Still Conscious

Please forgive me, but I’ve become one of the masses. The countless, nameless, faceless sheep who rise before the sun and go to bed long after it has set all in an inane effort to pay the bills. Why inane? Because expenses increase exponentially with the number of hours you spend working – test it sometime, it’s true! In between exercising [(yep, I get up before 5am for my daily (well, not EVERYday) workout], commuting, working, responding to, deleting, and organizing email, taxiing, parenting, wifing (I wonder if it should be an “f” or a “v”?), cleaning, cooking, grading (a special bonus of teaching is that you have work you get to bring home, like homework when you were a student, FUN), I do occasionally talk shop with friends and family. But the shop talk (how F#@$d up our country and its state of affairs) is so damn depressing!

What fun is it to talk about weapons of mass destruction and whether or not we should go to war? How exciting is it to have a round robin discussion of the evil privacy negating intent of the Patriot Act? Or who setup the outing of dissenting Joe Wilson’s CIA wife? Or how the incompetence of Michael Brown could really hurt the US in case of a natural or unnatural disaster? There’s no fun in being right, there’s no joy in “I told you so,” because no one believes us, even when we’re saturated in evidence. Even as a fulltime everything, I was still very aware of:

• soldiers committing atrocities and getting caught,
• the mounting evidence that the Plame leak ends at Bush’s desk,
• Ken Lay’s final exit and how it dealt another f#@$ you to past Enron employees,
• Congress’ great pause in trying to protect the flag from fire (how about some inexpensive flame retardant?),
• Republicans’ use of immigration to wag the dog – biting them in the ass,
• the Supreme Court protecting the rights of prisoners (like they were real human beings), and
• the US launching a shuttle with astronauts on it for the first time since the 2004 when the Columbia broke apart on reentry.
  

My point? Even as an insanely busy woman, I manage to avoid complete unconsciousness. I haven’t organized the InterAct files as nicely as I'd like, I don’t engage everyone in heated debate, but I do offer extra credit to any student who watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Though you may have drifted off early on with my inescapable bad listing habit, I leave you with a recommendation of excellent reading (or listening, whichever you prefer because I'm all about choice!) – FUBAR.

~ Jodie Hemerda