president.

I've decided that I prefer Obama over Hilary. I've sort of always known this, but could never really find the reasons to cement it. David Brooks' NYT article gave me the best reason. He's got a cool head, and he's honest. I think those are pretty much the most important qualities we could have in a president.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/opinion/18brooks.html?em&ex=1198213200&en=b4f2a6e89b57c99e&ei=5087%0A

"Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.

"Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall.

"Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.

"But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual."

Plus, I get the feeling that Hilary can be easily bought. As reported in Michael Moore's "Sicko," she was on forefront of the fight for universal healthcare in the early '90s. Then, suddenly she quieted down. It was because she got a hundreds of millions of dollars payout from the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and she soon become the healtcare giants' new darling.

Go Barack!

new spot.

I changed my web address to bangingonglass.blogspot.com. Before that I wanted worldoutthere.blogspot.com. But that was taken. But that's cool. I like bangingonglass even better. It's me, physically banging, knocking vigorously, trying to get out of a bubble, which is made of glass. It says that I see the world out there, without literally saying that the world is out there.

Last night I watched the story of stuff. www.storyofstuff.com. It's Annie Leonard, an environment and sustainability expert, talked about the materials economy, and telling it like it is. How our life is on a "trendmill" and we are brainwashed to work hard, come home exhausted and watch TV and get bombarded by commercials that tell us we suck, and then go out shopping to make ourselves feel better. And then, guess what, we need to work to make more money to pay for all the STUFF we just bought, then we're tired again and watch TV again, and on and on and on. And the government WANTS us to do this. Bush's advice to help us get over 9/11? Not hope, not pray, not comfort each other, but SHOP! And so we are hampsters on an endless wheel. And the nasty ever-compounding byproduct is STUFF.

This is exactly what has always been bothering me...more than anything else. How we have to share our air and our space and our land and our time with stuff. So much useless stuff. I feel like all it does is get in the way of being happy. It's clutter in more ways than one, because it clogs up your mind, your lungs, your eyes, your ears, everything. More than anything right now I want to give up my stuff for more space. More trees. More mountains and clean ocean and clean air. I want all that so much more than I want any of this inside stuff. As long as I can keep my warm socks and other things warm, I'm good.

Kay, so here's me, banging on the glass, wiping away the grime, trying to see and hear and smell the world out there.

Not sure what else I can do though. What else should I do?

There are seemingly easy answers. Open the window. Well...my windows are shrink-wrapped to keep out the cold. (And they don't even work).

I'll start thinking about that. I'll tell you when I come up with something good.

first breath.

Today I finally went back to the library. I have been renewing these three books for about three months now. Kafka on the Shore, The Great Railway Bazaar, and the Electric Kool-aid Acid Test. I still have images from the Railway Bazaar floating around my head. Beautiful and dismal feelings of India, which I remembered today while watching Anthony Bourdain traipse around Mumbai and Kolkuta on No Reservations. Kafka on the Shore was horrifying and fascinating, and life-sucking. I read that book for four hours straight on the Fung Wah bus ride to New York City to visit Amy on Veteran's Day weekend. And Acid Test was pretty good for a start, but I was too recently exposed to balls-to-the-wall drug culture in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to really intrigue me that much. Maybe I'll come back to it when I feel a vicarious destructive phase coming on.

So, for the first time in a long while, I left work at a strategic time in order to catch the 90 bus from Sullivan Station in order to get to the Somerville library on Highland. I had to walk briskly along Exchange Street in Malden Center from Wiley-Blackwell's nondescript polygonal office building toward the Orange Line T station there, across the shiny, pockmarked sluices of ice and snow that stifled the sidewalk. I was about two minutes later than I had calculated to be the ideal time to leave the building and arrive at Sullivan approximately 17 minutes later, factoring 8 minute walk/1-2 minute waiting time/8 minute T-ride, just in time for a bus to roar into the busway and scoop me out of this frigid, leaky cave under a 93 north expressway overpass. Believe me, you don't won't to stand in that rattling, deafening, fume-filled pit any longer than is absolutely necessary.

But once you are on that bus, after waiting tensely, bundled, standing uncomfortably for an indeterminate and often extended amount of time on a desolate sidewalk, it is peaceful. Peaceful because all the chaos is happening outside the window, and you are not a part of it. Unlike the T, you can watch the world while you ride. Unlike the T, you can sit during rush hour. Unlike the T, people don't wear designer clothes and high heels. They carry shopping bags and lunch containers and pull toddlers behind them. The people on the bus live in the real world. And they aren't robots reading newspapers and listening to iPods and watching episodes of Heroes on their portable devices.

I feel like I'm actually travelling, actually going somewhere when I'm on the bus. It's not a time-space warp like the underground transporter that is the T. On the T you disappear under the ground in designated burrows, and you magically come back up to Earth when you arrive at your destination, without knowing anything about the space between.

On the 90, we left Sullivan Station, passed underneath thundering 93-north, took a right onto Broadway, passed all the Portuguese check-cashing stores, Tony's subs and deli superette, Khoury's State Spa, and took a left onto Cross Street, a narrow throughway where the bus barely scrapes by passing vehicles squeezed into lanes lined with parked cars. Then we merge onto O'Brien Hwy/28N for 300 yards, while crossing through three lanes of oncoming road ragers screaming out of the city so we can merge left onto Medford St. and immediately after Highland Ave. Just after we're safely on peaceful, tree-filled Highland, I press the yellow tape and ring the bell for my stop at Walnut Street. I dash across the icy sidestreet and skid up the sloping cement walkway leading to the monolithic Somerville Central Public Library, which seems to tower over all of the North Shore because the landscape behind it just drops off to a land of endless triple decker houses with green bushy hills on the horizon.

I love this library precisely because it is so imposing. In a library I want to feel small and unimportant. I want the library to be saying to me, I'm older, bigger, and infinitely more knowledgeable than you. I want to go inside and feel all the tons of possibilities of knowledge physically pressing down upon me. I want all the ideas and interests that aimlessly swirl around my brain all day long to suddenly coalesce and crystallize and shine like new coins and hover right in front of my nose and beg me to pluck them down from there to be clasped into my eager, young, naïve hands. I don't mind the knowledge crystals bombarding me all at once, pointy ends and all. I only mind that they will all suddenly be rendered lifeless and stop and drop to the ground like ripe, heavy apples as soon as I leave that place. So I like to stay there as long as I can.

Today I went in only to return these books, because they were one week late, and I had reached my 3-renewal limit. I had already decided I wouldn't do this anymore to library books. Take them out and then sit on them and renew them over and over. I will take a break from abusing library books and read the ones I bought at the Strand in New York. Or maybe even the New Yorker which I have been reading barely a page and a half of at breakfast every week. But no more library books. Now I just had to divert myself for a few minutes (after stocking up on the bus schedules they display in racks on the lobby's brick wall, and estimating what time the next 88 would come) before I braced myself for the windy bus-stop back on the curb. I wandered into the multimedia room that was next to the bus schedule rack. And as I scanned the ramshackle shelves of ripped, cracked CD cases, I decided I would sit down and write a list of these albums I would like to listen to sometime, but thought it would just be easier to download than borrow and have to return (eternally and hopelessly late) to the library. I think I was probably wrong about that, now. You can't get good, classic music on Soulseek, and I'm sick of "cutting-edge" "fresh" Pitchfork indie bands. It's the stuff that everyone has known has been good for decades that I want to hear now.

Anyway, that list. There's no way I'll be able to recall the ones that I had wanted to put on the list as I glanced on them in the media room. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Tom Waits. Robert Plant. Lee Hazelwood. Nick Cave. John Coltrane: with Johnny Hartman. My Favorite Things (My One and Only Love). Dear Old Stockholm (After the Rain). Joshua Tree.

That list turned into the list music that was swirling around in my head from Sacramento driving with Lee and late night allmusic.com haunts and overhead cube-neighbor conversations. In conclusion, maybe this blog can become another sort of library crystallization method. I shall return to make more lists.

Love, K.