Who let the dipshits out?

It must be very disheartening to be a Congressman.

You kiss millions of asses and spend millions of dollars to win a tiny office in the nation's Capitol, where you spend your years vying for power with 434 other lawmakers. You rant, rave, kiss babies, sell your soul and dodge scandals, and at the end of the day when it's time to come home and relax, you're greeted with a bunch of constituents who attend your town hall meetings and spew a bunch of bullshit from the Glenn Beck show. They yell and scream about socialism and Nazis and birth certificates until the whole world seems like it's going to collapse in a wave of paranoid schizophrenia.

And then the realization hits: You've just wasted years of your life representing a bunch of idiots who actually believe the president of the United States is endorsing a diabolical plot to kill babies and grandmas. These constituents are lacking the basic reasoning skills necessary to understand that the system we have now, where insurance companies decide whether or not you are worthy of getting health care, is more akin to "death panels" than a government option, where all people would be accepted regardless of pre-existing conditions. Oh, and don't forget rationing! As if our current system doesn't ration health care to those who can pay exorbitantly high premiums -- and leave everybody else in the cold.

I never imagined Americans could be so capable of stabbing themselves in the back.

Psychic regurgitation

Lately I've been struck with the sickening, panic-stricken feeling that I have a fundamental misunderstanding of human relationships. This is usually followed by a short period of soul-wrenching hopelessness, in which I over-analyze every attempt I've made to connect with a female. Brooding comes next, often as I speed through the city at night, cursing myself for being so obsessively introspective. Anxiety pulses through me. I feel like I'm in a dark comedy, only I'm not completely in on the joke.

What I can't conceptualize during these bouts of hazy loneliness is how anybody can possibly hang on long enough to cut through this shell I've constructed for myself. Long enough to see that I'm actually a pretty happy, outgoing person under these layers of jaded boredom. Because it's becoming increasingly hard for me to give a shit when I'm feeling like this. I desperately search for some kind of meaning, but I only find emptiness and anger boiling inside me over my own failures.

And just like that, the feeling fades away. I force it to fade away. Life is way too fucking short to feel like this.

On being self-absorbed

A short moment for personal crap:

Lately I feel stuck when I try to write, like I have nothing interesting to say, or I have too much to say and my brain can't conceptualize it. Mostly I'm just too stressed out to care about anything past my own problems. It's a selfish self-absorption, a byproduct of following nearly impossible dreams and worrying endlessly about my place in the world. Often, the consequence plays out in my relationships, and thus I'm back to where I was a couple years ago: wondering what comes next. A little bit lonely. A little bit scared. Left with the overbearing feeling that I'm running out of time to get it right. My eyes are open, but I'm stumbling around in the dark.

Maybe the dark is where I'm most comfortable. It hurts when I hit a wall, but it's challenging and morbidly exciting. Boredom is more than a feeling for me; it's a significant detour to living my life. I want to fight boredom on all fronts, and maybe the unconscious way I do that is to force uncertainty on myself. Unfortunately, my hunger for adventure is often too single-minded. It's hard for me to share the hunger with others.

I would call this a momentary feeling of discord, but I'm reminded of something I wrote a few years back during a similar period. It sounds eerily familiar:

My life is always so dull when I'm comfortable. What I really need is a little chaos, agony, repression, emotional warfare. I think it invigorates my soul. I think it reminds me that I'm human and alive and capable of doing something besides this corporate, soul-eating office life.

So here I go again, taking another step into darkness. Also: Can anybody remind me how to, like, date?

@ Grassley: u r an asshole

One thing I've never understood about the American political system is how being elected president seems to automatically exclude you from the right to enjoy yourself ever again. Granted, some presidents have taken the idea of down time to the extreme, such as Bush's penchant for vacationing in Texas every time Cheney had a heart arrhythmia. But this obsession with Obama's extracurricular activities, and the notion that he shouldn't be able to leave the office long enough to show his wife a night on the town, is just getting ridiculous.

I mean, the man can't even have a fucking cheeseburger without Fox News concluding that his taste for mustard is anti-American. We've reached a sorry state of affairs when a major news network in America spends an entire week dissecting the president's choice of condiments.

Today, Chuck Grassley of Iowa bitched about Obama sightseeing in Paris during his trip to Europe. Grassley, who apparently doesn't speak the English language, had these things to say, via Twitter:

"Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us 'time to deliver' on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND."

"Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said 'time to delivr on healthcare' When you are a 'hammer' u think evrything is NAIL I'm no NAIL."

First of all: What the hell is he talking about? I can gather that he's angry about Obama inserting himself into the health care debate as Congress plods along on legislation, but the whole hammer/nail thing is escaping me. And whoever showed a 150-year-old Republican senator from Iowa how to use Twitter must be shot. Immediately.

Drudge also whined today about how Obama's wife and kids stayed in Paris for an extra day so they could shop, while Obama headed back to the White House. Well, holy shit. I can't believe the travesty. I can't believe the first family would want to shop in one of the world's most popular places to, uh, shop. The audacity is beyond words.

Protesters protest....uh....what?

My hope in the next sentence is that I can write a summary of today, Tax Day, without lapsing into a fatal depression.

So, here goes: Waving overtly racist signs and grasping desperately for relevance, a sea of Fox News viewers calling themselves "tea baggers" took to the streets on Tax Day, hoping to catch the spirit of the historic Boston Tea Party in which American colonists rose up against unfair taxation by the British. And somehow -- some fucking how -- that makes sense to every leading conservative commentator in America.

Well, apparently, this country is still rampaged by toothless idiots in Sarah Palin T-shirts who mistake racism for a legitimate airing of grievances. People who clearly skipped their high school history classes to smoke meth in the bathroom and hit each other in the head with hammers from the wood shop. People who wield the greatest power in the world -- freedom of speech -- to wave racially charged signs about Barack Obama's heritage at a fucking anti-tax rally. Huh?

The organizers of these protests probably thought the populist message would usher in some new conservative era, like a generational wave washing over America in some bullshit sea change of Republican politics. Instead, it made one thing clear: Nobody in the conservative movement knows what the fuck they're doing. I mean, what was the message of Tea Bag '09? You surely won't be able to tell from the signs. Was it that corporate bailouts are bad? Was it that Obama is a socialist/facist/Hitler/Kenyan/Jew? Was it that Obama wasn't born in America? Was it that income taxes are unfair? Was it that liberals want to kill your children? Was it that conservatives are just pissed off and aren't capable of collectively deciding what they're pissed off about? Please, somebody tell me; I'm dying to know.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, or enraged, by the fact that so many people are incapable of independent thought. This is the same schtick that's been running on conservative airwaves since Obama declared his candidacy. We aren't hearing anything new, and if this is the future of conservatism, I guess we can rejoice.

Oh, and how could I forget the best part of the day: Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Hopping on the hysterical rhetoric bandwagon, Perry toured the state with his new Texas-must-secede message. As if the possibility of Texas leaving the union is supposed to be some revolutionary act aimed at stoking populist rage and proud Texan independence. SNORE. Hell, it's perfectly OK with me. I hope the whole state breaks off from the continent and floats away into the Gulf of Mexico. The sooner Texas leaves the United States, the sooner we can kick their congressmen and senators to the curb. Not to mention that we can avoid any possibility of one of the Bush twins running for president.

Religion: The abusive drunk uncle that won't go away

I've reached the stage in the pre-paramedic program where the school tries to cram as much science into my head as possible in a 10-week period. The hope is two-fold: One, students will realize that it's way too much work and just quit, thus weeding out the slackers from the dedicated; and two, students will either learn or relearn how to think at the scientific level -- that is, make critical conclusions based on observable information.

Clearly, science-based observing and concluding is helpful with medical emergencies, such as when somebody is grabbing his throat and looking panicked. A critical thinker might draw the conclusion based on these observations that the man is choking. Conversely, a fundamentalist might draw the conclusion based on these observations that that the man has been taken over by an invisible demon living in the ground. And thus you have the difference between science and religion.

The crux of my little observation here is that the so-called "war on science" by religious people and groups is a misnomer. War implies that two sides or factions are fighting each other. This is incorrect. The core mission of science is not to disprove religion, or to disprove anything for that matter. That's the whole point: Science doesn't prove anything, it only theorizes based on observations over a period of time. We're all pretty sure that when we throw a ball in the air on Earth, it will fall. However, it's possible that one day, it'll just keep going up, and then the theories will be revisited. It will most likely never happen, but science concedes that it could. Until then, gravity is the highest truth available based on the facts.

Scientists will never ask the question of whether God created gravity, not because science is fighting religion but because the hypothesis is impossible to test. Why should science suddenly reject its method of observing simply because a massive group of people believe in God? The faithful keep treating scientific theories as a war on God, but really it's science that is being assaulted. The fundamental beauty of science is that it can evolve and change as new information becomes available. You can't say the same about faith.

Rhymes with dope

So the pope -- you know, the God-chosen leader of the Catholics -- traveled to Africa -- you know, where 22 million people are dying of AIDS -- and told its people that condoms are bad. Why? Because an invisible man in the sky who created the vast universe and life itself apparently gives a shit if somebody straps on a piece of latex before having sex. That's why. Yet more evidence that the pope is a soulless, hysterical idiot:

(From The Advocate, via Google News) Pope Benedict XVI has declared that condom use not only doesn't slow down the spread of HIV/AIDS, but actually makes the pandemic worse.

"You can't resolve [AIDS] with the distribution of condoms," the pope told reporters on Tuesday aboard a plane headed to Africa, a continent ravaged by AIDS. "On the contrary, it increases the problem."

According to the New York Times, Benedict has never addressed condom use. Predecessor Pope John Paul II often proclaimed abstinence, not condoms, would prevent the deadly spread of AIDS.

The Roman Catholic Church rejects the use of condoms based on its teachings against artificial contraception.

Hey, Cardinal Ratfucker, here's a tip: What the people of Africa need is some fucking help, not a sanctimonious speech from a man who lives in a golden palace in Rome and tells other people how to live. If you really want to make a difference, put down your diamond-studded scepter and feed an African child dying of starvation.