Furniture

I didn’t want to move this weekend but I didn’t acknowledge that until the weekend was over and I hadn’t done anything.

“Hey, do you want to go do something?” someone would ask me.

“Yeah,” I would say, hesitating. “I don’t know.”

People won’t usually force you to do something if you put up a weak and sustained fight, so, luckily, I was able to alienate most people I talked to.

I don’t really know what I did do most of the weekend, but I do know I only left my apartment once for more than an hour.

I went out to look for furniture because, for some reason, I’ve recently decided I need things for my apartment even though it has been almost empty for a year.

One store I went to put me in a bad mood, so maybe that’s why I stayed inside for the rest of the weekend.

In that store, a thrift store, I was looking at a piece of furniture I was thinking I might buy. I asked an employee if it had all its parts, but the employee told me it was missing some.

I said I understood, but told the employee I would continue looking. The employee thought about my decision and told me that I could buy the left-over parts from similar items and use those to assemble the item I wanted to buy.

“That’s OK,” I said.

“It’s really easy,” the employee said.

I didn’t know what to do so I walked away pretending to be interested in something on the other side of the store.

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Change we can believe in

“Sorry about that?” says Obama.

Not really, but he did give this pretty fucking lame explanation after he voted this week for a bill that endorses warrantless domestic spying and also basically hands immunity to all the communications companies that helped the government out so far:

Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program.

This, even after he said a few months ago he’d oppose the bill:

No one should get a free pass to violate the basic civil liberties of the American people — not the President of the United States, and not the telecommunications companies that fell in line with his warrantless surveillance program. We have to make clear the lines that cannot be crossed.

Anyway, I know everyone including you and me and even probably one of your parents was feeling really good about Obama for a while because he took the bold stance of opposing a war that most of the country also opposes. But, really, it’s probably time for everyone to realize that Obama is just another dick politician — everyone, including those who will take their own bold stances by voting for him over a 114-year-old warmonger even most conservatives hate.

Specifically, Obama is just another Bobby Kennedy. Some people think that is great because they get excited about play-monarchies or want to believe that the Kennedys were progressive heroes. Both Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama, however, are mildly worthless at their best.

I know right-wingers snicker to themselves about this all the time, but their challenge to Obama supporters to name what’s so grand about him is legitimate. Consistently, no one can name anything concrete besides his opposition to the Iraq War.

Even this is lame, though, because Obama just wants to send Iraq War troops to other sweet wars around the world.

So if you want a change, don’t vote for Obama. If you want a change and you’re anti-war, vote for any of the major third parties. All of them — Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Socialist and Reform — are non-interventionalist and talk about it in their platforms.

For instance, this is from platform of the Constitution Party, yeah the Constitution Party:

Since World War II, the United States has been involved in tragic, unconstitutional, undeclared wars which cost our country the lives of many thousands of young Americans … The Constitution Party has consistently opposed American involvement in conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central and South America. The United States has no interest in these areas which would justify the sacrifice of Americans on foreign battlefields.

Sunglasses

I wanted to buy a new pair of sunglasses this week but I couldn’t because the styles I liked were too small for my head.

These styles of sunglasses were actually large, just not as large as my head, but I didn’t know that until I tried them on.

“How did these suddenly become spectacles?” I thought when I looked into the thin mirror on the side of the store’s sunglasses carousel. “Why do I look like Geppetto?”

I was looking for new sunglasses because it turns out that I don’t like the sunglasses I bought last year. I thought I liked them when I was buying them, but apparently I couldn’t make an accurate decision with that plastic security clip stores always attach between to the middle of sunglasses.

I don’t blame stores for not wanting people to steal their merchandise, but it seems technology has advanced to the point where manufactures could imbed the security device inside the sunglasses.

Or, so no one could ever wear them, the store could put the sunglasses in that thick shrink-wrapped plastic all electronic music players come in.

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Been to

I’ve never left America but these are my favorite places I’ve been to anyway.

Fort Bragg, CA

Asheville, NC

Madison, IN

No one cares if you get a cold

I felt sick this week and that was bad, because when I’m sick I feel insulted if I have to do anything.

“I should probably get out of bed and go to work,” I say indignantly to myself in the morning. “That’s fair.”

I was especially insulted this week because my illness was a cold and no one cares about that. Telling someone you have a cold will actually make that person temporarily hate you no matter how bad your cold is.

It’s like telling someone about your vacation. The more details you give, the worse it gets.

This is because a vacation is just a vacation and a cold is just a cold and, if either gets more interesting than that, they become something else.

A vacation that becomes interesting might turn into a something like a hijacking and a cold that gets interesting will develop into a disease like smallpox.

I guess it’s hard to argue that a cold could become interesting even on that basis, though, because most exciting diseases, like malaria, begin with a fever and flu-like symptoms before they get worse.

But when you have a cold, you don’t have a fever. You don’t know this, however, until you ask someone to feel your forehead.

“Do you think I feel warm?” you will say, secretly hoping you do.

“No,” the person will say, looking at you like the liar they think you are. “You feel fine.”

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Overdramatic

My friend Teri got mad at me this week because she didn’t think I apologized correctly for insulting her.

“I’m sorry we got in a fight,” I said.

“That’s not an apology,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said.

She stared at me.

I had made fun of Teri because I thought she had written an overdramatic headline for one of her articles. Teri said the headline was not overdramatic, and she explained why based on the context of the story.

Her explanation made sense, but I still didn’t like the headline. I called her a bad writer and she got annoyed.

“I know what hyperbole is,” she said, “and this is not example of hyperbole.”

“Yes it is,” I said, “and maybe you’d know that if you weren’t such a bad writer.”

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‘Another Kind of Life’

Nevada state archivist and historian fights to save vision

By Dave Frank

Appeal Staff Writer

Guy Rocha presses a newspaper against the arm of his couch and hunches over.

“Monday, May 19th,” he reads.

“Mostly sunny,” he says a moment later.

The historian and Nevada state archivist moves his magnifying glass to an article lower on the page. He says this is how he’s had to do his research since his glaucoma has gotten worse.

To show what it is like for him to read fine print, he begins an article about the country’s mortgage problems.

“First, the good news,” he says, pausing to examine the next phrase.

He looks up from the article after reading a few lines. He says it is difficult to read documents, collect research and find the answers he needs.

The sight in his left eye is almost gone, and he’s trying to save the right eye. It has been operated on twice this year.

Doctors can’t promise treatment will fix it.

“It’s just too slow,” the 56-year-old man says. “I can’t live like this forever. My god, if I do, I live another kind of life.”

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