you better have voted.

If Americans don't turn out to vote, the terrorists have already won!

So much for that.

I maintain that they won with the USA PATRIOT Act. However much it cost them to get Americans to willingly lobotomize their freedom for the promise of a nonexistent safety, they beat us at a bargain price.

Finally talked to my grandmother up north today. There's a ritual with the conversation where any time we talk, she tells me about this tech company up there called the Grass Valley Group, and she says that it's changed hands a few times and renamed itself and she doesn't really know what it's called now, but Grass Valley is a really nice place to live (she left out the latter part this time, possibly only because she asked if I liked where I was and I said I was staying). In truth Grass Valley is a pretty nice place to live if you want to be kind of midway out in the boonies, but I don't, so I'm not moving there. In any case I'll make it up there on or before Thanksgiving, I guess.

I just watched last week's episode of The West Wing, to see what American politics should be, and then I looked at the election results and saw what we're stuck with. I'm something of a vegetable this week, like a bunch of circuit breakers in my brain have flipped and nothing's happened to reset them yet. I'm unemployed and my nation has voted for President Retarded Monkey and his merry band of assholes and I have all this shit to take care of and my shoulders hurt because I'm pinching nerves out of stress which is affecting my aikido which would otherwise be stress relief and I'm going to run out of money in a couple months and sometimes I don't deal with it all quite so well.

There are vicious circles here that I need to step outside of. Move to engage, get a grip, deflect, control the situation.

I finished sending out resumes to people I know or my friends know, at companies whose websites claim to be hiring. In the meantime tomorrow I'll stop by Semifreddi's and email Planet Organics and see if either of them are hiring, because optimism isn't really in me these days. There's too much reality to deal with.

I'm sorry about what I perceive to be the lack of interesting stories in my writing recently. I like writing about aikido, at least. That's just how things are at the moment.

Maybe tomorrow will be a good day.


Chris