Category: diary-x.com posts

Hope Is Not Lost

November 4, 2004 / / 0 Comments

Well, by now, I’m sure everyone has heard the news. Bush has been reelected. Four more years with an incompetent arrogant failure in charge of the country.

Obviously, I had really been hoping that Kerry would win. Was he the ideal man for the job? No. Was he a damn sight better than Bush? Absolutely.

But this election has shown something about America: After September 11, Bush had an eighty-eight percent approval rating. This should have been a massive blowout for Bush. But it wasn’t. He only won by three percent of the popular vote, with the largest voter turnout since the 1960s.

This means that a lot of Americans have woken up to the fact that George W. Bush is not the man for the job. Yes, Kerry lost, but we can’t give up now. There’s even more at stake now than before the election. We have to use this momentum to carry us through the next four years. If everyone just gives up and turns their backs in disgust, like I was ready to do early Wednesday morning, there will be no dissenting voices left.

Are you ready to give Bush and his political junta free reign? Do you want America to invade another country and kill another one hundred thousand innocent civilians? Are you willing to let the polluters continue running the very organizations that are supposed to protect us from them? Do you really think that by wiping out entire families, places of worship, and schools while waging a poorly planned and ill conceived “crusade” that we will create fewer terrorists?
Is the world that Bush is building the world that you want your children to grow up in?
Don’t give up. We can’t give up. Now, more than ever before, we must do everything we can to constrain Bush’s horrible and destructive agendas. If you don’t like what is going on, write your congressman and your senator. Go to rallies and protest. Circulate petitions fighting for what you believe in.

Because if you don’t, no one else will.

Goals

October 24, 2004 / / 0 Comments

I made a few fairly important decisions on the drive back from Janesville tonight. I suppose I can thank Christine for this… although she didn’t actually say anything about it. Being around her makes me want to try to be a better person. I’m not sure why. You should try it.

1. Down with TV. I spend far too much time watching TV. It’s a complete waste of time, and it keeps me from doing other things that I enjoy a lot more. Which is not to say that TV holds me down and screams “WATCH ME OR DIE!” while waving a gun… I’m just lazy, and TV happens to be the easiest and most low energy way to spend time. I’ve lived without TV before, and I read, without exaggeration, ten times as much then as I do now.

I’ve been trying to convince Pedro to go without cable for a while now, and it’s not working. I think if I just tell him that I don’t want to pay for anything more than Internet access anymore, that will force the issue. Besides being a waste of life, it’s damn expensive. We owe Charter $314.19 because we haven’t paid them a cent since they got us set up. We can barely afford our bills as it is, and wasting money on a luxury item like digital cable is just plain stupid. I didn’t want it in the first place.

2. I’m going to get a better job. I decided a while ago that I’m exceedingly lacking in self motivation, and the web design company I wanted to start isn’t going to work. Since then, I’ve done nothing to get out of the wage slave job I’m in now. I’ve spent far too much time hating and bitching about my job, and far too little time actually doing something about it.

It’s not a bad job, actually. The people are great, the benefits are cheap and very good, and the work really isn’t that hard. If I had just dropped out of high school and was living with my parents, it would be perfect. But I have a bachelor’s degree, and working as a shoe department manager for just under twenty grand a year is humiliating, not to mention bankrupting. It’s time to find something better.

Right now I’m studying Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) so that I can get a job as a programmer. I don’t really want to be a programmer, but it will pay well until I can become a Red Hat Certified Engineer and work with something that I think I’ll really enjoy. I’ve decided to set aside the time from 7:00pm to 8:30pm every night after work to study. If I’m not watching TV, I have nothing else to do anyway. (See how this works?)

3. Figure out how I feel about Christine, once and for all. I can’t see her without being confused about how I feel. I’m very, very, tired of being confused. What’s worse, I jerk her around almost as much. Whether it takes a lot of introspection (which hasn’t worked so far), meditation (which I don’t seem to have the discipline for), or counseling (which I can afford once I get a better job), I’m going to finally be sure about her, one way or the other.

I think these are goals that I can accomplish. Hopefully soon, I’ll have moved on from the miserable place I’m in right now into something better. I feel a little better already.

Ow…

October 12, 2004 / / 0 Comments

My back hurts a lot tonight.

If you remember a while ago, I had a brief adventure with gravity that involved a ladder. I went to the doctor twice and my back still hurts like hell. It’s been three weeks to the day since I fell, and if anything, my back is even worse now than it was then.

I spent the day moving around twenty cases of mens’ dress shoes. In case you were wondering, yes, it does make a difference what kind of shoes. A case of twelve pairs of mens’ dress shoes can weigh two or three times as much as a case of twelve mens’ athletic shoes. They’re not light. And it probably didn’t help matters that I dropped a case of loafers on my head.

Anyway, my back hurts. A lot. I took some prescription strength naproxen sodium (Aleve) over an hour ago, and it seems to only have dulled the aching slightly. My mattress has a dip in it, so that won’t help things either.

I’m going to talk to my boss tomorrow to see if I can get an appointment with a chiropractor and have Gordman’s pay for it. It’s odd. Somehow I feel like I’m scamming the company, even though what I’m asking for is completely justified.

Hmm. Somehow I thought I’d get a more interesting blog entry out of this. Apparently not. Oh well.

Maybe next time.