about this won't do it justice, and no matter what I write, it can't really ring true, or be an accurate enough description. There are certain moments that lodge in your memory without a clear order of events, accompanying sounds, or smells. You remember them only by the intense feeling you experienced at that time, feelings of dizzying glee or an electrifying excitement. Sometimes it's just a dramatic snapshot, a lone image that will stick with you forever, and be your only memory of a particular day or time.

A couple of weeks ago, I drove with a group from SU's chapter of Habitat for Humanity through the seventh and lower ninth wards of New Orleans. These are two of the most damaged areas, which have been mostly untouched since Hurricane Katrina destroyed them more than two years ago. My memory of these places will be defined by a handful of images and a couple of physical/emotional reactions. I'll remember a sickening weight deep in my stomach, of having so many thoughts at once, that eventually my brain slowed down almost to a stop. All I could do was look out the window. There's not much to say when there's so much to see. I'll remember the dozens of houses that had writing on them, left presumably by the people who lived there, begging for help. The front of one house was covered with the words, "HELP US, Please help, any donations," and other pleas, hastily spraypainted in a time of panic, still left for us to read years later. Did anyone ever come to help? When have you ever seen such a desperate, open cry for help, scrawled publicly for anyone who would read it?

Our car was quiet, we drove slowly, like tourists, through a place where people had died when a flood came, like something out of a disaster movie, and somehow, no one came to help. Two years later, in these areas, it still looks like no one ever came. What will stick with me are the foreign images of abandoned houses and empty streets, and the accompanying physical feelings I felt. What stays with me is the heavy desperation and overwhelming sense of hopelessness and heartbreak that hangs over those neighborhoods.

From the outside, some of the houses looked unremarkable. In most of them, it seems no one had moved back, because certainly, the insides would have been rotted through. The owners likely couldn't afford to fix it up, or wouldn't want to. How could you move back to a neighborhood that looks like a ghost town? A few people did; there were a few cars parked in driveways that still had the large X's on the houses, markers made by people who came through after the hurricane to check the houses for bodies. Four numbers were left in each corner of the X: the date, the number of people who came through, a number of dead humans found, and a number for dead animals. Imagine living in one of these houses, or even across the street from a house, marked with a number 3 beneath a giant X. I can't imagine what it must feel like to live in an empty neighborhood, staring at a number, left during a time of crisis and panic, a single digit strangely marking the needless deaths of three people. Who's been in the house since they removed the bodies? I kept wondering why the people who moved back didn't try to remove the markers from the fronts of their homes. Did they want to remember? Or feel too for guilty trying to forget? What does a person think, walking by something like that, every day on the way to the front door?

The devastation has taken extreme tolls on everyone left behind, not the least of which is a giant skyrocket in mental health issues among survivors, and very notably nearly 47,000 children. When we drove through those neighborhoods, I wondered how anyone could be okay still living there. What would a young survivor think? His school is boarded up, his home in ruins, and his parents might not have the resources to make anything better for him.

After all this time, there aren't answers for New Orleans. How can you rebuild something, when there's no way to stop the same thing from happening again? How do you begin to help? I don't know if my visit brought me to any conclusions. In fact, it probably muddled my opinion more. But it did renew my own sense of responsibility. It feels wrong to to drive through a devastated area, in your own country, rubbernecking out the window at someone else's sadness. But I think, even more than I did before, that it's all our responsibility. You shouldn't turn away because something's hard to look at or understand. You can't ignore news about genocide, war or a natural disaster because it turns your stomach. Katrina's devastation is largely a result of this type of ignorance and evasion-- people couldn't deal with issues of pervasive and persistent poverty, rapid climate change, impending crisis, and decisions involving government responsibility. We should look. We should remember, ask questions, and do something. Anything, really.