commotiocordis

Dear Barack Obama.

I'm happy that you won. Please to be repealing the Patriot Act, or my father will not vote for you in four years. And I will be pissed.

Oh, and way to go getting out the vote in California. It's not like you were going to lose there, why'd you have to get all your African-American buddies to go and vote in Prop 8? Thanks a lot.

Alexandria.


Instead of being a good person and actually updating with the stuff I haven't yet talked about, here's an email to my father.

My TV hasn't left CNN in two days. I spent all day yesterday (since one of my classes was canceled and the other was a 10 minute test) working the Obama tables around campus and then tabulating results from the Election Integrity/Warren Poll Comission's exit polls (which I should be getting a check for at home--I wrote that address on the W-9 to keep all my tax stuff going to the same place), And then all night waiting for the precincts to report in in Missouri--seriously, what are these people doing that they can't get results in until the next morning? Get a move on, LOL!

Even though it doesn't matter, I really don't want this to be the second time since 1904 MO was wrong--there's still a chance, as McCain is less than 6000 votes up, and they've got 6-8 thousand provisional ballots left to process (most from STL city) and all the college kids' absentee ballots and such, so I figure Obama might still take it.

I'm not happy about Franken in MN, though--first Jesse Ventura and now Al Franken? Come on. And they've only got one senator, too, so it's not like there's somebody else to temper him. More democrats in the Senate is more democrats in the senate, but blech. And on that note, if things keep going the way they are, I'd wager 2 years from now there will be a filibuster proof majority in there, which would be interesting.

And fat chance on the Patriot act. The best chance there, I think, is that a bunch of SCotUS justices kick it, and Obama gets to appoint some good ones. The ACLU then challenges the Patriot act and the new court boots it out. After Obama voted for FISA, I gave up most hope on him repealing it.

It's crazy, while going through that exit poll data, how many people (reportedly) split ticket--it's pretty clear that it's hugely name recognition, though. And I really wanted to smack some of these people across the head--they declared that they were democrats but voted straight ticket republican (or vice versa); I'm not sure if they're playing with the poll results (which is stupid, as it's anonymous and they could have just declined to take it), or just idiots. Could be either, down here.

Don't know if I mentioned, but saw Obama again over the weekend, which was cool. He was very obviously tired, though--he took stage at like 9:45pm after running around all day, but also it was in general. Idk, but neither that speech on Saturday nor his acceptance had the kind of spark that I felt when we saw him in St. Louis. Michelle was cool to hear, though--how often is it that you get such a smart, articulate first lady? Somebody in authority from Harvard Law mentioned how he figured that Michelle would be the one to run for office when he had them in his classes or whatever. And how he thought they were both republicans back then, LOL.

Oh, and I'm going to some conference of Midwest Residence Hall Associations over the weekend at UM-Rolla. Just FYI, I'll be gone. I expect to be quite miserable the entire weekend--I signed up because it's $15 for a line on the resume and a better shot at an RA gig if I decide to do that (I've heard it's a lot of work, though, so idk, and definitely not if they wouldn't pay me instead of giving me a free room since I already get that), but nobody told me that instead of being an actual conference with programming and learning and such, 3/4 of it is rah-rah crap. There are actual cheers I was told to learn, and spirit points awarded and such. I'm planning on magically contracting a migraine for the entire non-programming time, I think.

Only the second wrong choice for Missouri in more than 100 years. Thank God it didn't matter. Here's to making 44 a million times better than 43.

Edit (11:34pm): Strike that. Not all the precincts are in, and a good number of the ones that haven't reported are in, surprise of surprises, St. Louis County. It's 2 years ago all over again, LOL.

After polisci first thing in the morning, I spent my time after a 10 minute Communications quiz working a table in the freaking wind tunnel of campus (read: holding down all the Obama swag I was passing out more than actually passing it out), then went back to mythology for fun mythology stuff (the movie Black Orpheus? I hates it), followed by data input for the Warren exit poll from 12:30 to about 9. Then straight to working out, where I watched results come in; they called it for Obama right as I was done, so we hightailed it back to watch the speeches. Missed McCain's, so I'll have to check that online at some point, but hoorah, Barack; your eloquence is still impressive.

However, as a result, I haven't eaten all day. But now, though I'm not quite pass-out tired yet (almost--it's been a long, long day), I know I will be before anything gets made to eat, so idk what I'm going to do there.

Political commercial on a moment ago, and somehow the TV glitched or something and part of the approval message got cut out, so it was commercial, commercial, commercial and then McCain saying "John McCain and I approve this message". The cadence made me go "Oh, so schizophrenic now are we?"

And. OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG 6 DAYS.

Plus, I think I'm NaNoing this year. Or pretending to. I really have no excuse to do it, because I'm always going to have papers I should be writing or tests I should be studying for (like now on both counts). I wanted to wait until I was out of school to do one, so it'd be just work competing and not homework, but I've got an idea and I figured I might as well get started.

Just (or, you know, about an hour ago) back from the gym.

Wow, my body loved that. First real, decent workout since the end of August. I was on machines working muscles that haven't moved hardly since then. I'm anticipating soreness tomorrow (my knees + hips are already not liking how I was too excited to get over to the circuit machines to stretch after treadmilling), and the sores/scars/whatever on the back of my hands between my thumb and index finger from where I lock my hands in around the TV on the treadmill are bright, nasty red just when they'd begun to fade a little bit, but I feel great. Did the whole time I was on the treadmill, too. It was weird, but it was a good temperature and I was enjoying watching the Colbert Report and my body was generally satisfied with the level of workout I was doing (less intense than usual, actually, as these only incline to 15% and supposedly the one I usually use at school does 30%; I made up for it by going almost twice as long) and the general fact that I was home and this was back to my old routine, and I just noted a particular contentment. It's a weird place to feel content, on a treadmill in a gym at 10:30 at night, but I was, and it felt nice.

This is post ER-watching, which was post trivia-nighting.

Re: ER. I don't know how I got it so completely wrong about why Abby was leaving. I had myself completely convinced that she was blind from the previews for this episode. Something about how she is all squinty to avoid the sun when she's on the roof, and then swirls around with sort of glazey eyes, not focusing on anything when she's dancing and then (especially this bit) makes sad eyes at Neela and says (what I thought was) "I'm crying, right?" So I made up this whole explanation about how it was something stemming from the explosion that didn't manifest itself on the first day but has been getting progressively worse (explaining why we haven't really seen her lately). Nope, not at all. But the good amount of Abby/Neela made me smile. And Haleh's wall had me choked up a bit, trufax.

Re: trivia-nighting. I'm just good at these things, end of story, LOL. It felt like I didn't know any of them because it was a lot of stuff for the younger crowd (I was easily the oldest, followed by my brother and then a group around his age), but I still managed to pretty much single-handedly win the thing. (Not that there weren't a bunch that Tyler and the other random kid at our table got as well, but that there were very few that I didn't also know.) Kaci decided to team up with her friends, so she missed out on $5 Borders giftcard goodness. Which I then sold to her in exchange for having to drive her right over there so she could get some Twilight poster she'd been looking at (which they didn't have, fail, but I still got my cash).

I've got several mosquito bites on my right bicep, which are not fun.

I am getting too used to being back. At the same time, it's weird; I kind of feel like a guest in my own house, all not really wanting to raid the fridge lest there be plans for the food in there or something (my desire for a really good salad won out, however; feta cheese has never tasted so good until after you've spent months subsisting on a diet almost entirely of raw veggies, mustard for salad dressing, and egg white/tofu with the occasional bits of chicken or fish thrown in there every other week or so). But I'm comfortable. Like I said before, content. And thinking about going back has me going all anxious; I want nothing more at this moment than to just completely quit school and come back here (and keep going to school up here, naturally, but be able to live back in my old pattern).

Things that also make me anxious? According to the lookup doodad on the Missouri Voter Rights Center website (a sub-thing of the Sec. State's office website), I'm not registered to vote. At least not at my home (meaning non-school, and I specifically didn't re-register down there in if-it-were-any-redder-they'd-stop-wasting-the-ink-printing-the-democrat's-name-on-the-ballot SW Missouri) address. Umm, WTbloodyF? I voted in the last election. I've got people calling and bugging me about being a pollworker again up here. I was planning to go vote either today yesterday (which didn't happen) or today anyway, and that's done down at the election commission office, so I'll go see what's going on down there. Because oh man, you don't mess with a CSPAN junkie's access to the polls. Especially when she lives in pretty much the deciding county of Missouri.

Something I was just thinking about.

All this talk about Sarah Palin raising a child with special needs. Umm, he's not even one yet. I highly doubt she's done anything different for Trig than she had to do for her other kids when they were that age. That's not to diminish the work it's going to take as he gets older, but I'm pretty sure the special needs bit hasn't exactly factored into his raising thus far. So though I understand we've got to make it sound like she's got experience at doing something besides cutting funding for rape victims (btw, paper I wrote about that? 100%, baby!), I think we can stop talking about it like she's got all this experience in taking care of special needs kids.

Another random thought. What's with the Denver Broncos sending people to the Houston Texans? First Kubiak, who was Elway's backup QB until 1991 and then offensive coordinator for the Broncos later, goes off and becomes the Texans' head coach. And then what does Kubiak do? Hire the DB head coach (who was first his coach and then his old boss) Mike Shanahan's son as his offensive coordinator. And here I was wondering how the Texans managed to beat us in the preseason.

Back to politics. During the debate--

McCain: During the Depression era, we had a thing called the home ownership loan corporation.

Did anyone else's mind jump to his use of the word "we" there and immediately use it as confirmation of the fact that McCain is, in fact, incapable of dying? I have a feeling Colbert's going to pick up on that one as good for a few dozen dinosaur jokes.

And--
SCHIEFFER: The question was, what are you going to cut?
MCCAIN: Energy -- well, first -- second of all, energy independence.
Umm, what?

Edit: and to connect the two a little bit more, here's politics + football.

MCCAIN: Well, if you'll turn on the television, as I -- I watched the Arizona Cardinals defeat the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday.
OBAMA: Congratulations.



And hooray for fall break being this weekend, as I'm going to go hear Obama speak again on Saturday and possibly Jill Biden on Friday (depending on where she's talking, as the schedule hasn't been released yet). I really wish McCain and/or Palin would swing by, though; I'm an equal opportunity political speech listener, and I'd like to hear what the other side's got to say.

I've been crazy tired since probably 9 or so, so I'm not sure why I'm still awake. Probably going to try to go up to the election office and vote tomorrow (or Friday), so I've got to actually be coherent enough to, you know, read names and issues (because there are quite a few of the latter on the ballot this time around; I've got a list but I've yet to go through and look at them and decide what I like and what I don't) and such.

Requisite update from last Sunday (28 Sept.): Up all night trying to get tickets to this football game after we got shafted our old ones because the brokerage didn't have their listings updated, and thus let us buy tickets that the vendor didn't actually have anymore. Since Dad already had the hotel down here, I figured I might as well try. Posted on Craigslist finally, asking about tickets by way of bitching about the brokerage, and got tons of responses overnight about people with tickets and people advising me to just show up anyway, because there would be tons of people trying to sell them around the stadium due to there being a concurrent Nascar game and everybody expecting Denver to wipe the floor with Kansas City.

So we went. Dad ended up having to fuss around trying to check out of the hotel for quite a while, so we ended up leaving about an hour later than we wanted to, so we got there halfway through the first quarter. Drove around trying to find a place to park, walked around (as we'd parked on the opposite side of the stadium from the only gate that remained open that long after kickoff), got a pair of decent seat tickets on the way for $20 each. We were in the top level (whereas the original tickets had been in the lower), but low in it (though not as low in the section as the earlier ones either) and at the 30 yard line or so. The higher was good, we decided, as you could get a good picture of the whole field. Brought the binoculars, so we got to watch Shanahan pace around a bit, and get some good close-up looks (though it was more useful to just watch the play as a whole most of the time).

But then, you know, Denver didn't bring its defensive team with them to Kansas City, so that was sort of disappointing. But I had a lot of fun with Dad. Staying up all night the night before wasn't the best idea, though, because I wanted to be able to help him drive the bits when I was there so he didn't have to drive the whole six hours by himself (back here to drop me off and then back home). But in retrospect, I'd forgotten that he doesn't like me driving--he had crazy dreams about it last time we went somewhere (I think here to school for some reason, but I might be wrong) and thus won't let me drive long distances with him, though he never enunciated it this time around. Worse, though, we didn't really get to hang out on Saturday when he came down that afternoon, just a couple of shopping runs and then dinner--he ended up going back to the hotel around 8 or so and giving Rachel and I the car to run around wherever we needed (though nothing's open to do down here on a Saturday, it appears; even the mall closes at 9)--so in the car was the only time not occupied by something else that I really got to spend with him (football games = loud), and I was struggling to stay awake (and failing quite often) for most of it.

Downloaded this SopCast software today to let me watch the Denver game today, and ended up blowing my entire week's bandwidth. So I'm running at dial-up speeds for at least the rest of the week, which sucks. Further suckage comes from the fact that the entire bandwidth usage came from the P2P reuploading--3.75 gigs of it, when the whole 2 or so hours of football watching only took 635mb. Planning to look for a way to limit that like you can with normal P2P software, but I haven't found it yet for this program. Which means I might have to find another one that works, because that's not going to be doable if it busts me every week.

But above mentioned defeat to Kansas City, though humiliating (it seems like we only can get beaten by teams with horrible reputations--first Houston, then Kansas City?), really appears to have paid off, because it humiliated them early and enough to pick it back up for this game against Tampa Bay. Today's was a defense game, and we brought it.

Just got off the phone after about 40 minutes of conversation with the parents. Talked to Mom about the VP debate and politics and such--she's pretty disenfranchised with politics in general; she's voted in every election at least since I've been alive, and I'm pretty sure that's been since she turned 18, but she definitely doesn't get into it like I do. She's of the opinion that all politicians are crooks (often true, I'll concede), but as a result, isn't locked in to one party as much as I used to think she was (as much as she used to be?) And I'm pretty sure I've got her voting for Obama as well. So that's both parents turned from almost exclusively voting Republican. Job = success. She was asking me about the whole Obama/Ayers thing, which still hasn't really been explained well, but I read to her the couple of pertenent lines from the AP article I linked to in the last post (that was mostly about Palin calling Obama a terrorist) and she was reassured a bit ("That makes me feel better about--" I assumed 'voting for him' was the next line, which made me quite happy). She likes that Biden votes for the partial birth abortion ban, as she was always pretty much a one-issue Republican (stems from the Catholic upbringing plus probably more from the shitty luck she had having kids, I would guess). Not a fan of taxes either, but who is?

So win there. Same note, on Friday got to see Kristen Bell (from Veronica Mars and Heroes) and Rashida Jones (of The Office) come talk about Obama. Got some pictures of that on bleakone's camera that I'll have to have her email to me/nick with camera cord and put up for kicks. Mostly just went because Kaci and Mom watch Heroes and I wanted to snap a couple for them, as they didn't really say anything interesting. ("Register to vote! And then make your friends! And then vote for Obama!")

Cleaned out my email inbox on Friday night too, which took a long time. Brought it down from near 700 just in the inbox to 170 or so; my goal was enough less than 200 in the inbox that everything showed up on one page of messages even when I had some unread emails in there, which has been achieved. I'd say about half filed into my folders (that need renamed/reworked, as I combined some things and filed emails into folders that were originally for other topics, as they didn't have their own folder and I didn't feel like there were enough emails to deserve it, such as all Star Trek topic'd ones into the Voyager folder, etc.), and half deleted.

Missed breakfast and lunch (it's really just one brunch on weekends, but still) out shopping with bleakone and her mom (LOL at how I'm officially out of cash--as in, I have something like *counts* 37 cents to my name, and I didn't even buy more than a couple of 67 cent bottles of soda, a $1 package each of vanilla wafers and Wal-Mart brand cookies, and a thing of my Wal-Mart sugar free fruit punch that I down in two-liter quantities like water), so I microwaved one of my bison patties when I got back. Fairly successful--I could have gone down and cooked it on the stove in the basement, but I was watching the Denver game, so that wasn't happening until at least after that was done, and by the time it was over it'd be time for dinner and thus pointless, so I went for it. I did the math according to some website's suggestion of 7 minutes per pound (thus about 1:30 for my 3.5 oz), but stuck it in there for only a minute at first, which was good, because it was definitely done after that. A tad too far done, actually, but still quite eatable. So yum.

Now I really want to go to sleep and just wake up early enough to finish up my lab book for genetics (I've kept it mostly caught up, I just need to locate all the random papers I'm supposed to paste in and make sure they're up to date, as they're all the spare copies of ones we turned in, and I tend to fill in one copy and forget about it until right before I've got to hand it in and then not have enough time to duplicate it for my book), but I've had something like 3.5 liters of fake!Diet Dr. Pepper and two or three glasses of Diet Mtn. Dew since 2pm (I'm a whore for the soda--it's a problem, but I'll drink whatever you give me in whatever quantities you give it to me in, thus making the two liter bottle last not even a day in most cases) so I don't think it'll happen. Even though my body is tired (and my brain sort of too), I'm hopped up.

Palin meets her first world leaders in New York

I'm sorry, but this should not be an event just occurring for the first time for a vice presidential candidate 41 days before the election.

So I read an article in the NY Times this morning. 1 in 4 Americans think that the US enjoys too much freedom of speech and the press. (I can't find the actual article online as of yet, will have to check.) Nice job, America. I hereby declare that 1/4 of you are morons.

Oh, breaking news! Watching CSPAN, and one of the Democrats (Betty McCollum, D-MN) is now bitching that a Republican (Virginia Fox, R-NC) called Democrats anti-American. In form of a "parlimentary inquiry", whatever that means. Nothing, evidently, as nothing happened. She basically went "OMGZ, did you hear that, Speaker? She totally called us a bad name." And the Speaker was all "Umm, whatever. I'm not the referee. I'd like to remind all parties that all comments should be directed towards the Speaker and not to each other." And that was it; Fox just went back to talking after re-getting the floor.

The Speaker's fed up with the Republicans. Or at least their interruptions on stupid stuff. It was a nothing resolution (honoring Constitution Day, I'm assuming), and somebody stood up and said "OH NUH-UH! No quorum here, so that vote didn't count, kthx." And when she stood up to be recognized, the speaker had this "Oh, not again" tone of voice. It was really funny.

Quorum calls are boring. The Senate's been doing nothing the entire time I've been watching.

Back to the House. Noise mitigation re: airports near schools. You know, I've been thinking about this Federalist/Anti-Federalist issue that I've got to take a side on for a polisci position paper, which is hard for a bicameralism fan like myself. But when it comes to things like this, I start thinking that I'm a big anti-federalist fan. This issue, at least. I mean, come on. How many schools across the nation are near enough to airports to have this issue? Seriously? I understand that since the issue is using FAA funds (the F, federal, being the sticking point), it's got to be done on the federal level, but it seems like a big waste of time for something that could be handled with state legislative time.

And we switched to naming some place (North Platt?) in Nebraska "Rail Town, USA". And have been discussing that FOREVER. And now (name!fail) Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) is blathering about how DC is "Railtown, USA" because of politicing about the energy bill. Shut up and let them pass this waste of my tax dollars-paid time.

Except this was this afternoon, and I fail at posting when I'm actually writing things. Roomtypes are watching Youtube videos of old "So You Think You Can Dance" routines. (Edit: more than an hour later, still going. How many dances are there to watch, for crying out loud?) I wish to go to sleep. Not happy.

Walked to Walgreens (sort of--rode the shuttle about halfway, then walked all the way back) just a bit ago with bleakone. OMG, Oreo Cakesters for $0.10 each. Like, those packets of three? $0.30. I ended up getting 5 because I wanted to use up the end of my moneys gift card thing--if I just left like $0.50 on there, it'd never get used.

Edit: I just caught from the cohabs "And we don't have to go to bed until 12:30 in the morning" "Don't you have your 8:30 class tomorrow?" "Yeah, but it's just dance." No mention of the other person in the room who has an 8am class tomorrow that's not something stupid like dance and is instead the hard-to-stay-awake-on-the-best-of-days polisci lecture. Grr.

LOL at how there's a Sarah Palin dig in one of the Jay Nixon for Missouri governor ads. There's a reference to the "bridge to nowhere". It's a good idea--capitalize on the fact that everybody's already heard that phrase from the higher-budget national campaign ads so that Nixon, who doesn't have bazillions of dollars, can get the same message across without having to spend precious airtime explaining the reference. Plus, it makes the DNC happy because it's reminding everybody that the bridge was a fail!project, and making the DNC happy means more national committee resources on this race. Not to mention that when it came on, I wasn't paying attention at all because it was your generic regional political ad--just talking without even the passionate elocution of Obama to make you tune in--until my ears caught that familiar phrase, which made me look (because it seemed out of place in a state campaign ad). It's the same with some company (I can't remember which) that I've seen adverts for quite a bit down here--it's just the company's website on the screen with a TV-static background accompanied by that same fuzzy TV-static noise, which makes you pop your head up and try to figure out why your set's on the fritz. That's seriously one of the smartest ads I've seen in my entire life because no matter how many times I've seen it (it's been at least 3), I still look up every time.

So the TV's broken in a few times saying "turn to channel 4 for info on a flash flood warning" and I've just ignored it. It's been raining all evening, but hell, it's been raining for the past few weeks, and this place is underwater if it drizzles for 5 minutes. But I looked out the window a moment ago (as I thought I heard rush week kids screaming from across the street again--I swear, that I'm on the eighth floor and across both a small parking lot and a street from a couple of the houses and can still hear when they're out there rah-rahing is just impressive--but it was the wind whistling in the window, like I think I've complained about before) and holy shit! It's hard to get a handle on how hard the rain actually is coming down, as it's (obviously, as it's 1am) dark, but as I was looking across the street, a car was driving along, and its wheels were spinning up significant amounts more water than anybody should still be driving in. Plus, every time there's a big gust of wind, the window screams at me and then there's a big splat of water on it, LOL. And now that I'm looking harder, the rain is pretty brutal. I assume we're just feeling Ike at this point.

I pulled a box out from under my bed today and the cardboard finally just gave up, so that was no fun. Especially as something (oatmeal packet, apparently) had broken in the bottom of the box, so now I've got to vaccuum at some point tomorrow before Chelsea gets back.

And I missed Tina Fey on SNL, which is sad. I saw something like the last whole hour, and none of it was really funny to me--I don't watch very often (only when people I like are on it/hosting), but SNL seems to be very hit-and-miss. Some stuff is falldown great (see Tina's "bitch is the new black", "Lazy Sunday", etc.), but the rest is either "Huh. That was vaguely amusing," or just downright ". . . move on." Wasn't Barack supposed to be on it too? And Phelps thanked William Shatner, so I'm assuming I missed whatever he did too. Looks like all the good stuff was in the beginning.

OMG. This storm is loud. It just tripled in intensity, both rain coming down and wind smacking it against my window and making the window roar. I can't imagine what it must have been like further south. My grandparents and cousin were all in the manditory evac zone in Baytown, TX, so I'm still trying to figure out how things are going down there--power's all still out, last I could figure, so no luck yet.

Looking at the forecast. HUMIDITY DECREASE, KTHX. Working out in the non-air conditioned, lame-arsed gym here is utterly impossible when none of the sweat can evaporate from your body. I'm not a sweaty type in general, but here? *dies*

You know, I saw a Facebook group that really made me think. Still banning all men who have sex with men from donating blood is pretty darn discriminatory. Sure, there's the window of undetectability of the virus, but the window's the same in people who engage in heterosexual content.

Statistics:

MSM (men who have sex with men) account for 45% of all HIV cases as of the end of 2003. [CDC/Kaiser Report]

Blacks made up about 47% of the total HIV-positive population and more than half of new HIV cases. [The Body, from Kaiser]

Sure, there's some overlap there, naturally, but wouldn't it logically follow that perhaps banning all MSM isn't what we should be doing, especially when there's another demographic with an even higher prevelence rate? It's just another confirmation of what I've been saying--discrimination against homosexuals is the last accepted form of it. Can't ban all persons of African descent, we'd descend into race riots and screams of racism, but feel free to ban an entire group--gays can hide their sexuality, unlike skin color, so they're less likely to speak out when being oppressed. I'm not saying switch one for the other or anything like that, as the justification is there--they're banning those who admit to engaging in a specific activity, not those with a skin color they can't control, but statistically it appears to be no longer prudent. I'd like to see some figures as to the amount of blood that the Red Cross is losing out on due to the MSM ban to really crunch the numbers to weigh the exposure chance that they're allowing now with the current ban vs the slightly increased exposure chance + increased donations.