i'm so behind in posting for the week. i need to rant about my stressful apartment search as well as my anguish and embrassment at the way my country handles major crises and the needs of poor minorities.

i missed a protest of this local hate-fest, yesterday, unfortuantely. but i got to see jess briefly last night, which was nice. i've mostly been spending my weekends at home, hanging with the parents doing absolutely nothing because i'm so exhausted from attempts at apartment hunting after work on weeknights. we'll hopefully have a place in park slope or prospect heights, brooklyn within a week or two. cross your fingers. if you like me.

even though i've always had a lot of gripes with the clinton family, as the state of this country's elected leadership has sunken to new and newer lows over the past few years, and as i've read about bill clinton's work in stemming the aids crisis overseas and other work, my admiration for him has started to return, despite many of the decisions he's made that i oppose, most egregiously, his support for "free trade" capitalism at the expense of the rest of the world's welfare. as i walk past his foundation's headquarters every day on my way to and from work, i imagine that it might be a much more exciting and worthwhile place for me to be working. clearly much of his work is attempting to effect major change in global public health.

although i've disagreed with many of hillary's moves since she became my senator 4 and a half years ago, i think it would be really cool if she became president. although many of her goddamn liberal politicking drives me crazy, i do have to face the reality that nobody left of her is going to get elected to the highest office in the land, and of coures, she is a woman.

BUT i was extermely dismayed to learn that she's officially joined the leadership of the DLC. not that she was such a leftist before, as this stupid article seems to imply, but still. the DLC has the potential to suck every idealistic and populist bone out of her body, leaving a centrist shell infinitely indistinguishable form the GOP.

it's now 4 yrs since cornell and ithaca really became my home. i can descreetly remember the entire chronology of that day four years ago, 9/11/01, and how safe i felt tucked away up there amidst the large gothic buildings, the collective brilliance, picturesque hills and meadows, and the throngs of identical looking students. as i've mentioned earlier, i think that day really bonded our class together, as a group, because the place you can experience a tragedy like that and come through it together collectively, is truly home. although the only thing i'll likely be doing today in commemoration is posting on this blog and watching the reading of the names broadcast on tv, the fact that the four years since the 9/11 attacks coincides with the same four years since i began college, since i began my journey of joys and frustrations at cornell has some stronger meaning to me. i'm not sure what it quite is yet. i have a feeling that my journey and relationship to that place is not over and will continue at some point in the future.

as i read my first alumni magazine last night, it was actual more of a sad, heart-felt experience than anything else.although i spent the last 10 months or more complaining aboud so much and wanting to get out of there, last night what i experienced was a sadness at the speed with which those same four years passed and a recognition of all of the regrets i have, experiences passed up, moments extinguished, both trivial and not.

it seems like our country has more and more victimes with each passing year, and it's not only because i have come to experience a more complete political understanding of the world around me since i began four years ago as a freshman: first 9/11, the war in afghanistan, invasion of iraq, now katrina, continous violence in other locations intermingled, specifically israel and the occupied territories, and really every continent i can think of besides australia. i don't know. i feel like the past four years have only partially equipped me to deal with all of these global problems. i feel like it was an amazing start, an immersion in problems, solutions, nuance...but only a beginning. but there seems to be so much more i should have gleaned from that experience, and i can't help wondering if jacob lehman had been chosen a little earlier as university president and stayed a little longer, might cornell have made a bit more progress at advancing towards that goal of comprehensive global education?


may the memories of all the victims over the past four years, near and far, nameless and unnamed by the press be for blessings to guide us to a more just society and world.

i have so much stuff to bitch about and say about how shit's going down down south; maybe i'll write that later, but i just wanted to say--- i just went to lunch and i saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that said "hang out with your wang out" and now i can't get the phrase "rock out with your cock out" out of my head.

sim city 2000

according to CNN, they're following my lead and contining the real life city 2005 version of sim city 2000:

Widespread looting and random gunfire have been reported across the city. Police told CNN that groups of armed men roamed the streets overnight.

money and more money: being a real person sucks

issue number 1:
so i've basically had my heart set on moving to nyc the past few weeks/months. when i accepted this job, even though i didn't want to be in new york, i told myself it was only on the condition that i would not be living at home.

however, last week, i was reading this book i'm in the middle of, called hope's edge, which is an amazing book. technically the sequel to diet for a small planet, it deals a lot more with the relationships between food consumption, production and global justice movements. a section i was reading on the trains that mornign made me really excited about all these potential avenues for creativity in the future, all these exciting alternative development projects, and as usual my thoughts turned to thinking about how i could be doing that now and wondering why i'm wasting my time in this job that really doesn't excite me or make much progress beyond a few hundred folks in a very minute manner.

my rationale for the past few weeks every other time i've been wondering this is that i need to get a head start, start making some money, and then after either i've worked a bit or i've gotten a graduate degree, i can go off and do my own thing. but this morning i realized that if i'm going to live in the city, i'm really not going to be saving much, if at all, depending on what rent ends up being and the lifestyle i choose to lead. and so, it seems, that i'm sort of just wasting a whole year, becasue i know what i'll be doing the whole year, unless i change jobs, and although i'm making a decent amount of money, i'll just spending a boatload of it on rent and living in this psycho city, when there's so much more i could be doing if i was a less risk-averse person.

so i've definitely been having some doubts about actually moving to the city, although i can't see staying in the position i'm in for much longer either. and the problem is, that if i can't stand my job after a few months, i won't be able to move somewhere else and do something else unless i find a subletter. but i will likely be living with two good friends, which would be great, and i'm hoping to get involved in stuff and meet lots of nwe people. it's just that the majority of my awake time will be spent at work, and it seems like it will mostly be a waste. i suppose what i can do, if i do move, is to keep looking for cooler jobs in nyc and then if i get one, switch jobs while staying in the apt.

but what i don't understand is how i can get a recommendation if i'm looking surreptitiously and don't want them to know.

issue number 2:
i've received a lot of credit card offers in the mail and have been trying to decide between them which one to get, because i do need to get a new credit card to replace the one i currently have and need to cancel which is tied to an ithaca local bank. i had been vaguely thinking abotu the working assets credit card, because it could be a concerete lifestyle action on my part towards supporting progressive organizing. however, after i decided to research the card a bit, to make sure there was nothign sketchy about it, i discovered this whole issue people had been discussing online- apparently the credit line for working assets is through MBNA, a financial group that donates heavily to the republicans. while this was not something i had thought about previously, after reading it did seem relevant, causing me to have doubts about that card.

someone's comment on that board mentioned the Salmon Nation card, through the ShoreBank/Pacific, which is a local Northwest US bank also linked with community development in Chicago. So now I've been thinking about that card, but I can't decide what to do and would welcome any suggestions.

P.S. This post was intended for Friday Aug. 26 or earlier but I didn't finish writing it, so it's only being posted now. However, none of the above issues have yet been resolved so it is still relevant.