righteous moustache
I’ve got the monday night football game on. Aarti is asleep. the Redskins offense is flailing around in a pile of suck, and I keep waiting for them to do something — anything — to show a little life, and … and, as I type, they move the ball 30 yards on two plays. Jason Campbell isn’t that bad. say what you will, but he doesn’t seem to be a shitty quarterback. he’s just throwing to Santana Moss and Antwaan Randel El, and there’s nobody blocking for him. which is they key thing here. the line, which has suffered injuries, is paper-thin, and he’s … jesus. they just fumbled the snap on 4th down on the goal line.
the Washington offense is awful, and makes it easy to forget the D, that plays pretty well considering the fact that they’re always on the field. anyway. the DC media is gonna go nuts tomorrow.
so I’ve been listening to two songs a lot recently. I was thinking about saying I’ve been listening to three, because three seems like a more appropriate number for some reason, but that’s bullshit. I couldn’t even think of a good one. but it probably ‘mother’s dead’ as sung by Elmo Williams.
but anyway. the two songs are:
‘going out west’ by Tom Waits, and
‘the guns of brixton’ by the Clash.
both of these songs, are quite … masculine. Waits sounds like he gargles whiskey and paint thinner, and the Clash suggest going out shooting with the cops. I listen to these songs as I drive to work. I think about these songs when I sit at my cubicle, the one they’re moving me from in a few weeks. and I almost wish I had a record and worked in a machine shop, or something. yes. this is stupid, and condescending. I understand.
I applied to two jobs this weekend, and spent three hours today studying for the GRE. I did this at the public library. when I was done, I putzed around in its catalog. I like the library. I appreciate it. this is thanks to mom, who is library crazy. it rubbed off on Mar more, I think. she’s gonna be a librarian, after all.
so I picked up ‘Nickel and Dimed’, which you may or may not have heard of. a woman, who works a series of awful jobs in order to describe how much it sucks to live be working poor in this country. the more I think about this kind of reporting, the more my skepticism grows — of the writer, not of the opinion she (on the outset) appears to be defending. you can’t really say you’ve experienced minimum wage poverty until you’ve really lived it, not as an experiment you undertake during your fucking sabbatical. but even with that said, I’m willing to give the book the benefit of the doubt. I will pick it up, and give it a shot.
what my problem is: I never read half of what I come home with from the library. I don’t know why, I really should. every time I turn on the television, I feel bad about it. about neglecting the pile of books that I slowly chip away at. so I think, that in the next life (or apartment), I will not have cable. nothing but bullshit on it anyway. like, for instance, right now ‘Resident Evil’ is on. because it’s the week before Halloween, they’re showing Resident goddamn Evil. which is an unbelievable shovelful of bullshit. there are hundreds of scary movies out there, and not all of them are expensive to get the rights to, and the best cable can come up with is a mediocre video game flick.
you should be ashamed of yourself, cable. you could have played something worthwhile.
like, for instance, ‘Alien.’ the first one.
it’s like the anti-Star Wars. ‘Alien’ came out in when, ’79? and I think ‘A New Hope’ was only a few years before that. so when people thought of science fiction, they probably thought of the space opera tip. giant muppets and magic knights and shit like that, which rule and are loads of fun. but ‘Alien’ is not like that at all.
it’s dark, and dingy, and the only dozen-or-so people in it hate their goddamn jobs, and live in a poorly-lit hell of a cavern of a ship. it sucks, they want to go home, and they don’t want to have any kind of close encounter, which is what they get, in a gruesome way. ‘Alien’ is Star Wars where the wookiee instead looks like a dragon and eats you.
anyway, I bring up ‘Alien’ because I’ve got it coming on Netflix. Aarti has not seen this, and I’ve been talking about scary movies all damn week since plans to go see ‘Paranormal Activity’ fell through. I got to feed the scary movie beast. because I, as you can see, am a hopeless romantic.
and, to close: everyone’s favorite semi-crooked half-assing-it congressman from northwest Indiana is really representing the Region well, giving it some good publicity. he even made the front page of the Washington Post yesterday morning! he’s making moves. getting shit done. drawing everyone’s attention, for all of the right reasons.
I disagree with you over the ‘Nickel and Dimed’ book. I got a little tired of it by the end because it kept on going over the same situations over and over, but I did appreciate the reporter’s willingness to at least try and put herself in a situation where she can better understand just how difficult it is to live that life.
I would much rather have reporters do things like this than to stay on the complete outside, get a few testimonials, and then pretend they completely understand the situation they are reporting on. Sometimes you need complete objectivity and going something like this can obviously cloud judgments, but it would be hard to argue that a complete lack of knowledge and understanding of an issue would strengthen your ability to report it. Sometimes facts and figures aren’t enough.
Reporters gloss over the jarring poverty numbers all the time, maybe send a camera crew out and report on how difficult it is for the uneducated and unlucky. But actually getting a taste of poverty, albeit for a short time, can open you up to experiences you never would have had if you didn’t do it.
When you are actually forced to eat crap food because that’s the only thing you can afford, and work ridiculous long hours for little pay, even for a short while, it gives you a better understanding on what the people who have to do it day in and day out must go through. It might not be effective for some or most stories, but I do not see any significant downside to it.
Maybe this type of reporting tactic can be construed as condescending in some degrees, but I think a lot of reporting would benefit from a little more firsthand experience.