Hither and yon

Saw most of a DVD tonight w/ my sister called
Across the Universe. A musical set in the '60s to Beatles songs. So over the top, so musical, so angsty and dramatic. It's overwrought and they know it and rock it. Which I love. A little slow in parts, but other parts are fah-ree-ken TRIP-ay!!@#@ I was seriously like "WTF!" but in a good way. They got my favorite Beatles song in there, "Strawberry Fields," so that's all I cared about. Visuals were brash and yummy, too.

A gauge if you'll like it or not: You'll probably like Universe if you like Moulin Rouge ("Spectacular SpecTACular!!"). If you don't like Moulin Rouge ... stay far far away. Moulin Rouge is better, though.

You know ... my sister and my niece Janiece talked around the kitchen table tonight — me with a glass of boxed wine, them cracking me and each other up. It was a little on the magical side for me, since that's not a usual Friday night for us.

BLUH .... That full, week-old basket of clothes over there isn't going to fold its contents on its own. Then again, apparently I'm not going to, either.

I picked up extra-extra freelance at work, on top of the freelance I already do. It's just compilation kind of stuff for the primaries, but ugh, so time consuming. I refuse to do any of it this weekend, so next week's going to be busy.

Brian and I have one of our many here-and-there pre-marriage counseling sessions tomorrow afternoon. I keep meaning to take along an actual list of stuff that could use discussion. We usually just wing it, then it's over, then I'm lying in bed in the dark every night afterward like, "Gah! I forgot to bring up that!" Rull grrr.

My ::baby:: niece Keena turns 18 on Monday!! I can't believe it. The family will celebrate Sunday evening at mom and dad's by pigging out on tacos that mom and Brian make and smearing our faces with mom's chocolate birthday cake icing. That's what I'm talking about. GET THIS. Keena's turning the magic number that makes her all grown AND my other niece, Janiece, is the age of my favorite number .... ::drum roll please:: 23. Ka-pow.

Ugggghhhh. I'll be wallowing in self-hate tomorrow morning. I suppose them's the ugly, insomniac breaks.

Now it's Hillary's turn, but good luck

Now Hillary's swinging through Oak Cliff, and I'm interested to see which candidate causes a bigger Dallas splash. Hillary's coming in on Barack's heels from his Wednesday rally, with his rockstar buzz still in the air. Good luck.

• Hill's Dallas rally details
• HillaryClinton.com

Barack Obama's pit stop in Dallas

I drove into downtown around 10:30 a.m. and was retarded by the vehicular throngs. In other words, Obama traffic be makin' me late to work. He was rallying at Reunion Arena at noon, which is next door to my job. Reunion-ward pedestrians walking from Union Station, bus stops and downtown lots swarmed Houston and Young. (What appeared to be) Barack's suited heavies and their black SUVs were blocking our security entrance.

Even with these annoyances, the air was filled with that inevitable zing that comes from a bazillion people gathering in one place for one purpose. Wednesdays are grossly busy for me or else I might have stole away to join them. Instead, I watched the rally live online at Channel 8's wfaa.com.





Entirely too many people spoke before Barack took the podium. Several local rally organizers said what could have been rounded up and delivered by just one of them: Early-vote today please, Y'all fire up out there?, This is a time of change y'all, Si se puede!, It's important that you vote for Barack Obama please, Si se puede!, Y'all fired up? I think the left side is more fired up than the right side — let's make some noise, y'all!, Si se puede!

On a stats level, the warm-up team seemed to adequately represent the faces in the crowd: A black woman, a white guy and a Hispanic man and woman. There was a bit of Spanish translation during the pre-speeches, which was great. But if there were rally-goers in the crowd who only speak Spanish and therefore need translation, then they only got moving lips from the people who mattered, like former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk and Obama himself. Maybe there was some sort of other translation that I didn't see; who knows.

You know how typical political rally music tends to lean toward, like, Sister Sledge's "We Are Fam-uh-LEE!" or whatever? Obama's was a mix of typical rally fare like that and some unexpected tracks, like Bruce Springsteen's ode ot immigrants "American Land," and a "wha?"-inducing tune by some British chick named Natasha Beddingfield. I wouldn't even have known who in the world she was if one of our music critics, Thor, hadn't made a blog post about today's rally music. But that's what I liked about it. Barack is working the fresh-face-on-the-block angle, putting himself forth as the candidate who's going to do things differently around here, and it's kinda hard to sell that if all his between-speech music is the same that Hillary's, McCain's, or heaven forbid, Huckabee's camps are using.



On to the point of the whole thing, Barack's speech. It was rousing and inspirational, just like you'd expect. He was badly under the weather and he seemed like he really needed a good, long night of sleep. But he hit all the important bullet points:

• He'll get us out of Iraq in 2009
• He'll roll back the tax cuts Bush gave to the rich while giving cuts to the middle class
• Health insurance needs a major overhaul (duh), and folks like his late mother shouldn't have to pore over insurance fine print while suffering from cancer and worrying if their treatment will be covered
• Kids need to be learning about music, art, poetry and science instead of being taught to pass a NCLB test
• People shouldn't be kept from going to college because of money
• He will, essentially, set aside college funds for each child in $4,000 increments, and in order to access those funds, students will complete the circle and pay society back through volunteer work in the Peace Corps, veterans homes, low-income school districts, etc.

(Somebody please tell me if my interp butchers reality on that last one).

Charismatic, believable, urgent, hopeful, straight-shooting. If he said anything that would make potential supporters fall off the fence toward the other side, I sure didn't hear it.

Don't get me wrong — It's all about HillClint for me. Is she coming to town at all? I need to check. It'd be a loss if she didn't. On our end and hers.

You hear that Hillary? Come to Dallas! Si se puede!!


• Video: WFAA Channel 8's rally recap

Getting too old for this

I'm home after a weekend of being in Austin and at Brian's grandmother's. That's nothing too terribly new, except this itinerant lifestyle got old like forever ago already. When I used to dream of vagabonding, I was thinking more Kerouac's On the Road than literally being on the road for this constant Waxhachie-to-Arlington-to-Dallas-to-Waxahachie-to-Arlington-to-Waxhahachie-to-Dallas-to-Arlington clownfest to which I've managed to chain myself. I live out of a shoulder bag, and I don't even bother to unpack that shoulder bag because it's just going to get packed again in 3-4 days. Most of my toiletries? They've been in a toiletry case for a year and a half. I can't rightly complain, however, because I'm actively choosing this. And the reasons I continue to choose it never seem to resolve.

universal truth: loved ones will hurt you

A buddy just told me about his sister, how she just found out a couple of days ago that her husband had been sleeping with another woman for a whole year. She'd had no idea.


She's still, for lack of an adequate descriptor, reeling.

What do you do when this happens? What do you do when that bomb of nausea explodes inside your ribcage when you discover news like this?

Some of the responses that seem appropriate at the moment aren't real-world options, like murder, assault, arson. But all of the other responses you're left with feel so inappropriately passive — crying yourself to sleep, praying, confiding in a friend, Christian forgiveness, moving on.

She confronted him. Caught, he now wants to work things out.

What do you do.

I've always wondered if I'd see this during my lifetime

Thought of the day. If we're having to decide between a woman and a black man as the presidential nominee for a major political party ... we've made it, mayne.

OMG blogging SUCKS

But I'm going to do it anyways. Catch-up ...

Politics: Go Hillary!
Running: Training for a half-marathon! It's hard!
Fiance: I see him two days a week! That sucks!
Food: Just had leftover Pei Wei! It was good!
Job: I hear there's great demand in the stripping industry!
Family: Still living with my sister!
Highlight of the day: The leftover Pei Wei!