bicycling is living

Yeah, so I don't post all that often anymore. As a friend of mine said once, people who have enough time to blog regularly usually don't have enough of a life to make it interesting! (Not to say that mine is all that thrilling...)

Last night was Bike Night, and it went well. Next year will be amazing. What's cool, is that this year's Green Party gubernatorial candidate, Jill Stein, actually showed up to speak. She didn't have anything earth shattering to say, but it was nice, and she made a great point about not allowing diminished expectations — the less we ask for, the less we get. It's a fine line that activists have to walk, between looking like an extremist and being impotent.

I also apparently got some big props during my boss Tim's speech, but I was outside staffing the valet bike parking, and didn't get to hear anything except the last sentence or so. Ah, well, I did get enjoy the applause, which made me blush. And I had some nice company (and brownies!) while I was stuck outside, too, so I was happy enough.

We had an auction of bike related items and I had submitted some jewelry that I'd created with recycled bike parts that I'd had laying around the house. Surprisingly, there was a little competition for it, and the final bid was over $20. Cool, huh? If you want to see what it looked like (and learn how you can make your very own bike jewely) check out this page on my minimalist website. (It actually has three pages on it now!)

squeeeeal!

If you are like me, this will make you squeal in delight.

I watched the Episode II dvd this weekend. All of it. I'll have some philosophical discussion about it sometime soon...

broke

I have about $20 to my name. Hopefully, the unemployment stuff is all worked out (they apparently don't like it when you work temp jobs) and I'll get a buttload of money form them soon. As a bonus, though, I've been doing a lot of cooking and baking, and I'm probably eating a lot less junk food!

Been busy with MassBike stuff. Bike Night is the big event of the year, and I've been doing PR work to make it seem like people would be fools to miss it! See MassBike's event page for more info.) Yay!

I hadn't gotten a chance to mention that I saw Bowling for Columbine a while back. It wasn't any masterpiece of filmmaking, but it definitely was effective in generating discussion. The premise of the movie is asking the question of why is the US such a violent country. Many of the standard answers are pretty much debunked (video games, movies, too many guns, etc.). And the movie leave you with the question essentially unanswered. My best guess is that we have cultivated such an atmosphere of inferiority in our populace — through advertising gimmicks, test crazy school systems, and workplace/social hierarchies — that we are have turned into a country of paranoid bullies. Anyway, I highly recommend this movie. As a bonus, it's got South Park stuff in it to help alleviate the depressing tone of the topic.

my hero

Leave it to an nonagenerian to say what my last posting said in a much more elequent and inspiring way. See what Granny D has to say about the political devide that haunts this country, in this speech she recently gave in Boston.

United States of Idiots

We have spawned an entire society of imbeciles who have no idea of how the world works. I have to I keep reminding myself (and others) that people do what they do, and think they way they think because they just haven't been taught anything else. It's not really their fault that they vote for the wrong people (and referenda). Its all very simple to them - Candidate X says that he's gonna lower taxes and make more jobs, so hell yeah I'm gonna give him my vote. What's funny is that these people aren't just greedy, but in their blind greed they end up screwing themselves (and the rest of us) over.

Heck, one of my supposedly intelligent roommates voted to eliminate income taxes entirely (as did about half of Massachusetts voters!). When I pointed out what that would mean (cutting a majority of social programs such as housing and health insurance for the elderly and handicapped), she said, "well, they proposed it, they must have a plan". The State House can't even plan when they have hoards of money, I can't even imagine what would happen with no money... I also reminded her that our rent would probably double. She apparently thought that the landlord couldn't legally raise our rent that much, but the fact is that he can if he needs to cover property taxes.

Anyone can make a bad decision. But the problem is that more and more people are making more and more bad decisions. And we're all suffering for it. All I can think is thank goodness I don't have any kids. I'm utterly convinced that something big is going to happen sometime soon. It's really just an intuition, but I'm absolutely sure that some sort of world-sized metaphysical scale is getting so unfathomably unbalanced that it's starting to look more like a catapault than a scale. And day now a giant flaming ball of metaphorical pestilence is going to come hurtling at us, and we're going to be completely fucked.

Not to be pessimistic or anything.

It's easy being green

Elections tomorrow. I'm actually really curious to see how it all turns out. The country seems a lot more interested in democracy and it's inherent citizen participation these days. Leave it to King George to aggravate the moderate centrist voters enough to actually care about voting. Both Massachusetts' and Maine's Green party gubernatorial candidates are polling at at least 5%, and these polls are notorious for getting only the opinions of the stay at home wives and the elderly (though both of my grandmothers voted for Nader). Even the current governor of Maine says (off the record) that he is voting for the Green candidate. Locally, the old boy democrat state rep from the next district over, Tim Toomey, is getting a run for his money by a determined Green. The centrist (and even some of the wussier leftwing) media is so scared of the Green in the Governor's race that they have gone out of their way to either ignore her, or, now that the public is actually aware of her, to bitch and moan about the greens "spoiling" their party. The outcome that many have hope for is starting to come about—the centrist dems are moving left a smidge in order to try and court the favor of the left. The aforementioned Toomey has gone well out of his way to be really really nice to bicycle advocates lately. So much so that he even showed up at a very small meeting for the Friends of the Community Path just to let us know that he had been working hard on getting the path funded, and of course, to pass out flyers about his campaign.

There's even a write in campaign in Senator Kerry's (essentially) unopposed race to let him know how upset many of us are about his locally unsupported decision to vote to give Georgie the keys to the toy, I mean, war chest. The woman's name is Randall Forsberg and she's a democrat, not a green, but she's an anti-war activist from way back. To vote for her (all across Mass) for Senator, you have to write her name and address in in a specific way, for it to officially count. For instructions go to www.rforsberg.com.

I didn't go to the protest yesterday. Fortunately about 15,000 other people did, including Tim Robbins. Someday I'll make it to a protest, really I will.