And the winner is...

     M won a pumpkin carving contest at work with this entry, lovingly named "Awkward Teen-O-Lantern." 

     Pulled me right on outta that funk I was in.

Stupid

     So much to ridicule tonight, starting with kindergarten, whose grownups apparently are unacquainted with five- and six-year-old people. This week's Big Dumb Idea concerns a Halloween party during school tomorrow. Here's what I think when I hear "Halloween party": Halloween costumes. Yes? No. The directive is for the child to "dress as your favorite story book character." Never mind that my child wants to be a fairy queen ballerina ghost, a costume she has been planning for weeks to wear for Halloween, which is an awesome fake holiday and which tomorrow is. Halloween. Other children may dream of dressing up as spiders, or witches, or hobos. Because it's Halloween all across this great land of ours tomorrow. Halloween, not to be confused with Story Book Day, which is not a fake holiday in America because it is lame. 

     So, fucked once again by kindergarten and the evil choice between fighting the stupid and ensuring our daughter doesn't feel hopelessly odd and left out, we must now come up with an additional costume based on an emergency favorite story book character, which we are having a tough time doing because we are frightened of, not delighted by, wolves and trolls and chubby brother-and-sister teams who shove old ladies into ovens. 

     According to the overinvolved, understimulated kindergarten party planners, making our original, excellent fairy queen ballerina ghost costume just wasn't challenging enough.

     Stupid kindergarten.

     In other dumb, nine percent of eligible voters still have not made up their minds. Oh here's a choice for you, intelligent, ethical leadership to dig you out of the ditch you've put yourself in or a flaming vat of lying dogshit. Hmm. Don't know? FAIL. Forfeit turn. Disallowed to vote. 

     Honestly, I don't care what the undecideds do; I just want them to go away. I want to stop hearing about them, their smug, coy "power," how they're the key to the election. Get the fuck out of the way already.

     Stupid.

     This, too, from today's boneheaded McPalin dolts.

     And this, from the Old (and I mean old) Guard.

     And this.

     Oh, and there's this crap to look forward to.

     All this, and so much more, in just one day. And I didn't even have to go off the blogs.

UPDATE 10/31/08

     God in heaven, this AP article puts the number of "persuadables" at 14% and clarifies who these people are: the accepted euphemism is "low-information voters," but I prefer the more accurate moniker, "stupid fuckers." 

Funnel

     Several things give me the sensation lately that the world is shrinking -- my world is shrinking. The election first. The closer we get, the narrower my reading becomes; in the last couple of weeks, I've found myself sticking close by and constantly refreshing WashPo, NYT, HuffPo, Politico, Wonkette. My fingers type the URLs almost automatically. I have no use for other news, never mind other outlets. I have fallen off my habitual grazing of writing sites in favor of all politics, all the time. I'm a junkie who can stand ever less time between hits. 

     Second is writing. The novel is stalled. Anxieties burst forth in short poems. Nothing is lyrical anymore -- everything I write is pistol fire. Time seems short.

     Third is this fucking illness. Less time between hydrocodone; whereas a few weeks ago I could count on several hours at least of feeling OK, these days I'm hurting within an hour of getting out of bed. When I eat, it no longer surprises me that I feel like shit immediately after. One of the chemo nurses told me to blame the medicine, not the disease, but it's hard when I feel progressively worse. 

     Socially I'm caving in on myself. One of the hardest parts of being sick (and being treated with poisons) is that it becomes increasingly difficult to plan ahead. I've been invited to a birthday tea for a close friend this Sunday, but I know I'll be feeling like hell by 3:00. Should I accept the invitation and hope for the best? My inclination is to let everyone off the hook and send regrets. 

     A's birthday party was a low point last Sunday. I'd had chemo two days earlier, and was in full-throttle freakout (steroids? anti-nausea meds?) by the time the guests arrived, a blathering snotty mess. The prospect of functioning -- i.e. acting like a real grownup person -- in the thick of a dozen kids and their parents was just overwhelming. I was so afraid of pulling attention away from A and having the highbeams on me, I didn't make it downstairs until the tail end, hence disappointing the most important person in my life on the most important day in hers. Fucking awful. 

     I was very, very sick in 2007. Gather-the-family kind of sick. And I recall the perverse urge to pull away from A. I don't remember much about that spring, but I do remember thinking that she was going to have to get used to me not being there, that she and M were going to have to learn to do things without me. It must seem crazy -- it has seemed nuts to me, until recently. Now, though, I'm getting to the point where the logic doesn't seem quite so twisted. I understand the impulse, even as I reject it. That scares me.

     So. Shrinking, funneling, retreating. Illness is isolating. Cancer is a whirlpool.

Rain

     Just when the leaves start to get beautiful, we get rain. It happens every autumn; this year, after an exceptionally dry summer, we welcome it, but still -- I'm not ready for those leaves to wash down into the gutters. 

     A spent the night with her lifelong friend Tori last night (Tori is also from China, adopted by her mother about eight months before A came home), and M went to a friend's house to prep a spit for a pig roast today. They're both there now. I hope A gets some seasonal new clothes for her birthday tomorrow. My sister and M's parents and her godparents can always be counted on for an updated wardrobe at birthday time. God knows she needs it; we sent her out today in a summer dress with a too-small sweater. It's alarming how children shoot up like sprouts after a downpour, and I have a thing--a leftover anxiety from my own childhood when I felt I had nothing but ill-fitting clothes, too tight, too short, too worn--that A will have clothes in her closet that fit and are appropriate for the season. I am projecting, of course, but I think this is a basic thing that will help her know in her bones that the grownups are paying attention, and are actively taking care of her. Clean sheets, clean clothes that fit, clean fingernails, art supplies, books and music. Basics. 

     My treatment yesterday went fine, but the aftermath was, and continues to be, trying. I don't know if it's the Zofran or the steroids that make me crazy-tense, but I've been alternating fits of hollering at the TV and crying for the last two days. Going to have some hot tea and read Everyman, which we're discussing in Novel Workshop on Wednesday. I also have a new poem to turn in on Monday. Strike that: I have to write a new poem for Monday. 

     Feeling weak and cranky, but I got A's birthday presents wrapped and ready for tomorrow. Art supplies, a cookbook, a fancy math set with a compass and protractor, Hello Kitty stationery, peach hand lotion, a CD of Chinese Lullabies by the Beijing Children's Choir (her old copy is scratched, but she still tries to play it), some face paints, and a "diamond" ring from the vintage shop down the street (which M let her pick out last week). 

     She'll be six tomorrow. I hope she knows, or comes to understand, how desperately M and I love her.

So over it

     I haven't written as regularly in the last week or so for several reasons. The Republicans have jumped the shark -- or, more precisely, continue to jump the shark, over and over again, day after day. Just when you think it cannot possibly get more shrill or ridiculous, out comes some random asshole suggesting Palin's big shopping accident is somehow eclipsed by Obama's use of his campaign plane to fly to Hawaii to visit one of the two most important women in his life, the grandmother who raised him, who is on the verge of death. And look, over there is Nancy Pfuckinpooter insisting that oh I can't even tell what evil she is trying to weave on MSNBC today, I'm too weary and disgusted to follow along with these desperate blowhards. Not to mention the candidates, one of whom (and she shall remain nameless) cannot define "preconditions" in the context of international relations or, shit, anything else, and who thinks elitist refers to "anybody who thinks they're better than anyone else." GAH. I am ready for the circular firing squad to commence. Please, God, let the Earth spin off its axis just long enough to create a 12-day rip in the time-space continuum; I'll gladly forfeit the next two weeks if it'll spare the nation this stinking nonsense. Really, am I the only one who could use a nice long nap? Not even my vast supply of nerve pills, generously dispensed, seems to be helping.

     The other thing is that I feel like crap most days, which is not conducive to writing about feeling like crap. I have a chemo scheduled for tomorrow, and I have to say -- bring it on. Very anxious about this week on, week off pattern. As in politics, two weeks is an eternity and the bastards may just have enough time to get the best of us. So, scared.

     We're throwing a birthday party for A on Sunday afternoon, for which I am trying to gather, or at least conserve, energy. For reasons unknown to me or M, she has taken to calling herself "Hip-hop," so the sheet cake we ordered (M usually makes the birthday cake, but we're going low-effort this year) will feature a festive pink Hello Kitty motif and the message, "Happy Birthday, Hip-hop!" I adore my almost-six-year-old girl.

Random anxieties, worries

     UPDATE: Barack Obama is suspending his campaign for a real, legitimate, heartbreaking reason. This trumps the tally of pitiful distractions below. Prayers to the Obama family tonight.

     As my mother used to warn when I was five and whining: tone. Tone.

1. Limbaugh and other conservative mouthpieces stirring the uglypot
2. Ricky Dicky Davis, Part A: spicing up said uglypot with stale Rev. Wright dogshit
3. McPalin attributing more credibility to some random fake plumber's assessment of their opponent as "socialist" than they do to anyone with an actual brain
4. Nancy Poopinfucker making her own crappy contribution to the uglypot with her assertion that fully one-third of Virginia isn't real
5. Ricky Dicky Davis, Part B: implying there's something sinister about millions of people just like me and M donating an average of $86 to Obama/Biden
6. Bachmann Bachmann Bachmann

     God, there's too much to fully catalog. On top of it, I don't feel well. My energy is waning and the I'm eating more hydrocodone than ever. A asked tonight when I am going to feel better, because she wants to go places with me. My time with her lately has been limited to snuggling on the big blue sofa, or in bed. 

     Anxious and worried. 

Yes we can!

100,000 supporters in St. Louis. This is thrilling! Oh, my.

Why authenticity matters

     The New York Times runs a story on Cindy McCain's experience as a political wife in and out of Washington. The details of her story are not new -- her implication in the Keating Five thing, her addiction to pain killers, her isolation. What's interesting is Cindy McCain's announcement to British media that she intends to use Princess Diana as an example for comporting herself. 

     Never mind that Princess Diana was, well, a royal princess. My five-year-old likes that idea, too. Forget for a moment all of Diana's well-aired psychological and emotional difficulties. The qualities Cindy McCain chooses to focus on and attempt to emulate are Diana's lauded efforts on behalf of the world's poorest, neediest people, particularly children. AIDS babies, land mine victims, sick orphans. 

     The trouble with Cindy mimicking Diana's humanitarian efforts is that the impulse is at odds with Cindy McCain's life story and, as is clear from her record, her true nature. Yes, there have been many philanthropists, primarily women, who train their sights on the world's least fortunate to mask the pain of their own misfortune; even lazy armchair psychologists like me know that the do-gooders relate to the suffering of others because in it, they recognize something about themselves. Diana is the poster child for this Poor Little Rich Girl Makes Good dynamic. 

     But Diana's impulse seems to have been genuine, a repudiation of the difficulties of a failed marriage played out on a world stage, an extension of her expressive love of children and empathy for the downtrodden, and in keeping with her inner life. Organic; authentic.

     Unlike Diana, Cindy McCain's difficulties have been entirely her own doing, in direct relation to her outsize ambitions. She was the only congressional spouse implicated in the Keating Five scandal. She was not merely a troubled political spouse who found comfort in pain killers and came to be dependent on them; she stole from her own charity to support her addiction and lied about it to salvage her husband's career (and in the process, threw other careers, not to mention needy people, under the bus). 

     It's all well and good to admire the charitable example set by Diana. It's quite another to announce to the world that you intend to follow Diana's example when you've already wrecked your reputation doing just that. (The article reiterates that Cindy McCain never actually went to Rwanda in her fabled 1994 humanitarian mission during the genocide.) She's a poseur. She has proven repeatedly that her first interests are herself and her husband's career. I wouldn't trust Princess Cindy to collect money at the PTA bake sale, never mind as an ambassador for the very people on earth who can least afford her politically expedient motivations and attendant fuckups.

     Running a sleazy, shameless campaign that is by all accounts antithetical to his own true nature has proven unsustainable for the multiple personality disordered John McCain, and probably doomed his shot at the White House. And while it's fine that that Cindy ask herself WWDD -- there are few among us, after all, who actually live up to our ideal selves -- her chances of attaining anything close to the grace to which she allegedly aspires are dim indeed.

     Mrs. McCain, we knew Diana. Diana was a friend of ours. You, madam, are no Diana.

Pulling my hair out

     Figuratively, literally. 

     I'm going to miss the first hour or so of the debate tonight due to novel workshop. My money is on McCain raising the Ayers thing, using the same transparently flawed logic he has brazenly tried to advance for the last ten days: he'll claim he doesn't care about some "washed up old domestic terrorist" or Obama's gay Connecticut marriage to Ayers, blessed by that scary Rev. Wright who hates America, but that the American people of whom Obama is not one deserve to hear the truth and that it's a question of truthfulness and truthiness and truishness, which ryhmes with Jewishness, which reminds him, did you see that the socialist Obama's own Negro supporter, Jesse Jackson, is warning that the terrorist Obama administration will abolish Israel from the face of the earth, and every grandma and grandpa in the Sunshine State had better run for their lives? I'm just sayin.

     Elsewhere, from atop my head, my hair continues to flee. Trying as desperately as my man Joe Biden to sidestep the combover. I've asked M to let me know when it's too sketchy to ignore -- when the part is a bit too wide, too white -- so I can avoid embarrassing myself and everyone else and put a hat on already.

     Was all weepy and hurty yesterday. I think it must have something to do with the decimated blood cells... I felt tres fragile all day, and fussy last night. Keeping up with economic and campaign news didn't help, but I'm a junkie. Today's better, me-wise; the economy persists in sucking out loud.

     And the infant mortality rate is, shamefully, higher than that of 28 other countries.

     And the Dow is down 735 points.

     And we'll all be eating beanie-weenies and bark inside a month.

     But, yeah, come on, McCain. Tell me all about Bill Ayers.

Ten more things

     While I don't subscribe to the notion that a sunny attitude will upend cancer, I do believe in making myself feel good. You know, for the hell of it. A periodic inventory of gifts and graces helps me feel strong. This week's list:

1. Listening to A's side of a phone conversation with her new baby cousin and his parents
2. Being on the couch with the Sunday NYT, student poems, and my laptop
3. The smell of chicken stew M is cooking 
4. Utter certainty, confirmed with every news cycle, that we're right; that the nation will do the right thing and choose optimism over cynicism; that the batshit haters are the minority; that people are good
5. Going all day on one hydrocodone
6. Being well prepared for meetings at school tomorrow
7. Hearing all about my child's lovely manners from a friend who hosted A for a playdate
8. Talking with my sister-in-law, who is glowing and clearly over the moon ten weeks after giving birth
9. Writing a poem about illness that is not at all true (or at least is not my experience)
10. M

Are we done now?

     Newsflash: Sarah Palin abused her power and is in violation of Alaska state law. Essentially, Troopergate is a mini-scandal about unethical behavior. Unethical behavior from Sarah Palin. Could we not have dispensed with this nitwit Jerry Springer episode before it was thrust onto the world stage? We could have. But we were being mavericky in our selection of an unknown as a running mate, and we were too giddy with our silly surprising selves to save The Country We Love Above Ourselves the embarrassment of the Palin Posse even though we knew -- or pretended we knew -- about this investigation before naming her and her dipshit husband and her nineteen children or grandchildren or auxiliary children or whoever they are to the ticket. 

     Newsflash: (Didn't we already do one of these?) John McCain makes an attempt, at last, albeit halfassed, after weeks of stoking the flames, to tamp down the seething mass of ignorant hysteria that is his base by refuting that Barack Obama is -- what could be worse? -- an Arab. "He is a decent family man, a citizen." 'Cause, you know, there are no Arabs who are decent, who have families, who are men, who are citizens of the United States or elsewhere. So refuckinglax, everybody, even though you have John McCain's personal permission to be as angry as the six-headed beast that you are. Go ahead, get furiouser and furiouser, work yourselves into a frenzy, imply that Obama is a treasonous terrorist liar, but for God's sake, keep your collective voice down to a low roar and do it respectfully. And whatever you do, don't call him an Arab.

     Newsflash: And yet they're still at it. SaPa is still urging crowds to "connect the dots" between Obama and "his associations" and that insufferable nugget Tucker Bounds is blaming the lynch mob venom at GOP rallies on Obama's economic policies and the current fiscal crisis. WTF? Obama is, as always, gracious and calm. (Warning re: the ABC blog link -- the dingbats come out of the woodwork to comment; brace yourself for stupidity on parade.)

     News Summary: Why can't we skip the voting part and declare this thing over already?

Welcome to the Not So Great Depression

     Oh, I was all set to write funny, but then I turned on the TV and watched the whole goddamn economy crumble in, like, an hour, and now I'm in no mood.

     Brothers and sisters all over the world are in a blind spastic panic, unloading their investments and driving down the markets. Cashing out their bank accounts. Stuffing bills under mattresses. Opening wide to tweezer gold fillings into little cups. Pilfering their own copper pipes. Jesus.

     Rumor at school is that SaPa is coming to our little hamlet for a Hate-a-Thon sometime in the next week. I'm still waiting for her to explain (or be asked -- psssst, Couric: HINT) how Obama will "diminish the prestige of the presidency," while the close association of her own snowbilly lapdog Tard (Todd?) with the AIP will somehow elevate the reputation that W has methodically shredded in the last eight years. Grumpy Old McCain is back at it with the Ayers crap in a shameless effort to salvage a Straight Talk Express whose wheels came off weeks ago and whose smoldering carcass is still stinking up the bottom of the canyon. 

     None of this is enough to really do me in today -- I'm feeling like a shiny new nickel after the bloodsucking a couple days ago. But the cumulative effect, combined with the attempt to demonize, otherize, that one-ize, didja know he's black, wink? the honorable, patriotic, classy Obamas is so far beyond despicable I can't really get my head around it. I've been politically aware since about 1968, and I've never, never been so saddened by overt ugliness such as the McCain camp is launching, and its rabid supporters lapping up like blood-starved hounds. It's gone beyond insinuation to straight-up racism and fear-mongering. [This links to an elegant articulation by Seth Abramson of the real danger and potential legal implications of Palin's inflammatory rhetoric. An informative -- and chilling -- read.]

     Please, Mrs. Palin, explain how this elevates the prestige of the presidency. 

     Sickening.

     Chemo is on for tomorrow; we're going to try alternating weeks and begging the insurance gods to pay for Procrit. 

My life as a vampire

     The blood-taking went well today. I've had transfusions before, but always in concert with surgery or hospitalization, meaning I recall very little of them. Today I was wide awake (for the most part) and a little queasy considering those crimson bags hanging above my head, their bloody tails snaking into my chest catheter. It's ghoulish, no doubt, but I'm thankful there are people willing to donate. It took about six hours. Afterwards, M and I stopped for fried chicken ("chicken on the bone," A calls it) and came home and watched the stock market crash. Then I slept for three hours. 

     The theory is that I will feel -- what? perky? -- by tomorrow. Chemo's on for Friday. Yeehaw.

     My sister is on her way over to watch the Town Hall Debate, a genteel euphemism considering how thuggish the McPalin campaign has become over the last few days. Inciting violence now, they are -- openly, it would seem -- against anyone and everyone who doesn't favor their flavor of Kool-Aid. Obama. Biden. Journalists. Democrats. People with brains. Sarah Palin is a pig. McCain is a hypocrite (he voted for the bear DNA project he derided as pork in the first debate; that's the least of it) and a caricature of himself; a man who has sold his soul. I can't imagine his first act every morning isn't throwing up in shame. 

     Hopie's here -- showtime.

Today

     The last three days have been extraordinarily odd. I've been following politics, of course, and managed to read NYTBR, and watched back-to-back episodes of "House" last night (greatest show on TV) -- and in between, I did nothing but sleep. Hard. With dreams and everything. Lots of dreams about kittens in distress.

     That's what insufficient red blood cells do, I gather; deprive the ol' body of oxygen, effectively putting it to sleep.

     Today I have to go the hospital for another CBC (complete blood count) prior to tomorrow's 7:45 a.m. transfusion. Then, I have to go to school for a meeting about an upcoming event I'm coordinating, then it's on to Poetry Workshop from 4:00 until 6:45. And I think I need to stop to put gas in the car.

     Poops me out just thinking about it, but I already missed one workshop a couple of weeks ago, and I love the class. Love it. 

     Apart from feeling veeeery sleeeeepy, the pain's not too bad today. I'll eat a pill before I leave home and hope it lasts.

     So. Effectively there is no point to this post. Blah blah blah.

Staggering incoherence, Part Deux

   ...In which word salad is reformatted and represented as amusing poetics.

     From Slate, by way of Seth Abramson's The Suburban Ecstasies, I offer "The Poetry of Sarah Palin."

On Good and Evil

It is obvious to me

Who the good guys are in this one

And who the bad guys are.

The bad guys are the ones

Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,

And should be wiped off 

The face of the earth.

That's not a good guy.

God help us, there are many, many more.

Staggering incoherence

A blurb in the NYT, which SaPa claims to read "my copy of," features this actual string of words from the actual mouth of the actual woman John McCain would seek to install up there in Warshin'ton should, God forbid, they be blessed with the awesome blessing of service in this great state of Alaska and, also, America:

"If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for all of us."

Pop a Pepcid and read all about it.

In the tank

     Well, I have nothing much to say about the VP debate that hasn't been said better by smart people all over the Interwebs. The dum-dums weren't listening last night, they were cooing; I have no use for them. Call me in the tank for Obama, if you must -- the genesis of that suddenly ubiquitous phrase is a mystery to me --  but at least I'm swimming with funny, bright people. 

     M offered to forward to me a Time snippet about why "women dislike Sarah" -- including fallacies such as "she's too pretty," "they're afraid she'll make them look bad," etc. Infuckingfuriating. I can't stand Sarah Palin for the same reason I turned against Susan Allen, long-suffering wife of Republican legislative delegate turned governor turned congressman turned senator turned "rising star" on the national stage who shot himself out of a canon and landed in Macacaland just a couple of years ago. Anyway, as a journalist twenty years ago, I covered his hijinx and caught on but quick that not only is he inauthentic in presenting himself as an "aw, shucks" tobacco-spitting, cowboy hat-wearing Southerner (???), but his wife is equally inauthentic in presenting herself as a button-nosed cutesy nitwit who defers to dumb men. (Not even smart men; dumb men.) It turns my stomach, the winking, the gee-whizzing, the flirting. It turns my stomach because, as a baby reporter with zero experience and blonde hair, I used those same tactics to try to get dumb men -- in my case, the peabrains in the police and sheriff's offices in Chattanooga, TN in 1984 -- to give me the information I needed to file stories. I wasn't asking for scoops; I just wanted the same access the boy reporters got. And every time I ran up against a brick wall, which was daily, sometimes hourly, I resorted to the only thing I knew how to do: I smiled, I flirted, I ingratiated myself. Sometimes it worked, mostly it didn't. I got pulled off "general assignment reporting" and promoted to anchoring (this was at a piss-poor CBS-affiliate TV station; I was 22; it did not escape my understanding that they'd have pulled a monkey off the street to anchor those newscasts, so low were the pay and the expectations). I hated myself for playing the game. I had slimed myself; had betrayed my gender and my mother's example and feminism and was caving to the most insidious kind of sexism. I may as well have slept with the fuckers in return for basic facts of a crime or court case. And now, I feel a twisting deep in my gut -- that old familiar, visceral stomach-turning -- every time I see The Two Faces of Sarah. Tough and confident? You betcha. Fine. Pandering and flirtatious? Wink! "Gee willikers, can ya help me out here? I just don't understand you big strong men from Warshin'ton, DeeCee!" Wink!

     Puke.

     An apt segue to what happened at the infusion center today, or didn't happen. No chemotherapy for me, so in the tank are my red blood cells and platelets. Fuck. First time I've ever been turned away. I have to have a blood transfusion. They scheduled it for Tuesday. I feel like poo.

     And I'm scared I'm not going to be able to tolerate Topo Gigio, and then what?

     Maybe I can summon that witch doctor dude from up there in Alaska to come pray over me.

Foundationally I'm just ill about it

     It is a terrible thing to lose one's words -- or not to have a word.

     I guess in that case, one must invent a word.

     In the course of the last couple of horrifying/screamingly funny Katie Couric convos, SaPa has thrust into the lexicon  foundationally, which, near as I can tell, means something akin to fundamentally, though in the non-context of her word salad could also mean basically; theoretically; in my pretend fairy-world; or they told me not to say fundamentally because it'll remind people I'm a batshit fundamentalist extremist, so I'm gonna throw out something that starts with an 'f' and no one will notice, especially if I wrinkle my nose.

     I just want to mention a couple of things I'll be looking for tonight. First, everyone is counseling Joe Biden to hold the hell off lest he appear to be condescending to or, God forbid, attacking his delicate female opponent. I think this counsel is patently sexist, especially considering the McCain goons have been instructed to "let 'er loose" and are, at this very moment, creekside in Sedona feeding her red moose meat and blasting the Rocky anthem. So, um. How come she gets to chew Biden't ankles with her wolverine teeth, but he's not allowed to respond in kind? She's allowed -- expected -- to use wise-ass sarcasm, but he's not? Yes, I want to see him be respectful; I expect that from her, too. No, he does NOT have to be, for Christ's sake, deferential, or worse, reverential, as some pundits have suggested. (I assume they know what the word means, since they're on the teevee.) Reverent because she's a she? Respectful because she's a mother? Polite because she can't take it, or because it would be ungallant of him not to roll over and let the little lady scratch him to pieces? Sexist sexist sexist.

     Second, the format heavily accommodates SaPa's perceived strength -- that ability to say shit without saying anything at all. (Why is that valued, again? I always forget.) "In our great nation of America" is her new "um," replacing the "here in Alaska" phrase she repeated so frequently in her gubernatorial debates as a placeholder while she gathers her... her thoughts? Whatev. Anyway, my understanding is that there is no room for Ifill to ask follow-up questions of the type our Gotcha Gal Couric asked, which exposed Palin for the shallow, incurious, ill informed beauty pageant contestant she is. Over and over and over again (thanks, CBS!). 

     The anti-intellectuals will say she slammed it home. They'll say she's just like them. I say they're exactly right. Which makes my argument that the uneducated stupidshit should be nowhere near the Oval Office. 

     Heaven forbid we elect an educated, intelligent person who's actually been paying attention.

     Loaded for bear. I got your loaded for bear right here, cretins.

     UPDATE: Meanwhile, McCain seems to have foundationally misplaced his entire brain. On MSNBC this morning, McCain foundationally forgets that he foundationally voted FOR the bill he now says foundationally puts us on the brink of economic disaster, foundationally speaking. Call me crazy, but I suspect this is new GOP strategery: forget the multiple crises we face, focus on driving thinking people criminally insane with mindbending doublespeak. 

Upbeat or else

     The New York Times runs an article today about Vitamin C and cancer. It's so confoundingly paradoxical -- and obvious -- that it infuriates me: some new study finds that taking large doses of C to boost the immune system, both to ward against infection while on chemo and to engage the body in attacking cancer cells, makes cancer cells stronger. 

     No shit. The reason this disease is so obscene is that it is literally the body turning against itself. What's bad for the cancer cells, chemo, is also bad for the healthy cells -- so of course it follows that what boosts healthy cells also strengthens and lengthens the life of the fucking cancer cells. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars went into the research that concluded that water is wet? Jesus.

     My oncologist once said to me and M, "Oh, we can cure cancer. What we haven't figured out is how to keep the patient alive while we do it."

     Anyway, reading that article brought me to another NYT article/public discussion about the expected emotional response to cancer, and how damaging those expectations are. I knew when I posted the other night that I am not alone in feeling pinched by this myth that a good attitude is paramount, and reading this article, and especially the back-and-forth of the public comments, shows it's on a lot of other minds, too.