a reader e-mails 'i love your site but damn if it doesn't depress me! i come here with conventional wisdom about the new republic and leave feeling informed but depressed that for so many years the new republic has been able to pass itself off as left.'
cheer up, you're informed. and i linked to other sites. i didn't break that. it's been out there for years. but what i do have is strong sexual desires and a potty mouth and i can pull people in here that do care about the world but want to find something a little lighter.
i love a lot of sites and i learn so much.
iddybud, why are we back in iraq, buzzflash, third estate sunday review, common ills, the daily howler, a winding road, editor's cut, long, thin cock that ari knows how to use and so much more. i learn a great deal from them.
and i think they are all approachable. buzzflash's editorials and reader's contributions walk you through providing you all the information you need. iddybud has common sense and knows how to boil it down each time so that if you're just wandering into the topic, you know what's going on.
but there are a lot of sites that are a little too insider-ish and you go there and it's like turning on passions after my friend terry has been talking it up for over a year and i'm watching it and thinking 'who's that?' or 'wait, what are those two talking about? who slept with who?'
a lot of times it's like you're trying to start a new book but the first page reads like the start of the final chapter and you're left scratching your head, feeling uninformed and stupid and you think, 'i don't need this kind of negativity!' because it makes you feel like you are an idiot.
the news can be depressing. obviously. and i'm not trying to talk any 1 into understanding the details of some complex economic policy. (nor do i pretend i grasp that stuff.)
and i know if things get too heavy, i can wake you back up with sex.
for instance, bush's poll numbers are dipping. in some cases they've dropped down to 43% (cbs poll). now if i were to then explain the poll to you in great detail and lose you or if i was walking you through some basics on al franken like yesterday, i could then insert something to wake every 1 up.
like this. my friend thereza had the morning off and ended up visiting this morning. now thereza is my friend who's just broken up with her longterm girlfriend. i didn't know thereza was coming over. 1 moment, i'm in the kitchen dealing with the coffee maker, doing a neck roll to work out the kinks when thereza steps in through the back door.
she's been taking the breakup pretty hard so it was great to see her in a good mood and she entered talking, as joan rivers might say. telling me how things were turning around, she was done crying, and so on. i'm grabbing her a mug from the cabinet and nodding thinking as soon as she takes a breath, i'll explain that i have overnight company.
i never get the chance because she falls silent and is staring over my shoulder. i look over and there's jeff standing there, face a bright shade of red and completely nude because who dresses for a shower, right?
he's just standing there frozen. finally he backs out with apologies and thereza starts laughing her butt off.
i met jeff last week at the protests.
thereza wants to talk about 1 thing. his bush. he's got a tangle of pubes like you wouldn't believe. and they're so soft you'd think he shampooed and conditioned them. but they are intense which is funny because he's really not hairy anywhere else. but he's got this long tangle of dense, dark pubes and the juxtapositon of that with the smoothness elsewhere excites me.
so after we have a chuckle over that, thereza asks why i stopped writing about my cornhusker.
i still love my cornhusker and my e-mail buddy sherry and i would duel to the end over him.
but he's just not in the news.
thereza starts swapping hot bods with me and i toss out christian parenti and dahr jamail, of course, and she tosses out a few before noting sandra bullock which just shocks me.
i like sandra. she's funny onscreen and seems level headed. but thereza dismisses ashanti as sexy because she thinks ashanti's ankles are too thick. now sandra's pretty, funny and goofy.
but when you're down to examining women's ankles, it just doesn't seem like a woman who has to be near forty or just over is going to hit your list unless she's some sort of work out queen.
but thereza says sandra's 'fluffiness' is exactly what she finds sexy about her.
live and learn, huh? and that's not knocking sandra. she's cute and funny. i just wouldn't have picked her for a dream date meet up with thereza because thereza's standards can be so demanding. she once blew off a dead ringer for foxy brown because she thought the lookalike was wearing avon perfume and didn't see herself rolling around in the sheets with any woman who would use avon products.
and on the subject of live and learn i'll pass on something from ms. magazine. this is an article called 'The Fuck-You 50s: We’re loud, proud and 37 million strong' by suzanne braun levine. and i love the title.
here's a part of the article that i really loved:
Saving the world may not be what most of us have in mind for the next chapter in our lives, yet the journey we are on -- mapping our Second Adulthood -- is taking us from a most intimate inquiry outward to the way we express ourselves in the world, the way we connect with other individuals and generations, and ultimately to the impact we can have on society.
We 37 million women in our late 40s, 50s and 60s are part of a sea of change that can lift a fleet of boats, not just our own. But we are only just beginning to become aware of the tidal wave we represent. Not only are we gaining strength both as individuals and as a group, but our influence is compounded by our attitude.
"Women get more radical with age," Gloria Steinem frequently points out, because for one thing, we have had more years of experience coming up against false assumptions about what we are capable of, and for another, we have the daring that comes with what I call "the fuck-you 50s"
to defy those barriers.
Economists, politicians, corporate executives, sociologists and medical researchers are waking up to the thundering herd of "ponies and donkeys" headed their way. And we should be too.
to me, that's a really positive note. if you think about how we're lied to repeatedly by the mainstream media with the lie that the country has turned more and more conservative,
it's just nice to know that women will keep that from happening. not just now, but always because as we grow older and hit those 'fuck you 50s' (i really do love that term) we're going to worry less and less about so many things that we obsess over right now.
we talked about this, thereza, a now dressed jeff and i, after we had our coffee while watching democracy now. and we talked about democracy now and how amazing it was to be able to turn on the tv and watch actual news.
so for the reader who wrote in that she left informed but depressed, there's two positives: women grow more radical with age and democracy now provides real news you can use.
