Dostoyevsky for loneliness

Anthony Bourdain and I are still carrying on a long extended affair in my dreams, I am happy to report.

Hiro Nakamura is too fucking adorable for words. This show is slowly eating my brain, although the "it's ALL CONNECTED" thing is starting to get a little silly.

The whole viaduct fight does not instill much hope in me regarding the political process in Seattle. (For a quick primer of the factions, see this post.) If anything, it's even stupider than what goes on in Portland. What kind of "world-class" city would leave only two options, both of which are polluting and do nothing to ease the pain of commuting in a city with a fucking freeway dropped down its center? This city needs transit like nothing, and it annoys me deeply that routing traffic to the surface streets and beefing up transit is not an option.

So I have a coworker whose last name is Watanabe. Apparently, before he came to work for Insurance Company, somebody actually came up to Favorite Team Lead and said, "Watanabe--that's Jewish, right?" I fucking SPORFLED. For the rest of the day, I greet Coworker with "Shalom and Mazel Tov." Cody says it reminds him of that one scene in Shanghai Noon where the Chinese are mistaken for Jews, because none of the white people know what either Chinese or Jews look like. I think making everybody read Said's Orientalism might be instructive, but the joke might be lost on those who need to be schooled the most. Yes Virginia, there are still amazing bastions of cultural ignorance even in areas around Seattle. If it weren't so damn funny I'd cry.

* Amanda Marcotte speaks of the silliness of the real-life fight club, and woman (generic) as a stand-in for capitalist conformity and those who enforce it. There is also talk of Lacan in the comments. I know very little about Lacan in an academic sense, but in my Atwood and Ondaatje class there was a girl who sat in for two weeks and expounded upon language as a phallocentric endeavour and Ondaatje and especially Atwood's attempts to come to terms with it all and create agency within it. Or something like that. It's been a while. All the while I was looking at her and thinking "Guh. You are so hot because you can talk about stuff like this." (see also Adrienne's definition of theory sex) So now every time I think of Lacan, I think of HAWT. </shallow>

* Maciej Ceglowski takes George Will to task for objecting to bilingual ballots. I always hate it when there's not an Anna Quindlen column in the back of my Newsweek, because inevitably I'll get bored and read Will's column, which is so tetchy and conservative I can't make fun of it. As Maciej notes, there is an almost-literal grandmother clause that indicates if you've been in this country long enough, you can take the citizenship test in any language you damn please. And I deeply resent the implication that my grandma, a woman who fought Communist soldiers to keep her sewing machine so she could support her daughters, has less right to be here and/or vote than some idiot native who probably couldn't even pass the citizenship test.

* Enough of that. Have a grilled cheese pan with an image of Jesus on it. And a picture of Judi Dench and Ewan McGregor dressed up in bizarre costumes.

1. Lost is EATING MY BRAIN. Sayid is my new boyfriend, I adore Sun and Jin, Jack annoys the shit out of me (I honestly don't care about his backstory, and yet he gets so much of it), and I hate Ana Lucia. There's probably no possibility she's the one who dies. (And if you spoil me I will kill you.)

2. starstealingirl is coming to visit next week. Hurrah!

3. State tax refund will be posting tomorrow. Double hurrah!

I think I need to start making a tag for lists.

* Guacamole + garlic-infused olive oil = crazy delicious. And it makes so much difference when it's real guacamole made with real avocados, as opposed to the creepy stuff with itty bitty type and about 60 ingredients.
* My Babylon 5 DVDs arrived! Yay!
( cut for B5 bibble )

*The latest Something Positive makes me want to bawl my eyes out, even worse than the last three strips.
* Coretta Scott King's death saddens me, and I hope this gives the feuding King children a good smack in the head re: the power struggle that is taking place in the family.
* I am pleased that Brokeback Mountain got so many Oscar nods. I am, however, unsure of its suitability as the best picture of the year, having not seen any of the other nominees. I reserve judgement until then, but I do so hope Ang Lee wins best director, because I love Ang Lee. In the meantime, read John Scalzi's observations about what Hollywood perceives as its best and what it happens to promote instead of it.