A call to the liberal left.

So, I had the most interesting discussion tonight. Maybe I’m being a little facetious but not so much.

Tonight, I called someone who had given me her number through the website. I think we talked for about three minutes and in those three minutes she was able to determine I was not for her.

It’s more than a little off-putting.

Actually I find it offensive but more on that in a moment.

They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows, nowhere is this concept illustrated better than in the union of James Carville and Mary Matalin.

If opposites attract then certainly Carville and Matalin have proven that old saw as well because there is obviously a great chasm in their political views. Somehow though they manage to make things work.

So, getting back to matters at hand. Tonight I called a woman who had given me her number. Within the first few minute or two of the conversation she said the deal breaker would be if I was a Republican (which I am registered) and pretty much that was it.

I got off the phone and was done.

See, I think that the biggest problem in our country today is the very strong partisan lines that seem to be drawn in the sand by both political parties. These lines are polarizing in that they try to cast every issue in our country into a simple black or white.

That’s a problem and a big one.

By failing to recognize that there are subtleties to everything we encounter during our voyage on the planet, we remove the ability to compromise. There are no absolutes in our political landscape; there are no true ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys.’

Somehow though, I think I may be an exception.

See, I don’t believe in voting entirely along party lines and I can’t say that I ever have. It simply doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Consequently, there have been several occasions where I have voted for a candidate that was on the Democratic line. As a matter of fact in the upcoming election I am swayed to cross party lines - strongly (and if you don’t believe it, I do have another blog where I’ve written at great length about that very topic).

I can’t say I’ve ever voted for Junior either (although you would be surprised at the number of people who assume that is the case because of my party affiliation). I just didn’t like the guy and after 8 years I’m glad I didn’t vote for him. The Mother Jones article I read way back in ’99 pretty much nailed it spot on.

So, when I’m talking to someone who supposedly embraces the tenets of the Democratic Party and the liberalism that is purported to be part and parcel of the parties’ worldview, I find it amazingly ironic someone would be so entirely dismissive of me.

Of course the thing is, I’ve also gotten to a point in life where I can’t find it within myself to argue with stupid people. If you are that intellectually stunted where your world can be broken down into two camps, chances are no matter how much I try I’m not going to convince you that life isn’t a zero sum game.

And that goes for the Republicans out there as well as the Democrats. When we talk about what is broken in this country, I think we need to begin with the dysfunctional political rhetoric that we engage in. If we truly want our country to be a better place we had better start trying to listen to the arguments that each side would offer up and then work towards an acceptable solution to both parties.

But then, maybe I’m too much of an optimist and living in a fantasy world. (1337 Views pre transfer)

On birthdays.

My birthday just passed within the last few days, I won’t say exactly when but in the last week.

Birthdays are minefields for a lot of people, minefields in that they can be our most wonderful of days or our most terrible, all having to do with how we approach the day.

Long ago, something clicked inside of me and rather than making my birthday some incredible celebration, I focused on just having a nice day. It sounds inane, ludicrously simple, but there is a challenge in the concept of the basic nice day.

Think of it as a day free from the petty annoyances and anxiety over those little challenges we all face during the course of our daily existence, the moments when we are not at our best; the affront while we are in traffic, or maybe in line at the supermarket, all the little insults that wear away at our nature like water eroding a rock.

Good days.

My birthday was a pretty good day as days go. Nothing exciting, nothing earth-shattering or eventful, just a decent day that ticked by painlessly.

I spent part of the day on the scooter. This is a newly discovered joy. Even though I have had my scooter for a little over a year now, I find myself I am just embracing riding, as I grow more confident in my skills.

Even though a clear mental image of me on the scooter, a la the bear on the tricycle at the circus dances around in the recesses of my mind, this bear still has great fun taking his tricycle out.

In the evening, I went to a ballgame after going to a favorite place for Korean fried chicken.

It was a simple but good day.

There was a time in the past when I really thought my birthday had to be THAT GREAT DAY! By that I mean, it had to have some enormous, earth-shattering celebration.

I remember vividly when my thinking was adjusted; I made the mistake of going into work rather than taking the day off. Without going into detail, it was just a miserable day. No birthday should be spent at work, ever.

It was that one particular birthday that did it.

Ever since I realized that the best gift I could give myself was just having a good day on my birthday and I’m glad I kept the string going this year. (1284 Views pre transfer)

Hurricanes blow.

Can someone explain the logic of putting newspeople out in the middle of hurricanes?

I wrote about this somewhere else because I simply find it fascinating.

How many times do we need to see some poor idiot standing out in the middle of a driving rain to know how bad hurricanes are? Is this merely a question of geeky news directors, the guys who were part of the A/V club in high school enacting their revenge on the ‘pretty people?’

I’m thinking too in some way TV is doing a great disservice to people.

Stick with me on this...

If you tell people that a hurricane is coming and it’s a good idea to evacuate in advance of the storm then why would you send people into the midst of it? Isn’t that sending the message that it‘s okay and safe to ride out the storm? If the newspeople are willing to go into the middle of the storm, the reasoning probably is that it must be somewhat safe now, isn’t it?

I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie The Day After Tomorrow but perhaps one of the best moments in the film was this point where there is a plague of twisters in the LA basin and a newsclown is out in the street doing a report on it when a car is flung out by the wind of the twister taking the aforementioned newsie out.

It underlined the stupidity of sending newspeople into these things.

People are home watching the TV and every time one of these hurricanes hits there are a slew of newsies on the scene.

Yesterday or the day before, Geraldo Rivera was out in Galveston when suddenly a wave came along and took the footing out from underneath him.

Can you imagine?

I can see the headlines now, Geraldo Swept Out to Sea!

The man who boxed Frank Stallone, who gave us the secret of Al Capone’s vault and Trash TV taken from us in a singular moment of irony provided by Mother Nature.

They need to create a Jim Cantore award for these people but really they need to stop sending them out in this weather to begin with. Last time I checked, aside from flooding, rain, wind, tornados... well hurricanes are all pretty much the same, it’s just a question of how badly you’re going to be f*#$ed. (1179 Views pre transfer)

Who called?

This week I was on my way home and someone called me.

I know it was another member, a possible dating candidate who was reaching out to me. This is extremely flattering.

However, my mind is a cluttered mess.

Really.

This particular day, I was on my way home after seeing the doctor to resolve the whole aforementioned ear issue. It was one of those hot days and I had been schlepping around the city. Schlepping around the city is fine and everything but add to that not feeling well and it gives you a pretty accurate picture of my state.

As it was EVEN WITH the heat and feeling crappy and all I had still walked from the village all the way up to midtown.

So, I’m on the train and the phone rings.

Now, the train is one of those blessed places where there should be at least some civility, or at the very least that’s how I view things. Maintaining that civility involves not having the very loud cell phone conversation to the consternation of all your fellow passengers around you.

Plus, it’s not exactly a private thing now is it?

There are times I have to restrain myself from adding to someone’s cell phone conversation when they abuse the privilege and regal the rest of us in the car with the minutiae of their day.

Most common element of any phone conversation I have heard while commuting?

“I’M ON THE TRAIN!”

Immediately my first thought is, ‘No shit Sherlock,’ followed by the ever popular, ‘Aren’t the rest of us lucky?’

I don’t want to be one of those people.

Plus the woman in question used her first name. Great if you don’t have anyone else in your life with the same first name? Then the confusion starts to set in especially if you’re tired.

So, this woman called and said, ‘Hi! It’s ********!’

My first thought was, ‘????’ followed by, “Oh, hi!”

If I’ve only emailed back and forth to you, chances are I still only think of you by your online handle so, unless you make a point of connecting the name with the handle the first few times... well, you’re s@#t out of luck (or at least I am because I won’t make the connection).

So I begged off (I was on the train) and said I would call back (because the cell phone captures the number and all that late in the evening) and when I did I got the trunk line for the place where the woman works. I don’t know her extension, I don’t know her last name and I haven’t heard a peep from her since.

Of course I have been dealing with my own ear situation.

So, just sayin’ if you called me last week... you might want to give it another go.

And if you are going to call me and we haven’t spoken? Be sure to give some background info the first few times out because again I have a very cluttered brain. (1271 Views pre transfer)

I CAN’T HEAR YOU!

I have an ear infection at the moment.

Actually, I have an infection that started in my left ear and has now made its way over to the right ear. This is gross, I know. It’s really, really f@$#ing painful too!

I’m losing my hearing though and I imagine this is a harbinger of what it will be like when my ears decide to give up the ghost. Over the last few days I was trying to see if I was hearing properly just by speaking and my voice sounded like it was muffled.

Weird.

This is the second time I’ve had something like this happen in the last ten years. Five or six years back I was working with a client, one of those all consuming jobs where you are either at work, or you’re thinking about work, or you’re working from home. My work can be that way at times although since I’ve learned to set boundaries for people.

In this instance, I had been running around with a bug for a few weeks. Not a full blown cold but one of those things that just wasn’t going away because I wasn’t giving myself the proper rest and opportunity to get rid of it.

I was run down, tired and finally there was a glorious day when I awoke with ear splitting pain in both my ears and just about couldn’t hear a thing.

A trip to the hospital ensued.

Long story short, after running around for a few weeks staggering like a drunk even though I had never partaken of any kind of alcohol taught me the lesson to pay closer attention to the cues my body gives me.

So, these last few days I’ve spent in a strange state of alternately sleeping or shuffling around the house in a ghostlike fashion. I’ve been dealing with it since Tuesday but the left ear feels like it’s getting better and hopefully in the next day or two the right ear will follow suit.

The good part about this is that I finally was forced to get my hearing tested and came to find out that while we all will find a deterioration in hearing as we age, mine is just a bit more than my peers. Usually I don’t mind it or notice it that much but there are times when I just miss a few words here and there. I’ve also found closed captioning to be a bit of a godsend because if I do miss something I can at least read it to fill in the gaps.

This failing will probably limit further the potential pool of candidates but, feh! Take me as I am or not at all. (1390 Views pre transfer)

Just sayin’

If there was a website where people went to write... only they wrote about picking their noses, it would be called Booger right? (1188 Views pre transfer)

Porno

So, another one of the blogs had the question of whether or not men “need” porn.

I chimed in (like a dope).

I imagine it has to do with where you are in life and also whether or not you’ve been in a long-term relationship or not.

If you want to understand, go back and take a look at the movie American Beauty. There’s a sequence that shows Kevin Spacey at the start of his day. He’s in the shower and I would take odds he’s not thinking about his wife at that moment (even though in the film he’s married to the very lovely Annette Bening).

The inference though is that there are two people together and while they’re together certain things are no longer a part of their marriage.

It’s hard work to be with someone.

Not even hard work, it’s constant work. To stay with someone you really have to work at it and in addition to working at it you have to be forgiving of your partner’s shortcomings and failings.

Dating is interesting but the person we present when we date is not who we are.

No, instead it’s an idealized version of ourselves without all the bumps and bruises. It’s the person we would like to be were we not carrying around all the baggage of the years piled up neatly in our very own Samsonite all weather set.

Some of us have more pieces in our luggage than others but even the best of us has a carry on (maybe one of those jobbies with the little wheels and the telescoping handle).

The whole discussion about porn was surprising if only for the very extreme response it generated from some people. It’s a dicey issue to be sure but I never fail to be amazed by what will get some people’s back up.

I really don’t think men think too much about it. Certainly not quite to the same extent women may and definitely I don’t think it’s something they look upon as a betrayal of their relationship.

It’s not something they’re proud of (except in those special instances where a person has embraced their deviance), it’s just another fact of life for many.

It might have something to do with the dynamic between the sexes as well because wooing as it is requires an exertion of effort and there are times when men just want things to be easy.

Is that really a crime? (1011 Views pre transfer)