Dichotomy

I always told myself I'd never blog about politics, but here I go. Upon hearing that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both announced their intent to run for the Democratic nomination, my first reaction was to wonder if the Democrats would suffer for it. As much as I hope it's not true, I really worry that there are people--potentially lots of people--who are fed up enough with the status quo to vote Democrat, until they're confronted with the choice of aiming to put either a black man with a foreign-sounding name or a woman in the White House. I don't think it's too far out there to assume that some people in this country will vote Republican just so that they don't have to vote for someone biracial or female. I've personally witnessed a sort of casual racism even among people in my somewhat distant family, such as someone saying he was disappointed that his cardiac nurse had the same birthday as his niece, because even though the nurse was really sweet, he didn't want his niece to have the same birthday as a black woman. In a way, this sort of seemingly-innocuous, easy-as-breathing bigotry is more disconcerting than outright nutter-style polemics, because it makes me wonder how many otherwise nice, normal people harbor that kind of back-asswards thinking. It's all sort of depressing, even though I'm really excited about a woman vying for the Presidential nomination and the prospect of Obama in the running.



And now for something completely shallow!

Several somethings, actually.

1. true love

I got this shirt at Old Navy last night, and wore it to work today. It's true love, for reals, yo.



When I tried to find a picture of the shirt, I found out that it comes in green as well, but--tragically--my size is no longer available online. I am weeping for the green shirt awesomeness that will never come to pass.




2. the most amusing $4 I ever spent?

While at the mall with the bibliophile last night, I also spent $4 on this Page-a-Day calendar:


I figure it'll be immensely useful when I'm desperate for blog content. And since I'm 20 days behind, I get to be greedy and go through a lot of pages before I have to start being patient and taking one page at a time.

Some highlights so far:

• January 5--Virtual Lite Brite
  
  
• January 9--Mail Art ("To test the limits of the post office, the mischief makers at this site threw all sorts of unboxed objects (with mailing labels and stamps directly attached) into the mail to see if they would reach their destinations.")
  
  
• January 11--The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest ("Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.")

As a bonus, the calendar included a code for a free page-a-day email calendar, so I signed up for the Book Lovers one. Then, with possible blog fodder in mind, I dug out the code from MB's Wine Lover's Calendar and signed up for the Fact or Crap daily calendar. Stay tuned for random trivia!