An update.

(With apologies and gratitude to Anthony, who received an e-mail suspiciously similar to the text below just a few moments ago. Whatever, I'm sick and feel like a jerk for having fallen off. I'm trying to catch up, y'all.)

The Political

I saw this BBC article a couple of months ago, and I wish to god he had named the person quoted in this exchange:

A leading Republican, who was in Congress for more than 10 years, answered my question: "Who can beat Obama?" with a casual, "a mammal". Then he added sadly: "But they are all reptiles."

We're all hoping that they destroy each other and don't end up putting up someone who looks moderate enough to lure away disenchanted Dems. In the meantime, I'm usually too focused on keeping down my food anytime one of their god-awful faces is on my tele to pay much attention to what they're saying, and that's probably preserving my sanity.

The Personal

I had an interesting four-day weekend: I went to Florida to meet Colleen's family. They're in the suburbs of Tampa - which is to say, Tampa; the whole bloody city's one big suburb - and they are hardcore Republicans with Christian overtones and Tea Party inclinations. They've long since made their peace with their gay daughter, but loving her deeply and wanting a good and safe life for her somehow does not equal choosing not to vote for people who want her miserable or preferably dead. It's a conundrum.

I had been warned of their political leanings and Colleen had pleaded with me repeatedly not to get involved in any kind of political discussion with them, mostly because a) I'm obviously not going to change their minds, and b) her Dad is a... fucking fucking fuck, I've lost one of my Australian words... he likes to start trouble because he thinks it's funny... AUGH. I get really upset when that happens. I've started forgetting words and street names; I couldn't come up with the name of the Annandale a while back and I drove myself crazy with it. Stupid and unimportant, except that it isn't at all. Anyway, whatever the word is (and please post in the comments if you know what it is)*, that's what he is, so the only way to avoid getting into an ugly and unwinnable argument is to refuse to bite in the first place. But it's hard when you're pottering around in the kitchen and notice the Obama countdown clock prominently displayed on the counter, and when politics keeps coming up in conversations going on around me, and also, well, have you met me?

Fortunately I managed to keep well out of it, and it all went swimmingly and they liked me very much. But it was weird being in that environment. In some ways it felt almost disturbingly familiar - the beaches; the crazy flora I've never seen Stateside, including a bottle-brush tree in their front yard! - and in others it felt so completely unrelatable. The place has no soul, and that's a big part of it - it's all planned/gated communities and strip malls and chains, not an independent anything to be found anywhere - but the other was definitely the people. You'll hear that Southerners are much friendlier, but I don't think that's correct: it's warm, but it's automatic; it's manners, not friendliness. With the people, as with the city, there's no there there. It's dead inside. And the politics are effing terrifying. I really do fear for this country.

But I'm trying to focus on the good of the trip, which was that her family really did seem to like me. I was so fucking terrified: it's been a long time since I dated someone who cared what her family thought. It's a lot more nerve-wracking this way (even though it probably says some very good things about Colleen and the choices I'm making these days. Look at me, growing up).

The Patriots

Didn't happen. Did not happen. Don't know what you're talking about.

XOXO

* EDIT: The word is stirrer. Which I remembered while brushing my teeth, because why not.

Who's awesome? Yeah she is.

In between working 18 jobs, cat-wrangling, and trying to unpick the snarl of yarn that passes for my mind most days, Caitlin does the hard yards over on Twitter, using her IR-trained brain to analyse why people kill each other all over the damn place. We should all be following her. Who said so? Just the well-known and highly respected Blogs of War, for a start: her feed, @Caidid, made their 'People You Should Be Following on Twitter in 2011' list - as a result of which, she is now being followed by this guy. Really.

XOXO

If I have to wake up at 5:30 a.m....

...it's nice to be able to wake up to some good news.

For fuck's sake, Australia.

God help you. The next three years will take a lifetime to recover from.

You're a bit of a bastard aren't you, Nicholas?

Crap politicians yield excellent humour.

(Tip of the hat to the Ginja Ninja for the pic. And big ups to anyone who can pick the source of the post title.)

Is it wrong that my hero is a redneck gobshite?

Now if only we could link him to Tony Abbott....

Onya Dahhhhhhhlin'!

Up the workers... especially you, Erin. :)

Here we go.

Looks like my fears are coming true.

In through the nose, out through the mouth.

You guys.

For the last two days I've been having run-ins with the American taxation and health care systems. They are... like, I don't even have the words. I don't know how to say all the things that are wrong or how astoundingly wrong those things are. I don't know how it is that either of these systems could be so completely broken and yet still be the civic equivalent of required reading.

I am not stupid. I am not lazy. I am not trying to do anything illegal, immoral, or even remotely out-of-the-ordinary. And yet I have, on three separate occasions over the last 24 hours, been reduced to tears by the incomprehensible garbage that governs my ability to comply with (not break, not stretch, not find-a-loophole-out-of, but comply with) federal and state law, and to access and pay for (not abuse, not cheat, not rort, but access and pay for) basic health care when I need it. And along the way I have talked to people who are kind but lack the knowledge or ability to help me; or who are unkind and uncooperative and lack the desire to help me; or who just plain need a punch in the mouth and make me want to move to Abu Dhabi tomorrow rather than deal with their bullshit one fucking second more; who are all employed to (at least in theory) help me and millions of other people do exactly what I am trying to do. None of this, none of the system that has grown up to support hundreds of millions of people, makes any fucking sense.

In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams wrote an awesome bit about how hard it was for him to discuss two obnoxious German students he had met in Africa because everything about them was such a stereotype. Writers, he said, should be in the business of destroying stereotypes, not enforcing them. He eventually decides to deal with the problem by making them Latvians instead, which made all of their annoying qualities interesting instead of cliched, and also allowed him to use the line, 'a smile played across his thin Latvian lips' - an excellent result all around. Unfortunately, I do not have that luxury. My recent experiences are so horribly, stereotypically, fundamentally American that to assign them to any other country would rob them of their power (and be unnecessarily cruel to whatever nation I'd picked on). But the flip side of this is that because everyone already knows that our health care system sucks ass and our tax codes were written by day patients, I cannot communicate how truly heinous it is to have to deal with these things in real life: if I rant about it, I sound whingy; if I joke about it, I sound like a hack (amirite, ladies?); and if I try to give you the information straight, I still sound like I'm exaggerating because unless you've been through it personally you would not believe that it could be this fucking ridiculous. So this is where I'll end. I'll shake it off and get on with my day, because that's all I can do, because somehow I've ended up back in a country where these systems are the systems.

I read the news today, oh fuck...

So Julia 'The Icewoman Cometh' Gillard is PM.

This is a tricky thing to take in. It got dropped on me this morning while listening to NPR on the way to work, and I reeled. I'd only checked the ABC News website not 48 hours before and there'd been no hint that this was in the offing; now all of a sudden Australian's got it's first HBIC and I'm torn between feeling thrilled to the core that a woman - a competent, intelligent, effective woman (i.e., Bishop, Hanson and Palin: not you) - is running things; impressed by her ability to make such a tough choice and act on it quickly and successfully; and absolutely effing terrified that Labor has just handed this year's election to Tony Abbott. I've thought long and hard about this, and I believe that I would rather see John Howard back in power than Tony Abbott. That's how much I fear that lunatic.

This morning I read a piece by Annabel Crabb that said that while Rudd was popular with the electorate, he was never much liked by other politicians, and when his public rating started to slip there were very few people left to catch him. Gillard is, by all accounts that I read/heard, very popular with and well-respected by other pols; however, I'm worried that she's not nearly as well-liked by the public, and they're the ones who'll be deciding if she keeps the job. The problem is, while Gillard is smart and experienced and a hell of a politician, she's also a bit of a cold fish (Josh Thomas memorably referred to her as the Queen of Narnia), a fact that will count against her even more because she's a woman. She's not soft, she's not maternal, and she's not a sex object; she's the boss that the men refer to as a ballbuster because she got further than they did and doesn't put up with blokey bullshit. She can't be accused of having slept her way to the top, so she must have castrated her way there instead.

And she's a ranga besides.

I didn't mean for this to turn into a feminist dialectic. And let me make myself perfectly clear: if allowed to govern, Julia Gillard will be excellent; I do not doubt that for a moment. I'm just not at all sure she'll be allowed to govern.

What's killing me on a personal level is that I had no idea this was in the offing. Even with all my reading I can't get a feel for the timeframe of the whole thing, apart from 'really fucking quick', but I can't help but think that if I were there I would have had some inkling, some insight that things were afoot. And if I didn't, if it had been the shock to me there that it was here, I'd have rung Anthony and Paul and Alison and Hamish and Nikki and Michelle and Amanda and Emily and Stuart and we'd have sat around with our soda waters and beers and Long Island iced teas and absinthe and talked and talked and talked until I felt like I had some grasp on it, like I knew what to think. I feel very, very far from home at this moment.

XOXO