confusion

Well, first I apologize for there being no updates and no warning of why all week. I moved into my apartment on the 24 and 25 and started work on the 28. So. There will be very sporadic updates for the next few weeks till I get Internet service at my apartment.

The apartment is very empty. Nice but empty. I have only one real piece of furniture—my bed. Besides that I have lots of boxes of books and cloths. Everything else will have to wait for a while till I build up some more money. Oh well, I can always walk to Xando’s to sit down!

My job is cool—till I have clearance I have nothing to do. But they will pay for my masters degree so I guess I should fill out some paper work and get of my butt. I can also apply to do internal, non-classified work. But basically other than that it’s twiddling of thumbs till clearance—and that can take more than two years if you have been out of the country for a while…. Great!

My biggest problem this week was with cars… or rather with car—it died, in rush hour traffic on 66! Getting it towed to a service station and getting home that night involved lots of walking in the cold rain and cussing! And getting to work the next morning involved much walking. Ended up costing just over 300 to get fixed and towed, but I made it back to C’ville Friday so I can practice more with my new car and get the whole manual transmission thing down. Cross your fingers!

Anyway, I will try to update on a semi-regular basis till I get Internet access at my apartment. Then hopefully I can do it on a daily basis. Ciao!

I heard an ad on the radio today for a company looking for computer people from “the intelligence community” who currently have a Top Secret or higher clearance. The thing that disturbed me about this ad was the way in which the term “homeland” was used. They said; blah, blah, “continue serving the homeland,” blah, blah. Now does this strike anyone else as a bad thing? To start to refer to the US as “the homeland” scares me. It sounds like “fatherland” or something from Nazi Germany or Communist Russia. I have thought it before, with Bush’s warmongering and Ashcroft trying to suspend civil liberties but does anyone else smell nationalism here with shades of Europe in the first half of the 20th century? I don’t want to live in Fascist America under Herr Bush and Kommandanten Chaney and Ashcroft.

I know the manager of the Ponderosa where the latest shooting took place. I worked for the Ponderosa in C’ville when I was in high school and the same guy owned both of them—and the same guy managed both of them. Glad it was not him who got shot, sorry for the guy who did get shot.

The whole sniper thing is upsetting but I find it more so with the media—as usual the media has turned the whole thing into a “bread and circuses” voyeuristic orgy. I turn on the TV to get the news and all that is on is sniper this and sniper that. I find the reporters so annoying and ratings driven that I end up getting my news from the ticker at the bottom of the screen and muting the idiots. They attempt to make hour-long dialogs and interviews about every fact. God forbid that one network talk about something as inane as the type of trees in the “wooded area” and the rest not do it—I REALLY DON’T CARE WHAT THE LATIN NAME OF THE TREES IS!

The media in America has gotten way out of hand. They turn everything into a spectator sport. It is the media that has driven the salaries of professional athletes into the stratosphere (anyone who disagrees with that should look at the average salary of a NBA, NFL, NHL or baseball player and the salaries of, say a soccer player in the US.) Then we had all the 24 hour financial channels pumping the markets—which lead to every Joe Schmo being an expert in the stock market and pumping the markets more. Just as there are athletes willing to stake steroids and cheat to get ahead there are unscrupulous people in the business world who are willing to lie, cheat and defraud the rest of the world to make money by making their company look better than it is. (We won’t even mention the fact that for more than a year while consumer confidence was high and the economy was still fine—not much growth, but stable, these idiots on the Finance channels screamed “Recession, recession!” 24 hours a day and somewhere along the line enough people hear it to believe it and WHAM! It’s called a self-fulfilling Prophecy look it up.) Anyway, the new fad this summer has grown out of the Enron/Tyco/WorldCom/Et al scandal meets reality TV. The voyeuristic coverage of the child abductions and shootings this summer was disgusting. You could not have the TV on for half and hour and not hear the same info 30 times.

I don’t know what you could do about any of this. I just can’t stand the media anymore. I don’t know what came first the media or the voyeuristic addiction to it that seams to have gripped most of American. I think that deep inside much of America is suffering an existential crisis and is trying to live vicariously through all the drama on TV and scripted drama just cannot compete with the news. If more people took up bungee jumping would all this still be a problem? Would CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News still have enough people willing to sit and drool over the next piece of “in-depth reporting” about everything and anything to support them?

So, I got my apartment. Just four blocks off of DuPont Circle. The apartment is a little funky on the layout, but c’est la vie. It comes with a nice size kitchen—a must since I love to cook. And a full size washer and dryer! Yea! I have to go up and get the keys, then begins the process of moving in.

The big issue with moving in is I have nothing. I sold everything I owned to pay off loans two years ago figureing I would get a nice job when I graduated. HA! Well, I have a good job but not so much spending money right now. So, it may take a few months to get stuff like a tv and nice sofa but I’ll deal with it.

So… J███████ and S██████… get ready for some D&D!