More than a man, he's a shining golden god

Rewatching Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny on Sunday was extremely awesome, and has kept Jack Black stuck in my head all week.

Friend reblogged this video on tumblr, which I thought was pretty witty while also being largely spot on. There are a couple of parts where I thought she was giving girls too little credit-- for example, a chick might be hot and into nerdy shit, but she still might dump her significant other for totally legitimate reasons that aren't shallow. But anyway.

My favorite sequence is where she gets down to business, but the gist is: People don't break up with people because they're "too nice", or even because they're "nice" at all. People break up with people for entirely legitimate reasons, often to do with lack of compatibility.

Work is good, but I'm worried about some of my students. I do have several in the area where Hurricane Isaac has hit, and I haven't been able to get in touch with all of them. I have no idea what it's like to live through something like that, but I do know what it's like to sit in another state and worry, waiting to see if your friend will be able to contact you and let you know they're still alive. Thankfully, though they're terribly insensitive about just about everything else, my students seem to appreciate how scary it is to live through even tropical storms, and several of them today expressed concern for fellow classmates living in the affected area.

Edit: Holy wow! Awesome Russian animated film of The Little Mermaid from 1968!

The song she sings is so wonderfully haunting!

Honestly? Election year is just making me want to get the heck out of dodge

I want to live under a rock, or on Mars, or something, until the goddamn meaningless two-party circus is quiet.

I don't really feel like the presidency matters; the people under the president matter. And a shocking number of people in this country are totally okay with bullshit policies either because they don't know better, or they're perfectly morally comfortable with fucking over everybody else in the hopes that they will benefit.

Danny and I had a conversation the other day about how it makes me a little uncomfortable that my mom has some learned racism against Asian cultures in general. It's mostly because of the era she grew up in, and her parents being the way they are, too, but Danny pointed out, "Well, and she was exposed to those decades of fear-mongering about how Japan was going to take over."

"Hah," I said. "That's definitely true."

"Now it's fear-mongering about China instead."

"It's always something."

"It's funny because we seem to get so damned nervous about the idea of somebody else 'catching up' to us. All the other powers in the world are pretty similar to each other, in terms of strength. They have to actually be polite with each other to be able to co-exist, they have manners." We started climbing the stairs.

I said, "Well, that's what's really wrong with us, as a country, in terms of attitude. You have this bullshit 'American' ideal of being better than everybody else, and we're terrified- fucking terrified that that won't be true anymore, and then we'll have to own up to the fact that we've been bullying everyone else for the last twenty years, longer. And they're not going to fucking like us any better with us acting like we do."

Anyway- I'm super against Romney because I'm super against the Mormon religion and people who support it. I seriously don't think I need to explain why, so I'm not going to bother. (I'm actually really sick of having to explain why I'm against organizations that are explicitly seeking the destruction and rescinding of my and other women's rights. I do not need a reason beyond that. That is a good reason.)

I don't think Obama's all that, sure, but I also think the people working under him have done the best they can do with a really shitty situation. I definitely don't think Romney would be better. I don't think having a system weeded down to two parties is fair to the nation, nor logical for us as a people. There's no representation for like 85% of the populace. Mexico had sixteen parties in their latest election, last I checked! SIXTEEN. That's actually having choices! We used to have all sorts of parties, and they weren't just meaningless showmanship attached to arbitrarily chosen words. What happened to that?

I don't hear anybody in US politics offering a good solution about how to fix our problems. I just hear the guys in office right now, doing their damnedest to keep things running, and the guys who want to be in office, screaming like children about how the guys in office are fucking it all up.

Nobody in their right mind would actually want to be the president of this country as it is right now.

I shall now sulk disappointedly about the RNC and Clint Eastwood's involvement. Sulk.

Gene Wolfe, I hope you do not weigh in on this election, because I would doubtless be sad about it either way.