. Spinning .

I didn’t listen to the State of the Union address last night; didn’t even read the full text the next day as I usually do. Nor have I been following the GOP primaries. The time to listen to politicians is certainly not in an election year when lies fly like bullets.

My concern in upcoming major elections is not as much who gains the oval office, but more importantly, that neither party ever again gains control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate, all three.

This to me is the very antithesis of a democracy. At best it represents the will of half the populace. I would prefer the frustrations and time delays of gridlock (gridlock, meaning that two opposing sides cannot compromise; not that one will not bend to the wishes of the other and take the full blame for the hold-up) to the steamrolling over of one half of society’s desires and values in favor of the other’s. Forcing one political policy on the entire population of a country is called a dictatorship.

Well yes, I guess the last full novel I read was “The Namesake” back in April 2011. And yes, shortly thereafter I started Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World but in truth, I’d only made it 200 pages in by the end of the year.

Well of course I’ve been reading! Short flash pieces of my friends’ work. Poetry, art (yes, you can read art just as you can paint a story), too much current event news coverage, and my own pieces as I flash-edit (a new term I’ve just made up to indicate the fast nature of flash fiction writing). That’s what I spent most of last year doing: writing. Every day, a story a day. Now I need to organize them all in Tinderbox (as I did the previous year’s 100 Days Project), tag them with style or theme if not genre, clean them up, and plan to put a book or two together out of them and make some attempt to publish.

I’m also getting (or planning on getting) more active with my reading and reviewing here at Spinning. I suspect that my couple of years of reading and writing flash fiction may have tuned my mind into short spurts of attention, and I may have to slowly expand it into novel length not only to read, but to write.

See, I’m also planning on writing a hypertext narrative of novel length.

But first, I’ve just gone through fifty more pages of Murakami today and once I go back and refresh my memory with what I read in the beginning of the book, I’ll post the first review. Not my usual style, where I’d post almost daily as I read, but it’s a start!

With a Photoshopped version of the snowstorm…

Let’s say I agree that the money and wealth at the top 1 or 2% needs to be equally redistributed to the remainder of the populace. No matter if that money was ill-gotten or earned by hard work. Sounds good no?

Since I’m not in that top percentile, I’d make out well. And, that extra bonus money (since I certainly didn’t earn it) would be quite welcome and appreciated. Now, let’s look down the road, a generation beyond the great equalization of wealth.

I’d bet my entire windfall that in less than a decade, the shift in wealth would have already become evident. There would already be new billionaires, and there would be a large portion of society that had long lost every penny they’d been given. You see, when you win the lottery, you win money–not brains.

We are not really all born equal, nor are all able to overcome their obstacles and gain their desires, become educated, earn a good to great living, invent the latest new gizmo that benefits mankind. Nor will all born with the silver spoon manage to get much beyond toddling without losing the spoon.  This is the nature of man. Some folks have ambition, some have genetic predisposition to fuck up.

Soon the whole balance would once again reassert itself as a society. The haves would do better and better, while the have-nots would grumble and complain and blame everyone else but themselves. You can’t say that some have an unequal chance in life when you see the self made millionaires like a Bill Gates or an Oprah Winfrey or a Barack Obama who have found their own ways of using their talents to get ahead in a world where they weren’t marked for greatness.

I’m not rich because I’m not super intelligent, or super creative, or super silver-tongued and self-confident nor have the ambition to overcome my shortcomings. It’s my fault and my fault alone.

I often post the same thing on twitter and Facebook and did so with this:

Ever wonder what life would be like if it were the men’s movement of the sixties instead of the women’s? If men decided that the glory of raising children shouldn’t be for women only, quit their jobs and stayed home?

What’s interesting is what came out of it. On twitter, it went in the direction of certain college campus behavior and men hating women. On Facebook, it took off in the theme of women hating men. Oh the wonders of diversity of opinion!

I personally don’t think that men hate women or women hate men. It really has nothing to do with it, though there may be some resentment involved. Basically, I think it has more to do with self-image and projected image and perception.

But getting back to the original question. While one’s first thought would be, “You can’t do that because someone has to earn a living to support the family.” But look at the women’s movement away from the constraints of home and family to grant time for full time meaningful employment, and meaningful employment often means success-oriented with goals that might challenge any normal schedule and a job into much more than a 40-hour week. Didn’t anyone say, “You can’t do that because who’s going to raise the kids?” Or even watch the kids for that matter. Well that problem was solved with daycare that took care of infancy through age six when kindergarten is normally started. Solutions do manage to come up when someone wants something bad enough to make it work.

It’s an interesting question as a “what if?” and it no doubt would have had as large an impact on society as has the feminist movement of nearly fifty years ago.

Love these new little round cucumbers; they’re delicious and look like miniature turban squash or honeydew melons.

Interesting, though not really all that surprising to me, that every one of the sympathy cards we personally received on the death of a close family member were from those I’d consider conservative-leaning.

I like the new GEICO commercial, where the little kid gets hung up in the basketball hoop. It’s an irony that will go over the heads of many who will chuckle perhaps, completely missing the heavier story that underlies it.

The young couple stands in front of a nice suburban home, and tell us something to the effect that their 401k wasn’t going to be enough to send their 5 year-old son through college, so they “taught him to dunk.” In the background, the little boy slam-dunks a basket and hangs there. “Scholarship!” the mother proudly beams.

And while everyone watches and giggles, no one realizes the import of not the advertised message-a GEICO savings plan–but of the ease with which one can get access to an education by learning to bounce a ball. Easier than saving money or earning a scholarship based on intelligence and knowledge. Yep, college ain’t for smarties. College is for those who can play games.

Thought I’d outgrown naivete. Thought wisdom and patience had been acquired. Didn’t believe I could still be surprised.

While attempting to convert from COBRA coverage to an individual health insurance policy, I called to get a quote. $6000 a month, the girl said. I was outraged, even found it amusing before I figured yeah, she’s made a mistake. So I called back the next morning and spoke with someone else who quoted me, yes, $6000 a month.

I laughed. No, really. I asked her, “Weren’t you afraid to get back on the phone and tell me this?” She said it did seem a bit high. Plus, the coverage wasn’t as good as what we had and had a higher deductible. “That’s $72,000 a year,” I said. “Do you make $72,000 a year? And would you pay that for insurance?” which to me, is like “protection” money, not even a guaranteed service (in that it may not be used, as The Company truly hopes and prays).

All set to armor up and swing a magic sword of self-righteousness, I wondered why my husband didn’t seem surprised. Nor, aside from a few, many others. Then it dawned on me: While CIGNA is required by contract and law to not discriminate against me and my spouse by refusing coverage, it’s well within their methods to simply quote some exorbitant price tag. This, folks, is what I didn’t think they were capable of doing, even as I raged against the fee. Though of course, the laws being the laws, loopholes for worms are always included. They can pass a thousand-page bill that besides guidelines and earmarks and all kinds of goodies thrown in, don’t actually solve the problems at all.

There are other options, but I really should have started digging into this six months ago, not realizing quite how complicated it all gets. Group insurance to group insurance is one thing, but if you go to an individual policy, then try to get into a group, the HIPAA doesn’t cover you and you can be discriminated against legally for existing conditions.

Somehow, I’m not thrilled with paying taxes that will pay insurance for others, while I myself may need to do without.

And now, with a new perception of myself as less than Joan d’Arc taking on injustice, I find I must do further battle with the powers of government. Our property tax bill on a 33 year-old car went up 350% because of a new valuation.

You know, we’re all hurting, but somehow, I just wouldn’t think of screwing somebody else so they can hurt too and believe it would make me feel better.

And the garbage pickup isn’t worth it.

I believe I’ll be moving on to the Insurance industry.

Okay, so the new official garbage can was delivered within an hour of the pickup of the old by our regular drivers for twenty years (Hi guys!). Here it is:

It’s the Big Green Monster in the middle. On the right is Old Faithful, our dedicated garbage container for all these many years. Though garbage pickup is every Tuesday, there are times when I let it go for two weeks because it’s not full. It’s practically never more than half full on a weekly basis. (I don’t waste food or anything else.) Upon occasion I have a black plastic trash bag from the shop, maybe once a month. The small pails to the left? They’re our recycling buckets. I fill one up once a month; they pickup every other week. This will be replaced by a receptacle the same size as the new trash container, only it’ll be blue.

It’s true I’m resistive to change until I’m convinced it’s for the best. This move was touted as being the best, and I’m sure in many ways, for many residents it is. I don’t see how my elderly-with-bad-knees neighbor is going to get this thing down to the curb. I also don’t believe that one of the reasons was to enhance the beauty of the town but suspect that like much else, it was to level the field, to make us all the same, which is too close to those futuristic movies and TV shows I watched as a child.

And what about jobs? These will be picked up via a mechanical arm. That’s why they have to all be consistent. Meaning one guy per truck loses his job.

Enough about me; I’m waiting to see what my husband says when he can’t get the car into the garage.

Nothing like seeing all the little sprouts stick their heads out and make you feel like Mother Nature herself:

I was going to tweet this, or put a brief comment on Facebook, since I use those for my random thoughts, but somehow I know that I’ll just invite argument when all I want to do is, well, lay down an idea. And, well, I seem to be in a crowd of one in my way of thinking.

The opening of the floodgates along the Mississippi in order to save New Orleans from more damage brings up ethical questions about who to save and who to let swim. It’s been brought up as a rich versus poor controversy, but everything lately is being laid at the feet of the rich versus poor as a point to blame. For me, it’s the individual versus the masses, or in this case, the lesser will be sacrificed for the majority of the populace.

And it all comes back to this: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Ursula LeGuin).

Why don’t they just face the fact of life that New Orleans is in a bad place. Particularly if you believe in global warming, what’s the sense of rebuilding it over and over again–in the same place? Move it inland a bit, why don’t you? Yes, expensive, but it’d be a lot more secure and it wouldn’t be at the sacrifice of all those little towns along the river that wouldn’t be in peril if they just left the damn river alone. They’ve spent a lot of money building a flood gate system to protect New Orleans and I’ll betcha all of Louisiana, including those folks who are unfortunately at risk to lose their homes though they might’ve been wise enough to build far enough inland paid for that system with their tax dollars.

And for me, it all comes back to Omelas. When I read that story a few years back, I never knew how much it would explain my views on life. I’d've saved the child.

Last night, after having the critical last 10 minutes of a tv show interrupted by an impending Presidential announcement only to listen to the media speculate and time-fill while they waited for the President to get ready, and upon the media breaking the news (along with Facebook, twitter, etc.) that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, I went to bed in disgust. Since the President had already been scooped, it didn’t make any difference to me what he had to say–it would be old news and frankly, everyone was already giving him credit as if he’d wielded the knife himself.

This morning I checked through twitter and Facebook again and was put off by the reports and the sarcasm I saw there. At this point, I was thinking, jeepers, the U.S.A. spent ten years and thousands of people involved in the tracking-down of Osama Bin Laden when all we needed was one man. The Democrats were right; this is the second coming. People were cheering outside the White House, waving flags, singing patriotic songs. The election’s in the bag.

Then I knew I had to listen directly to the President’s speech. I grit my teeth and watched the 9-minute tape.

And once again I realized that despite his ego and attitude that I personally find abrasive, the President is a lot more intelligent than a great majority of his idolaters supporters. He wisely and honestly gave credit to the years put into this coup instead of taking all the credit for himself. It is, of course, a feather in a politician’s cap, but Obama was subtle in this regard and certainly gave credit where credit was due. While he attempted to bring back a sense of patriotism and pride by calling up the show of support and solidarity Americans felt after the 9/11/01 attacks, he noted that Bin Laden was just one man and would be replaced by another. I salute him for that.

Have I fallen for campaign schtick? Possibly. But I’m already well used to presidential speeches and what rings true and what doesn’t. Even with the political ramifications and forethought of same that the President put into this speech, it was to be admired that he presented it in the words that he did.

What this event has shown me is that I may just rethink my connection to the internet social networking system. That, as I’d always done before, get the story from the horse’s mouth and forego media speculation and the personal biases of individuals vocalized on these all-too-easy-to-rant online methods. I may just disconnect from it all.