I have to say, I am so proud of my senator, Russ Feingold.
I’m about to be all left wing political for a moment. Skip ahead to the next section if you hate that stuff.
I even am proud to be able to say ‘my senator Russ Feingold’. Yeah, I voted for him. If you have the February issue of Vogue lying around, check out the feature on him. Yes. Vogue. They call him the Man of the Moment (and I think writer John Powers has a bit of a crush on him as well). I don’t blame him. Russ is funny and smart and yet really humble and attractive in a very normal, every day kind of way. I’ve shaken the guy’s hand while he was walking in a Seymour Hamburger Days parade. I later read in the paper that Russ refused to ride in a convertible, instead content to walk the sidelines and shake hands. He came after a really large corn combine, and gracefully hopped over a rather large deposit made by the 4H horses that came before him. Sure, that might be pandering. I don’t have to tell you how the people of this area value hard work and humility, how they immediately dislike anyone who puts on airs or thinks they are better than anyone else. I’m willing to admit that it might have been political styling, but I also know that the other candidates sent their cars away and walked the parade route too, after finding out that Feingold was doing it.
Wisconsinites aren’t known for their unconventionality, so it’s hard for me to fathom the conviction it must have taken for him to be the sole Nay against a sea of senators voting for the Patriot Act. And this new request for censure? If I haven’t seen him walking around with my own two eyes, I’d wonder if he walked with a limp due to a set of abnormally large brass balls.
I always said that I’d probably have a bias toward a strong female presidential candidate, just for the sake of trashing the patriarchy, but as much as I feel Hillary is a woman who, in another twenty years, will be lauded as a visionary, Russ would still have my vote. The guy who acts his conscience despite what it may do for him politically? Who doesn’t cave to peer pressure? That’s the guy I want in the White House. He’s the senatorial version of Jon Stewart, people. How can you not love that?
Of course, the Republicans are calling him all sorts of names. How dare he question the president? You’d think this country’s government was a system of checks and balances or something!
Give ’em hell, Russ. Excuse me, Mr. Bush, your check just came back marked Insufficient Funds.
And now we return to the standard Dumber than a Box of Rocks fare. Whatever that is.
For the folks in the comments who mentioned the swimsuit potentials, my current non-supportive suit racer’s is from Junonia, and that’s also where I got the underwire non-supportive bikini top. I got a Land’s End suit two years ago, which I had modified for my long torso, but it doesn’t support either. They now make underwire suits, so I may go that route. Thank you for your suggestions!
As for Esteban’s illness, thank you also for your support and well wishes. He’s loath to admit that anything is wrong right now, and doesn’t really like to talk about it, but we’re pretty sure that he’s going to be OK. Or in his typical clipped response ‘It’s being taken care of’
If you give blood on a regular basis, I would like to thank you. If Esteban hadn’t received the transfusions when they checked him, the doctor gave him a 25% chance of going into cardiac failure within 72 hours. If they had had more B positive, they would have given it to him, but they didn’t, so they couldn’t. Luckily, they had enough to get him out of danger, but I can’t imagine what might have happened if he had been in a car accident or if there were several people who had needed his blood type that day.
I have no doubt that by donating their Type B Positive blood, six strangers saved Esteban’s life. It’s hard to imagine all of that when you go to the Red Cross and they stick you and then you eat cookies and drink juice. It seems so cheery and nonchalant, such a stark contrast to the family that standing on one side of a steel-mesh hospital window, trying to keep their shit together because if they don’t they’ll be throwing up with worry. Every pint that you give is one step closer to changing the worst day of someone’s life into an amusing story told at cocktail parties about the day that someone almost died but it’s all better now and really, what’s did you put in this dip, because it’s just fantastic?. That’s the difference, right there. That ishy bag hanging beneath the lawn chair. That’s the key. So thank you. Each and every time you give blood, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I notice that I’ve picked up a new habit in the absence of my old fingernail biting routine. Somewhere along the line, I’ve become a hair twiddler. I’d like to think it looks cute, sort of like something a teenager would do while flirting over her locker door, but I also suspect that it looks a little insane (Does anyone remember the 80’s music video where, in the end, the female singer is locked up in a padded room, twirling her hair? Was it the Motels maybe?) I dislike habits, particularly ones of stress. I managed to fix a lot of my broken relationship with food in that I rarely binge eat, but I’ve traded it for hair twirling, headaches, irrational thoughts, a tendency to lash out verbally, and I still have a fat ass. Clearly, I am not the poster girl for self actualization.
I read somewhere that fidgeters burn twice the calories of non-fidgeters, so I keep trying to remind myself to release the stress by tapping my foot. However, I’m just not a perpetual motion type. I’m all about the stillness, a talent taught to me as a child by an Native American shaman who chastised my sister for fidgeting too much while we were walking in the woods. I can approach skittish animals in the woods without scaring them while my sister gets to shop at the Gap. Brilliant strategy.
Thanks to the new hair twiddling, I have a permanent section of hair on the left side of my face (because even though I write with my right hand, I do almost everything else with my left) that hangs apart from the rest and is starting to look ratty. Why aren’t there any nervous habits that don’t destroy one’s appearance?
Other than recreational shopping, of course. That just makes one look fabulous.
I mentioned a month or so ago that I will be participating in a reading at the end of the month in Milwaukee. The story I’m reading is going to be in a lit journal this summer, so at least one person thinks it doesn’t suck. If you are interested in attending this reading, e-mail me for details! It’s rumored that there will be several online persona types in attendance, so it’s one stop blog stalking. How convenient.
What do you get when you combine two online diarists, three bottles of wine, Pad Thai and American Idol? A blog.
And yes, I am that ladylike in real life. At least when I’ve been hitting the Framboise.
Weetabix, out.
