ErikaJournal Jan 31 2003

 

1168 just vague general annoyance

 

Jan. 31, 2003

 

I sent this out to some girlfriends, plus A and festive:
----------
The Grievance

I, the penis, hereby request a raise in salary for the
following reasons:

I do physical labor. I work at great depths. I
plunge headfirst into everything I do. I do not get
weekends or public holidays off. I work in a damp
environment. I work in a dark workplace that has poor
ventilation. I work in high temperatures. My work
exposes me to contagious diseases.

Dear Penis,

After assessing your request, and considering the
arguments you have raised, the administration rejects
your request for the following reasons:

You do not work 8 hours straight. You fall asleep
after brief work periods. You do not always follow
the orders of the management team. You do not stay in
your designated area and are often seen visiting other
locations. You do not take initiative -- you need to
be pressured and stimulated in order to start
working. You leave the workplace rather messy at the
end of your shift. You don't always observe necessary
safety regulations, such as wearing the correct
protective clothing. You will retire well before you
are 65. You are unable to work double shifts. You
sometimes leave your designated work area before you
have completed the assigned task. And if that were
not all, you have been seen constantly entering and
exiting the workplace carrying two suspicious looking
bags.

Sincerely,
The Management

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x replies with:

funny one, I'll have to share this one :)

I am so sorry that I haven't gotten that form to
you, M and I have been having a rough patch lately that took a lot
of my attention. Things are fine now, but I have misplaced (read:
lost) the form. I suck.

I'm looking forward to seeing you tomorrow at Pace's. We are planning
on getting there sometime around 10ish.

love you-
X
--
my reply:

You can go to the rocky river ranch website and print out another
one.

http://www.greatescapeweekends.com/

and click on "Reserve Your Weekend"

Then there will be a little 'printer icon' you can click.

I would photocopy mine for you, but I filled it out already, in ink,
and it would be ugly & messy to photocopy, whiteout, re-copy, etc.

If you can, bring it to Pace's tomorrow & then I can mail our
registration off on Monday. We'll probably arrive at the party around
the same time :)

XO!

=E


-
x replies:

Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 12:57:20 -0600
I'll do that. See you tomorrow.

xoxo-X

============================
I don't know why this annoys me, it just does. Do I suck? Am I a bad
friend? I dunno...

And I *really* don't know why I continue to do nice things for them.
So ungrateful. So...dirtyickynasty.

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1169 free will astrology - week of 1/30

 

 

Jan. 31, 2003

 

 

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Years ago I lived in a run-down old house
in rural North Carolina. At $50 a month, the rent was steep
considering that there was no running water and most of the windows
were broken when I moved in. My bathtub was a bucket I dipped into a
well and filled with water that I heated up on my puny gas stove.
When my food stamps ran out each month, I'd ride my one-speed bike
six miles to the cafeteria at a local college, where I scavenged
scraps that students left behind on their plates. I hope this
vignette inspires you, Taurus, to recall in detail the lowest, most
deprived period of your life. It's time to take inventory of how far
you've come -- and to imagine a future that's as much an improvement
over now as now is over then.

Your destiny is a gorgeous mystery, Taurus. Your soul is awakening
more every day. The secrets of life are ripening right in front of
your eyes.
********************************************

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The Gemini who drove me to the airport told
me that when he's not putting in 60 hours a week driving a cab, he's
working on a screenplay that has garnered interest from two agents.
Meanwhile, the Gemini woman who operates the carousel at the zoo
confided that before she comes to work each morning she spends an
hour writing grants that could help her start a tutoring program for
homeless kids. I have a message for them and for all you other
Geminis whose big dreams haven't been getting anywhere near your full
attention: It's time to kick a labor of love into high gear; to
transform a hobby into a vocation; to take a giant step towards
graduating from your amateur status and turning pro.

Life will be a gorgeous mystery in the coming week, Gemini.

 

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1170Interview with Kurt Vonnegut

 

Jan. 31, 2003

http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=38_0_4_0_C

Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@

By Joel Bleifuss | 1.27.03 print | email | comment


Kurt Vonnegut | vonnegut.com


In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel,
Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13
others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-
eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.

As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter
of this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in
the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes
to quote: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as
there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul
in prison, I am not free."

—Joel Bleifuss

[Q] You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan
wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq.
What has changed, and what has remained the same?

One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what
continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place,
and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got
here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. …
An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or
currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball
manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing
professional athletes: "Can't anybody here play this game?"

My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned
20, finds herself—as does George W. Bush, himself a kid—an heir to a
shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and
to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland
and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment's notice to turn industrial
quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone
meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice
between liberalism or conservatism and on and on.

What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our
president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited
technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly
destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for
supporting life of any kind. Human beings, past and present, have
trashed the joint.

[Q] Based on what you've read and seen in the media, what is not
being said in the mainstream press about President Bush's policies
and the impending war in Iraq?

That they are nonsense.

[Q] My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many
people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we've lost reason
to hope?

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a
just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body
snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though,
is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy,
Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. And those now in charge
of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no
history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists,
aka "Christians," and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic
personalities, or "PPs."

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical
diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot.
The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey
Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the
suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They
cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and
WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining
their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure
as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them?
And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal
government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now
in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people,
they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they
cannot care what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that!
Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut
health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build
a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra
Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

[Q] How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how
would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-
war movement of the Vietnam era?

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and
financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was,
every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer,
painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it,
came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a
laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction,
focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-
cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-
feet high.

And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now,
TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of
protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the
right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their
government for a redress of grievances, "ain't worth a pitcher of
warm spit," as the saying goes.

[Q] As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between
how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of
today view their responsibility to society?

Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist
Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And
leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the
fine arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody practicing the
fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or
scared, still can't help serving all humanity. Music makes
practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without
it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up.

But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal
confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or
history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn't possible. Literature is
by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in
many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the
author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem
responsible to small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or
she might as well have given an interview to the editor of a small-
circulation publication.

Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of
architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will say
this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on
occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be
less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and
Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in
that regard.

[Q] That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV
show?

"C students from Yale." It would stand your hair on end.

[Q] What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?

Assholes.


Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as
a investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss
has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the "10
Most Censored Stories" than any other journalist.

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