2002-03-05|9:13 a.m.
I haven't talked to J in what seems to be several days. He has written me and left me notes. If I were him, I would hate me. I just haven't had the energy to do much of anything in this department. I am not depressed; I am just avoiding becoming depressed. I wish I could explain it better.
I read the book Shopgirl the other day, by Steve Martin. It was an excellent little book. He handles drama so well; I have to admit it sort of shocked me. Every bit of it was believable. In fact, the book's heroine was easy to relate to. When she became so deeply depressed she couldn't get out of bed, I knew exactly how helpless she felt in that state. She would call in sick, like me, and the narrator recognized that this was just as worthy of a sick-day as real illness. I am not saying that I relished this comparison. I actually felt a bit embarrassed. In some ways, I want very much to be normal, to be happy.
Arnold Schwarzenegger called my house last night. He called to make sure that someone (probably my old housemate who was a registered Republican) was going to vote for Rick, once Richard, Riordan. It is too bad that it was a recording, because I wanted to tell him how much I liked him in Total Recall.
Veridine, a diary I also read frequently, mentioned not too long ago how absurd it is that people want to take television and other so-called luxury items from prisoners, and it got me thinking. And then I saw a video on the making of Billy Bragg and Wilco's Mermaid Ave album created from the unrecorded lyrics of Woody Guthrie. In the documentary, they interviewed people upset by Guthrie's communist ideas, as they called them. One man commented, "He is simply preaching that we take from hardworking and give to the lazy." This too got me thinking, and yesterday while making A and myself lunch I was hit by an overwhelming disgust for such ignorance, and selfishness. People are so very good at thinking that what is before them is entirely earned and gained by themselves, ignoring the help from others and chance-based opportunity that falls before them. There is no sense of community. I realize that communism is not a reasonable form of government, but I do see why some people supported and still support it. It is the desire to reverse the earlier mentioned type of thinking. At what point do we become so protective of our stupid knick-knacks and crap that we can justify that owning such things is more important than saving human life, protecting our environment, and simplifying our own lives? We want the desolate to beg for it and the wrongdoers to become inhuman and institutionalized. It makes us feel accomplished and superior. Someone is below our caste and because of that we are "hardworking." Funny though, it really is the hardest working that reaps the least reward (i.e. fruit pickers in hot fields or men from Mexico that mow our lawns). It is those who have privileged families who have helped them gain professional positions in comfortable offices, which are not really hardworking. And we all know how much more they make.
Orwell's Down and Out novel does this whole concept more justice. He reaches this lowest level and learns many things for himself. Two of which are to never expect the beggar to be thankful for the pennies that one gives him, and to recognize that the unemployed are understandably tired.
And in all this I realize how much of this applies to me. All the extra I have. All the unneeded that I covet.
Word of the Day: flotsam- floating wreckage of a ship or its cargo/ floating debris/ a floating population (as of emigrants or castaways)/ an accumulation of miscellaneous or unimportant stuff