Guess Who I Saw?

I mean "whom," obviously. Anyway, you'll meet he, I mean him, later.

The Gators are back, and for that I am grateful. Thanks to the generous hospitality of Sue and Brian, who hosted a watching party, I was able to see my favorite Florida team roll over my least favorite one. The orange-and-blue squad did not exactly dominate the orange-and-green squad, but the win was mighty fine nonetheless. It’s a bit strange blogging about football, not only because I am hardly a fanatical sports guy, but also because it reminds me that I’ve been doing this almost a year. When I began the blog, we were nearing the middle of the season.

The job is still pretty cool. Or hot. I guess it's cooler (i.e., hotter) to say "hot" these days. Last week, the going got a little rough as I made the transition from trainee to full-fledged assistant. This was not an official sort of thing but rather an unspoken one. I showed up one day and was expected to know how to do most everything. And now, I do. Still, for two or three days tension was like a tiny thong on a fat girl as I forgot to tell the boss about a phone call here or neglected to file a piece of paper there. We had a little chat, and the boss basically told me that now was the time I needed to do things on my own and not screw up every five minutes. I agreed to that, in concept. The weird thing about being employed like this is that there are expectations to meet. I mean, I actually beat out other people for this job. That is more or less a first for me, unless you count beating out people with criminal records or who are too young to participate in the legal operation of a roller coaster in Florida. It has made me realize my weaknesses, which happen to be organization, oral communication (socializing), and attention to detail in regards to things I don’t necessarily find important. It has also helped me recognize my strengths, which happen to be focus and thoroughness (which I guess could be called “work ethic”), ability to learn quickly, and consistent output of quality work (probably as a result of the first two). I would have mixed some of these up in an interview, but now I know exactly where I stand. I’m trying to improve where I can and maintain where I can’t.

My family in Florida had a bit of a trying weekend for reasons I can’t go into on the Internet, but I just want to say that I’m thankful that everything is okay right now. I have already booked my Thanksgiving flight home, which is a nice change from my usual last-minute scrambling.

YO! I saw the guy from the Coke Zero commercials, the tall guy with the glasses. He was eating at a restaurant. And a day later I saw this guy. Man, celebrity sighting is getting old.

My friend Adam just moved here, which is an exciting development. He’s tall like me. Two other tall people, Patrick and Ryan, are also on the West coast now, though not in LA.

It seems I was a bit quick to embrace Gov. Palin as the next great thing, although I still stand by my assertion that she seems pretty cool. The problem is, I thought she was more small government and less let’s-expand-the-empire-and-get-it-going-with-Russia-again-while-we’re-at-it. But I guess that’s a side effect of running with the guy who doesn’t mind spending the next century or so in Iraq singing “bomb Iran” to the tune of "Barbara Ann." Incidentally, I also hate the Beach Boys version of the song.

I think Palin for the Republicans has the same sort of tabula rasa effect that Obama had on the Democrats. They both seem to be politicians upon whom you can, with great ease, project your own views. It’s for different reasons, of course. Palin seems to have some strongly defined views of certain subjects, it’s just that she was relatively unknown and could therefore represent anything you wanted her to represent. I, for instance, wanted her to represent a libertarian voice in the election, so I seized onto the facts that she cut spending in her state (supposedly), sympathized with the Alaskan Independence Party, and once said Ron Paul was a pretty cool dude, all while ignoring that facts that she didn’t really cut spending all that much, has turned her back on most that interesting stuff in her past and, of course, has agreed to run alongside John McCain. As far as Obama goes, I’m sure he has some strong convictions as well, but the reason people were able to project their beliefs onto him (less so now that the primary is over) is because he deliberately kept his rhetoric vague.

All that being said, this financial situation with the banks and mortgage companies is pretty fucked up, and both of the major parties are planning on making it worse, just in different ways. It frightens me, it really does, that corporate welfare has become not only acceptable, but the norm. It's expected. I know the term fascism is thrown around a bit too freely these days (e.g., “my parents are such fascists,” Islamo-fascism), but isn’t the true definition of that term something like the government and the corporate powers merging into one?

I think much political is on my mind because last weekend I had an extensive political debate with friends over tacos. Usually we go to In-and-Out and sit for three to four hours and talk about movies, pop culture and ourselves. It’s a fun time, but on this occasion it was tacos and politics, still three or four hours. I love these kinds of discussions because even though often it seems that you’re going in circles and nobody is ever going to change his or her mind, it’s not really true. Sure, it’s rare that somebody changes his or her mind in the middle of an argument. But that’s because it would be absurd, not to mention humiliating for most people. Think about it, someone leaning across the table in the heat of an argument, pausing, and then taking a deep breath to proclaim, “You know what? You’re right!” and then skipping over to the other side of the table to sit with his newly found, like-minded friends. It’s silliness, I tell you. But there’s a quotation by C.S. Lewis that’s always stuck with me. It may seem odd that I would paraphrase a Christian apologist here, but what can I say? I’m a complicated being.

My friend Clive Staples says, “The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.”

In an effort not to end on a note of pompous profundity, here’s a video of some strange girl singing a song that’s slightly better than “Barbara Ann.”