Ha. Ha.

all right, this is where my silly 26-year-old mind has wandered since the last post...

maybe all this is a good thing. i think the last thing we need in a national healthcare system is one in which (healthy) Republicans get to hold every single story of system missteps and shortcomings over (nauseous) Democrats' heads. I can already see Glenn and Rush and Sarah P. digging into it, and it makes me a little sick. So, you know, that would be a shortcoming in the healthcare system right there.

And, being a true Unaffiliated, i really think that something as broad as healthcare needs to be legislated on common ground. (I realize that there is none of that right now.)

But, being a true Unaffiliated introduces problems of its own. because i like this take on things - I like to think that everything can be debated and reduced (yes, like a balsamic reduction) to a common ground - that a common ground must always exist, and it's just a matter of finding it. However, i have come to realize that i occasionally agree with one side and truly do not agree with the other. For instance, i really, really believe that gay marriage should be legal. If you think i'm going to go into all the reasons why right here, then you're wrong. but let's just say that there's no reason it shouldn't be legal

. Period. Bam!

So... i don't know where that leaves me in my quest for diplomacy and bipartisanship, including when it relates to healthcare. I guess it comes back to: Argh. Because if you agree that insurance cos. shouldn't turn ppl away because of pre-existing conditions, and you wrote legislation to prevent it, then you'd have to account for all the schemers who wouldn't get insurance until they were sick. So you'd have to make having insurance mandatory. So then you'd have to subsidize those who couldn't afford it. Then you'd have to define who couldn't afford it. Then you'd have people right above that definition line who also probably couldn't really afford it. Then... you'd have government healthcare.

I mean, governing is like trying to raise teenagers. effing impossible. no wonder it doesn't work very well.

I will say that this graph from National Geographic was a bit... disconcerting (Click on graph to enlarge, i.e., to see U.S. costs).

finally, i hope there are people in Washington paying attn to this (does anyone else think the hyperlink icon in Blogger looks like a bull? ...??).

Excerpt:

"The conventional wisdom is you can't have back-to-back major financial crises. I think we're going to push that, we're going to have a look and see whether that's true. And the next 12 months could really be exciting. People could be very positive, but we are setting ourselves up for an enormous catastrophe."

ha ha! isn't that funny?? An enormous catastrophe. That's funny. Funny enough for me to stop thinking about healthcare while I laugh.

the aughts

so, my last blog post of the decade was about a 13-year-old girl who writes about fashion. hm, i definitely did not mean for that to happen. if i could think of a less appropriate way to round out my decade, ... well, i can't. don't get me wrong; i still think she's cool. and i do like fashion, but i certainly don't know fashion. i don't discriminate between YSL and XXI. heck, i know more about football than i do about fashion. maybe even basketball. definitely not hockey.

annywho, the decade of the aughts, huh? funny that i never really heard it being referred to as the aughts until the last month of the decade. but i like it. so i will most likely, from now on, refer to it as the 'aughts' even though that's not the way it happened. but it happened. and as i have marveled about it with friends, this is the first decade i truly remember. When the 90s started, i was 6. Don't remember much from 6. When the aughts (heh - by the way, what do you call this decade? the 10-to-12s-and-teens?) started, i was rounding out my senior year of high school. I don't remember a heck of a lot, but I certainly remember more than i did at 6.

i guess it's interesting to look back on a decade, but i'm not going to write about it. it deserves a quick trip down the proverbial memory lane for me, and that's about it. because really that's all it takes for me to realize how much i've changed in 10 years. the difference between 6 and 16 is infinity, and the difference between 16 and 26 is infinity. plus, if i tried to recap the decade it would go something like:

The Past Decade:
Spring 2000 - graduated high school
Sept. 11, 2001 - woke up to raj telling me and beth that the twin towers were falling
Spring 2004 - graduated college
Spring 2005 - graduated grad school
Fall 2009 - sometime between me leaving work and me arriving at AA5, MJ died

you know, pretty standard timeline-y things, plus stuff i remember from the past year, or two, tops. it's hard to fit a decade into, well, anything but a decade, I guess.

there are probably a few things about the past decade that i think are worth mentioning. How about .. ok, my personal opinion on worst new word of the decade: 'staycation.' w(ho)tf goes on a staycation? if you're seriously that overworked that you need to take time off to stay at home and clean your baseboards and watch DVRed episodes of How I Met Your Mother, then you need a new job. And if you seriously want to take a 'staycation', then that's just lame.

on a related note, a close second is 'mancation.' i think Brokeback Mountain might have ruined that one.

eh, that's all i can come up with about the decade for now (earlier, i tried to make a list of people i admire from the past decade, and i ended up with my father and tina fey and anthony bourdain all on the same list, and, well, that was embarrassing and is the last list i'll attempt for a while).

The new year has started out pretty well, i think. I didn't get in any car wrecks on new year's day, or wake up somewhere unfamiliar (in fact, i woke up at the same friend's house that i've woken up at for the last 3 new years' now (umm... where the fook do you put the apostrophe in a plural new year's?)), and i've already been to two pretty good concerts (RJD2's Ghostwriter is v. good live).


and, you know, Blagojevich still thinks he's black, and health care is still a headline rather than an actual working noun, and apparently not only is John Edwards crazy but so is Elizabeth, and Haiti's a sad horrible bloody mess, and Kiffin's in California, and Art Clokey died (who was, by the way, put in an orphanage when he was 10 because his mom's new boyfriend made her choose between him or the kid), and Conan is in network limbo, and the Neighborhood Theatre may close .... which is all good, right? because apparently being sad is good sometimes.

Well, also, the star Betelgeuse (shoulder star in Orion) is so big that if it were at the center of our solar system, it would extend out past Mars. So, you know, it's all relative.

And also, there's this. Again, relative. auld lang syne, y'all.