You voted today; it isn't even an issue.
Do they hand out these little "I voted!" lapel stickers everywhere? I felt so out of it until I finally made it to the polls, at about 6:45.
I have to get this off my chest: there are a lot of very stupid people out there.
Yesterday, as I was driving from Warner Bros. to USC, I heard two really frightening articles on NPR's "All Things Considered." One was about the Texaco Tapes scandal, in which executives at Texaco were taped in executive meetings using words like "niggers" and "black jellybeans" to describe their black employees. The guy who the notetaker for the meetings was secretly taping to make sure that he was taking the notes correctly -- he got downsized and then turned the tapes over to the plaintiffs in a discrimination suit against Texaco. What a guy.
Let me go out on a limb here and say: It's really, really stupid to think things like those that were said. It's even stupider to say them out loud and remove all doubt that you're an idiot.
The other report was on the performance art exhibit "Temple of Confessions" in New York, in which two Mexican (-American?) performance artists act as various Mexican figures, such as "the Mexterminator," who comes to marry your blonde women and introduce Spanish terms into the English language. There's a setup in which visitors can wear headphones and speak into a microphone to confess. The artists record the confessions, alter the voices a bit, and then play them back to future visitors.
One confession, from a young woman, maybe in her early 20s, went something very like this: "I'm a Christian, and I'm worried about what's going to happen to all to the Mexicans when they die. I believe that Christians go to heaven when they die. The Mexicans aren't Christians. They believe in earth gods, and I think that's kind of like Satanism, you know?"
Where do you even start with something that stupid?
And then there was this, from last night's guest speaker in Brooke's class who is an executive at Daybreak Films, the company that gave us Die Hard, among others. Someone actually pitched to her, in the past week or so, "It's like Die Hard in a building...this time in New York City."
You just want to run smelling salts under someone's nose for something like that.
I haven't felt like writing because I've been depressed. No particular reason, other than the usual list.
I had lunch with Tiffany today, and she said that a Chinese artist she'd heard give a speech recently pointed out that all you can deal with is where you are in the current space and time -- that is, the now. Most upsets come from things that have happened and those that have yet to happen, and we can't do anything about either one. We can only worry about the now.
Needless to say, I still think about a million things at once. Free-floating angst: I don't recommend it.
Today after writing class I voted. Then I went over to IKEA to pick up the last batch of furniture for my apartment: the bedroom set, including a dresser. Yes, I've survived two and a half months of life in LA without a bureau, but not for much longer. For an encore, I went to Vons to do food-shopping.
Now I'm sacked out in front of the TV watching election coverage -- albeit on Comedy Central -- and surfing the web. Any second now I'm going to go to bed.