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I ran what I assume was a successful game on Tuesday, because it ran all the way until 10 and nobody threw anything at me, which is really about as much as I can ask for. I've been spending a lot of time trying to run a successful game, which is stressful for me. Doing it on a weekly basis is somewhat frustrating, even when I enjoy it, which makes the probable upcoming two-week hiatus for the holidays a welcome one. I've opted to do a birthday thing on Saturday, which seemed like fun yesterday and seems like work today, because I'm sick of people which, I guess, is actually representative of me being somewhat sick of how I act around some people.
I don't want to be left alone so much as I want to be around people who arn't in the process of busily rubbing my last remaining nerves and frayed ends of self-esteem with an industrial sander. Everyone's so fucking loud, and if I'm not, I'm a killjoy. It's like a competition to be the biggest person in the fucking room, which I am not ever going to win because, one, my heart isn't really in it and two, I really lack that capacity. I know that I'm not really an asshole, it's just that I'm trying to act according to perimeters that I'm neither accustomed to nor have much real interest in parroting. But I've been doing it because I'm pretty tired of being ignored in a room full of 6 foot tall extroverts.
There are a lot of other things that I'm a combination of exhausted hearing about or seeing happen, which actually occur on something of a national scale. Like this furor over DADT, for example, which would be symbolic if it weren't for the fact that it actually impacts the military on a fairly large scale. I'm at the point where if the military is intentionally trying to hamper its effectiveness out of fear of teh gays, I'd be fine with them shooting themselves in the collective foot if it weren't for the lives of our gay service members that it's playing so much havoc with. In the same way, I believe that marriage is a fairly patriarchal tradition that I'm skeptical of, and I understand the people that insist that the government should be out of the marriage business entirely, relegating government involvement to civil unions only, but those are a bit beside the point. As long as our government recognizes marriage and as long as that union confers specific benefits, then it should be accessible to people regardless of sex or gender.
It's true that there's some nuance to those positions, but they're fairly clear and, I thought, obvious. And people are hemming and hawing because it seems like our service members are brave enough to handle being shot at, but terrified of discovering that their co-worker might find them attractive or are fine with our straight population's 50% divorce rate and flawed relationships but I guess it's actually gay people that're going to ruin this particular tradition.
In other ridiculousness, we've got Julian Assange of Leaks That Will Not Be Named by the firewall at work releasing bank memos and documents or whatever. Like usual, the government condemns this, and like usual, I support it, because I feel like the evidence for the emperor wearing no close as been fairly abundant for a while, but the emperor is far away and behind a wall, so documentation is helpful. Except that with the banks, we've known for a long time that they're screwed and screwing, and there's not too much we can do about it. We might be able to have the culture cache to leverage social change, but these people literally run the government and the nation* and I'm reasonable sure that there's no way to functionally leverage a change except by Congress, maybe, technically. Because we live in a country, currently, where the idea that everyone should have health care is literally described as a privilege and not a right be people in power, and that definition is parroted and believed by people who are actually being denied that 'privilege' right at this moment, I don't feel confident. We are a people who both hate these people and believe that they're entitled to screw us at the same time. We're either self-loathing on a deep level as a nation, or enveloped in some impressively terrifying double-think. Because I'm an eternal optimist, who believes in complexity, I assume that it is both.
Like I implied, there's more. There's always more. But isn't this long enough?
* Plutocracy, obviously.
I don't want to be left alone so much as I want to be around people who arn't in the process of busily rubbing my last remaining nerves and frayed ends of self-esteem with an industrial sander. Everyone's so fucking loud, and if I'm not, I'm a killjoy. It's like a competition to be the biggest person in the fucking room, which I am not ever going to win because, one, my heart isn't really in it and two, I really lack that capacity. I know that I'm not really an asshole, it's just that I'm trying to act according to perimeters that I'm neither accustomed to nor have much real interest in parroting. But I've been doing it because I'm pretty tired of being ignored in a room full of 6 foot tall extroverts.
There are a lot of other things that I'm a combination of exhausted hearing about or seeing happen, which actually occur on something of a national scale. Like this furor over DADT, for example, which would be symbolic if it weren't for the fact that it actually impacts the military on a fairly large scale. I'm at the point where if the military is intentionally trying to hamper its effectiveness out of fear of teh gays, I'd be fine with them shooting themselves in the collective foot if it weren't for the lives of our gay service members that it's playing so much havoc with. In the same way, I believe that marriage is a fairly patriarchal tradition that I'm skeptical of, and I understand the people that insist that the government should be out of the marriage business entirely, relegating government involvement to civil unions only, but those are a bit beside the point. As long as our government recognizes marriage and as long as that union confers specific benefits, then it should be accessible to people regardless of sex or gender.
It's true that there's some nuance to those positions, but they're fairly clear and, I thought, obvious. And people are hemming and hawing because it seems like our service members are brave enough to handle being shot at, but terrified of discovering that their co-worker might find them attractive or are fine with our straight population's 50% divorce rate and flawed relationships but I guess it's actually gay people that're going to ruin this particular tradition.
In other ridiculousness, we've got Julian Assange of Leaks That Will Not Be Named by the firewall at work releasing bank memos and documents or whatever. Like usual, the government condemns this, and like usual, I support it, because I feel like the evidence for the emperor wearing no close as been fairly abundant for a while, but the emperor is far away and behind a wall, so documentation is helpful. Except that with the banks, we've known for a long time that they're screwed and screwing, and there's not too much we can do about it. We might be able to have the culture cache to leverage social change, but these people literally run the government and the nation* and I'm reasonable sure that there's no way to functionally leverage a change except by Congress, maybe, technically. Because we live in a country, currently, where the idea that everyone should have health care is literally described as a privilege and not a right be people in power, and that definition is parroted and believed by people who are actually being denied that 'privilege' right at this moment, I don't feel confident. We are a people who both hate these people and believe that they're entitled to screw us at the same time. We're either self-loathing on a deep level as a nation, or enveloped in some impressively terrifying double-think. Because I'm an eternal optimist, who believes in complexity, I assume that it is both.
Like I implied, there's more. There's always more. But isn't this long enough?
* Plutocracy, obviously.
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