Not talking about S**** P****

It's been a busy few days, which might explain how I made the brilliant move of leaving one washer-full of clothes (out of the nearly 1,000 washers I was taking up) at the laundromat. Overnight. There may have once been a time when absentmindedness made one a more authentic and thus superior academic, but all it did was distract me from my studies--had I lost all of my t-shirts? How was I going to fix this on a grad-student budget? Seems I panicked for no reason--the clothing was all still there, if damp, this morning. It was even a bit less damp, so I ended up saving maybe fifty cents on the drying cycle. But still, ugh! Guess I won't be a mother of five with a full-time job running the country any time soon...

In other news, I'm mystified--mystified!--by this article. "Europeans are slower to spend," they say? Enter any store in lower Manhattan and you will not hear American English. One Euro is worth ten million $US (says this student of the humanities). Then again, the article points out that "consumers in much of Europe are buying less than they did a year earlier." This is not surprising. I'm sure while at home, Europeans aren't shopping because they have already bought every last item for sale in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and for all I know Wasilla, AK.

In the same news, it appears I am, like everyone else, disproportionately preoccupied with a woman whose initials are S.P. In order to explain my "visceral revulsion," I should point out that the visceral is tough to explain, and impossible to explain in a rational way, so as to convince the unconvinced. (I should also point out that the comments section here is indeed getting troll-ish, but this is in part my own fault for having more visceral posts than I normally would, which is the fault of my response to none other than... guess who!) I guess the best way I can explain the revulsion to the Republican Party at this point in time is that I am revolted (but for somewhat logical reasons) by the extreme-left and the extreme-right. I am typically more put off by the extreme-left. But, in this election, only one extreme appears to have a shot at winning, and here's a hint, it's not the left. I'm put off by those on the left who argue that it's racist for Israel, whatever its borders, to be a Jewish state. (That's now much of a nutty Zionist I am, I believe there should be a two-state solution, with one of the states being a Jewish one. Albeit with how the state defines "Jewish" tweaked, since the status quo is, to put it mildly, a bit narrow. Gosh, I'm such an extremist!) But the Democratic Party is not the mouthpiece for the more radical of the Union Square perma-protesters. The sense I've gotten from the RNC and its aftermath is that the less appetizing aspects of the right now have a very good shot at winning once and for all.