Now this is true love

I can't believe I waited so long to move the 40" HD flatscreen TV up to our bedroom. We bought it last February in a fit of irrational spending and mounted it above the fireplace. It was lovely and perfect, but given our lifestyle, it was sadly underused. I enjoyed it a bit playing Tiger Woods on my PS2, watched a few football games and golf tournaments, but it mostly entertained the dogs with Animal Planet when we went out. We spend far more time in our cozy red cave of a bedroom, so I finally talked Diana into making the switch, which involved hauling the 400-pound old-school 36" TV down off our dresser and to the living room (which we said we would never do after hauling it UPstairs last year). We upgraded our Tivo to the fancy new HD version, and now we are enjoying the pure bliss that is full High-Definition television in our favorite place (bed). You haven't really enjoyed TV till you've enjoyed it in HD. This picture doesn't even come close to doing it justice, but just imagine how much fun it is for us to watch Cesar and Daddy on Dog Whisperer in 1080i, every whisker on Daddy's face popping off the screen at us, every little crinkle on Cesar's face making Diana swoon. Soon we'll be enjoying the high-def wonders of Africa thanks to Survivor Gabon, and I personally can not wait to see my favorite girl Tina Fey in HD on 30 Rock.

We are a simple people with simple pleasures. A cozy bed, a half-dozen dogs, a bottle of wine, and a big-ass TV to entertain us. Doesn't get much better than that.

So far, a good healthy crush

We watched Barack's acceptance speech last night (Tivoed from Thursday), and I was quite impressed. I've seen him speak before, and he's indubitably an excellent orator. More than anything, I'm grateful for the fact that he actually writes his own speeches, that we finally have a candidate who's actually capable of writing his own material. There's something incredibly disingenuous to me about politicians who deliver speeches written by someone else and get the credit for those words. Like so many other things about Bush's sad excuse for a presidency, it's intellectually lazy.

I can't say I'm quite in love with Barack yet, but I definitely have a serious man-crush on him. I haven't felt this way about a candidate since I saw Bill on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1992. I'm excited to know that someone I respect, someone I would want to hang out and talk to, someone who shares my values, could actually be our leader again. It's not the "I want to have a beer with this guy" thing, which fucked us all for the last 8 years, but rather the simple feeling of identification.

In the few times I've seen or read Barack in interviews, he does seem like what I consider to be a regular guy--intelligent, curious, compassionate, witty, self-deprecating. Not some schmuck who drives a pickup and clears brush so he looks like a regular dude--someone who is comfortable knowing he's fortunate enough to be smarter than a lot of people and wants to do something with that ability. This concept that the president should be "one of us, just like the average Joe" is such an idiotic crock of shit it makes me throw up a little in my mouth. The President SHOULD be smarter than all of us. Jon Stewart had a great bit earlier this year where he said that our President should be like this guy. With everything going on in the country and the world, we need as smart a person as we can get, somebody who actually thinks and learns and adapts to new situations, not someone who blindly insists they have a chosen path and will stick to it no matter what.

It makes me sad to think that so many Americans value stubbornness over adaptibility, folksiness over intelligence. I'm fighting my normally cynical outlook on national politics with the knowledge that IF all the young people who CAN vote DO vote, Barack will be our President. We came close in 2004 with that pasty android Kerry, but some of those kids didn't show up and we got fucked sideways into four more years of idiocy. I think this batch of young 'uns doesn't want to be responsible for having Grampa Munster as our leader, and is smart enough (for the most part) to get over the ridiculous notion that maybe they're just not ready for a black man to be President. If they still get hung up on that a little, somebody should remind them he's only half-black. It's pandering, but I'll take whatever works this time around.

Just as I intend to actually watch football every Sunday this year, I intend to really immerse myself in the election now that we're in the homestretch. I hope that by the time I've seen all the debates and interviews, I will be fully in love with Barack, and come November 4th, will be joyously celebrating the fact that we finally pulled ourselves out of this retarded backwater ditch we've been idling in for the last 8 years and have Barack driving us into a new era for this country. If not, you can all kiss my ass as I drive by on our way to Canada.

The Death of Expectations

We decided to start watching Mad Men this season. Very interesting show. Wish we had watched the first season, there are still some gaps in our background, but the period setting and attitudes are quite engrossing.

This past week's episode featured a line that Diana and I loved so much we keep talking about it again and again. When talking about her somewhat inscrutable and dickish boss, the more-than-meets-the-eye Peggy Olson (props for them spelling the name the right way) says:

"I never expect him to be any other way than what he is."

Stop.

Go back.

Read it again.

Isn't that one of the best attitudes you've ever heard? Seriously, how could anyone ever argue with that? Expecting someone to be anything that they are NOT is simply pointless. People are who they are. They may evolve and change over time, they may stay exactly the same, but at any moment in time, they are themselves and to ask or expect anything else is unfair to all.

How much aggravation and arguing and heartache could people save if they simply learned to accept each other for who they are? Accepting doesn't mean agreeing with or liking, but it means accepting that it's not your place to demand a change or to make someone feel like they should be something else. How many of our country's and world's problems could be solved if people could learn to simply accept?

The people in my life who are true friends are the ones who have always accepted me for simply me, better and worse, and to whom I owe no explanation. They accept me, I accept them, we expect nothing more than to be ourselves. People who start to place expectations on me will quickly find themselves on the bottom of my list.

It's ironic this line came up this week, since over the last few months, I've been thinking more and more about how comfortable I am allowing myself to be free of people's expectations. I'm learning more and more to simply not give a shit about what people expect, or what they may think of my choices, and it feels damn good. I know my darling wife has patiently nudged me in that direction for many years, and as usual, she was right.

So ponder that line when you have a few free minutes. I can't imagine you'll find any argument with it.

One of my favorite songs ever is "Last Goodbye" by Jeff Buckley, who died far too young. I listened to it today and thought I would post it in case anyone else wanted to listen. Ironically, one of the videos for the song I found on Youtube was a tribute to Heath Ledger, who also died far too young. We saw The Dark Knight this weekend, and he was amazing in it. So listen to a good song and feel a little sad for Heath.

Random Title

One thing I still haven't figured out is what sort of strategy I'm going to use to pick my post titles. This used to drive me nuts when I blogged before, and I often ended up not posting anything because I couldn't think of a title I thought was clever enough. Being the linear thinker I am, I can't really start writing till I have the title. So what I need to do is start randomly picking titles from shows I'm watching or songs I heard. Which means you can expect lots of lines from Family Guy and Colbert, and Weezer and Foo Fighters songs.

I just had to post this picture for Miss Katia. She has a soft spot for pandas. :)



We decided to take a huge risk tonight and took the air conditioner out of the bedroom window. If everything goes as planned, we'll enjoy some lovely cool evening breezes. If not, we'll wake up sweaty and gross. Either way, the dogs won't care. Wish us luck.

Now Where Was I?

Oh yeah, I was about to start posting here again. As most things do, it took a bit of time for me to actually get started. Inertia is a powerful thing. I'm still not sure what I want out of this, but I do miss having an outlet for my thoughts, so I'm giving it another shot. There's plenty of stuff going on for me to vent or rave about, especially with the election coming up. I'll either be ecstatically gloating or planning our move to Canada--you can guess which outcome would be which.

My hope is that this blog will be able to entertain you at least once a week. A weekly chuckle is all I hope for. Or maybe an "awww" at a gratuitous cute dog picture like this...

Oh, this is one of my latest obsessions, once again two years late to the game. Lolcats and Loldogs are silly pictures of people's pets with captions written mostly in Lolspeak, and I laugh my ass off daily at the new ones I get. Click through Trixie's picture if you're curious.

Our critters are all doing pretty well. Poor Lucy has a partial rupture of her ACL, but the doc says she'll probably heal without surgery. Aside from a little limping, she seems fine. The other dogs are all doing well, and we've had plenty of boarders over the last few months, so there's always something funny going on with them. Three of the cats are currently locked up in one of the guestrooms while we retrain them on how to use the litter boxes and get the house de-peed. They're not too thrilled about it, but it needs to be done, and it's nice for us to get the rest of our house back. Reva is the lone free kitty, partly due to her being a superstar--she was chosen to be featured in the Mutts comic's new Shelter Stories book.

I'm still hopelessly addicted to World of Warcraft, and I'm perfectly okay with that. I've been playing for almost two years now, and have been in a really cool, somewhat elite raiding guild for 6 months or so. It's a really fun group of people to play with, and I'm kind of proud of the fact that I've actually become a pretty damn good player. Diana's been very cool about letting me have this hobby, largely because I can play on my laptop in bed and so it doesn't really take me away from time together. But I'm rationing my time and not letting it take over completely.

Over the next few weeks, I'll share some more stuff I've been preoccupied with. If you stop by here, please leave a comment and let me know so I feel like I'm not just talking to myself.