Speaking of ‘Precious’

I have said before that my life, which people who aren’t me seem to think should be some sort of action-packed romp around the Continent, doesn’t exactly resemble the sort of thing that Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote about. Normally this is a point of some consternation for me. The other day, as I wept into my mid-afternoon martini about the sheer unglamorousness of being me, I recalled this quotation from Hemingway that is just So My Life. (That’s a slight exaggeration. It was a Pims and Lemonade.)

Several days later I have mustered enough get-up-and-go to locate the quotation. Which is written in a notebook. A notebook that is sitting on my desk. The desk where I spend copious amounts of time every day.

Not that I’m doing anything productive during the time I’m sitting at my desk. You see, I am a young procrastinator. I am full of ideas and inspiration and good intentions, I just happen to be terminally lazy. That notebook I mentioned with the quotation written in it? It’s basically full of sketches and outlines of a year’s worth of harebrained schemes. Of all these things I want to write about.

Do you know what I should be writing about right now? I should be writing inquiry letters and cover letters to potential employers about how awesome and motivated I am. I should be writing my dissertation on museum education for students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. What am I actually writing? This blog. A review of Oreo cookies for no useful reason whatsoever. Instant messages. Because I will leave the things that I should be writing and should be doing until the last possible moment, until right before it’s too late to share them.

Which reminds me…the quotation:

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafes.

-The Sun Also Rises

I really didn’t intend for this entry to sound so nihilistic and, well, precious. The stuff that needs to get done will get done. Eventually. In the meantime I have some drinking in cafes to attend to.

Today I Will Blog About Blogging

I tend to have so many browser windows open that I send my computer into fits of hysterics. (And I have a Mac. It is very difficult to send a Mac into hysterics, for they are stoic and unflappable machines.) Then I have to restart, thereby losing all the open windows. Because of this AND because I award myself a self-indulgent point over at Joe’s Goals every time I update a blog I have decided to post about all my open browser windows. In essense I will be Telling You What I Think, cleverly using other peoples’ words to do so. Genius! Of the strictly derivative sort!

First of all, I am clearly elated that it looks like Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States of America. I am terribly excited to be be excited about a politician. Both my Governor and my Congressional representative have had titillating and ruinous sex scandals in the past couple of months, and my Senator is doing the right wing’s job for them, so you can see where I might be wary of indulging in the Politician Love, but there you go. According to the Huffington Post, this election cycle is so exciting that politics sells better than sex at the moment. I posit that no, actually they just go together like llama llama llama, a dippity ding da dong. See: the news. See also: the strange sexual perversions of politics nerds. Ahem.

In addition to the usual suspects (Gmail, Facebook, Livejournal, The Daily Kos, The New York Times and the Huffington Post…sorry I can’t be bothered to make those into links) I also have this news story open: Limbaugh Comes Out for Obama. Everyone’s favorite complete asshole (I have more respect for Bill O’Reilly. Really.) has been running “Operation Chaos”, urging his listeners to cross party lines in open primaries and vote for the Democratic candidate who will have the hardest time beating John McCain in November. Now that we have a presumptive nominee (although I would argue that we don’t–Obama is no more presumptive now than he was before Tuesday’s primaries) and it isn’t Senator Clinton, the candidate Rushy wanted Republicans to vote for, he is claiming that the whole thing? It was an elaborate double cross! He wanted Obama to win because he will have a harder time beating McCain. He just told Republicans to vote Clinton so that people would think he believed her to be the weaker candidate. I guess he thinks that not only Republicans listen to his voting advice, but that Democrats do as well. “Well if he wants people to vote Clinton we had better vote Obama, don’t you think Mildred?”

HA! Joke’s on you, Donkey face! Limbaugh has declared Operation Chaos a rousing success because now it looks like Obama will be the nominee. He fooled you! (To say nothing of the Republican dupes who voted Clinton.) He is the master of the double cross!

But wait! If he was trying to manipulate Democratic voting patterns before, who is he trying to manipulate now? Perhaps he is trying to scare the superdelegates into endorsing Clinton! Perhaps the whole thing is a triple cross! Perhaps, perhaps!

Oh wait, why should Democrats listen to him? (Why anyone should listen to him is beyond my comprehension, but I mean listen to him in the sense of “take his words to heart” and not “tune into his radio program.”)

Whatever happens, know that Rush Limbaugh will declare himself and Operation Chaos a success. That’s all that matters. Eight years of President Obama followed by eight years of President Clinton? Victory for Rushy! Let’s make him that victorious, OK?

It seems that instead of blogging about blogging I ended up blogging about politics. I should go read some gossip blogs or something.

In other news, I have my tickets to the midnight showing of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull or whatever it’s called! My friends are having a garden party with frilly hats and Pims and croquet! There has been actual sunshine the past few days! I will be living in Camden (London, not New Jersey) this summer! (If you are going to be in London this summer and have any interest in performance art give me a shout. We’re planning something big, where by “we” I mean my friend Kat and I.) I have become an exclamation point abuser!

OK, time for dinner then drinks. The rest of my day consisted of lunch then drinks. Grad school is very taxing.