In between the last post and this one, I finished The Dissertation. All of my daily word allotment was forced to go toward constructing social-science-y sentences about things like "dimensionalizing." What was left at the end of the day was utter gibberish, and while that would make the blog fit in nicely with certain other blogs, I expected better of myself. Also, I was at my parents house, and they have cable. Project Runway called.
Even after defending the dissertation, though, I noticed a certain lassitude about picking the blog back up. I'd heard that Sarah Palin had a reality TV show, and that Kate Gosselin was going to be on it when they took their broods a'campin'. The fact that despite my adamant refusal to pay for television I somehow, through a process of cultural osmosis worthy of further study, knew all about John and Kate+8 + John's lover + bodyguards, etc., was deeply irritating.
And the Tea Party candidates are so ridiculous it's hard to get ginned up about them, as well. All these folks hating government so very much that they're willing to spend vast amounts of money to get into government, but only so that they can then dismantle it and take away their own jobs. Right. Bureaucrats willingly working themselves out of a job, for the good of the people. I have heard of such things in legend and song.
Also, if one doesn't read the news for a while (not counting, of course, the cover-to-cover reading I give The New Yorker every week), it comes as a surprise to pick up the Times again and realize it's all kind of same-ish, and somehow it doesn't seem like much of anything has happened at all. Then there are things that happened as much as a month ago--floods in Pakistan, for example, or that minor little incident in the Gulf of Mexico--about which I would like to hear more. What is happening in Pakistan? Were the displaced people able to go back to their villages? Are there even villages to go back to? Is there clean water? What happened to the crops? What kind of aid is getting through? And last but not least, how might we make ourselves ever-so-friendly to the Pakistanis, in the hopes that they do not auction off their nuclear weapons to the highest bidder in order to buy wheat?
As for the Gulf, everything is A-OK there again, I assume. The ocean and marine life just kind of rolled with the whole thing, developed a tolerance for eating tar and the ability to wash themselves with Dawn dish soap, and now it's all good again. BP still exists, still paying dividends, imaginary money still doing its thing through the worlds various stock markets/casinos. These are some things I would like to know about. But I glance at the NYT top ten articles list every day, and so far, the old journalistic tactic of fingers-in-ears-while-humming seems to be keeping Serious In-Depth Reporting at bay.
