my hands smell like bleach. no, it's a good thing. so is eating left-over Thai food, which is next on the afternoon's agenda.

i dreamt that i got shot in the ass. we all made jokes about it. "ha, ha! sean got shot in the ass!" it wasn't that there was anything particularly funny about the jokes but when you've been shot in the ass, everything takes on new levels of mirth.

i sneezed more times on Saturday than the entirety of my life previous. really. and when the sneezing finally began to wind down, my head felt like it might actually explode. apparently, the sneezes were keeping the pressure down kind of like immunological safety valve.

the worst part is i had to miss Miss Yve's party. i tried three separate times to convince myself to put on a coat, get in the car, and show up for an hour. however, none of these efforts actually got me off of the couch. but it sounds like the party went off just fine without us.

i slept nearly 12 hours that night and woke up feeling better; sneeze-less at least. Sunday sort of came and went. maybe because i'd slept in much later than i usually do, i looked up expecting it to be noon and it was 4:00p. sure was pretty in the City, though. sunshine and 70.

in the past 24 hours the following good things have happen to me:

1. received a free license code for a piece of HTPC (home theater PC) software i'd beta tested. (value = $40)
2. received a free copy of Microsoft Money 2005, which i also beta tested. (value = $80)
3. re-measured the living room and dining room and found them to be a lot less square footage than i'd estimated, making putting in hardwood floors a lot more affordable than i'd thought. (value = $3,000-4,000)
4. walked through an intersection near my house which used to have stop signs in only one direction and about which i'd written a letter requesting stop signs in the other direction, and found that they had installed new stop signs! (value = life and death)
5. woke up feeling well rested and invigorated after a week of feeling dead on my feet, depressed, and ready to quit my job. (value = immeasurable)

what i find most disturbing is that we're able to go to war but we're unable to show its results on CNN. we see battle plans drawn out in attractive red and blue graphics. "the 4th Battalion will sweep into the city from the south [large well designed, almost beautiful, arrow sweeps across the map] and quell the insurgency." but we can't show a soldier shoot another human being at close range.

what few people realize is how many people will die, and brutally so, in a quelled insurgency or a liberation or an Operation Infinite Freedom. innocents, children, grandmothers, friends and neighbors, and, yes, people who took up arms. we don't seem to ever talk about that part of war. which is really too bad because unlike what the makers of war tell us, that's really what war is about.

was thinking about this dialog from On the Waterfront yesterday. no reason really.

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i stayed up until 6:00am last night rearranging my music files. now i'm too tired to go out which is fine except that i'm totally bored. i've read all the forums to death and my fingers are tired of clicking. maybe i'll go read Moneyball. mm, a book about baseball. really exercising the intellect lately, aren't we, Sean?

oh, and i decided to sell my car. it's a done deal. it'll just be me and the bus. and my motorcycle. and a broken down Vespa. and the car share thing, of course. and maybe some days i'll rent a convertible and drive around playing techno really loud to make me feel better about my penis size. but that's it.

i think i'm going to give up my car.

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someone responded to my post about the Peterson verdict pictures that people were expressing relief because "one more murderous freakazoid has been taken off the streets."

the glee on those faces doesn't strike me as relief. and being relieved that a "murderous freakazoid" is off the streets is a little silly. the guy killed his wife. (probably.) he's not going door to door with an axe and a garbage bag. it's not like had he not been convicted that people would have been walking around in fear of their lives, worried that, oh my god, Scott Peterson could be around any corner. naw, i don't see the jubilation as relief so much as celebration of victory.

from sfgate.com...

Federal judges are jeopardizing national security by issuing rulings contradictory to President Bush's decisions on America's obligations under international treaties and agreements, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Friday.

In his first remarks since his resignation was announced Tuesday, Ashcroft forcefully denounced what he called "a profoundly disturbing trend" among some judges to interfere in the president's constitutional authority to make decisions during war.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers group.

i find the reactions in this picture a little disturbing. how can you get that excited and happy about someone being convicted of a grisly murder? is it the joy of vengeance or have they just lost touch with the humanity of the situation? this ain't a ballgame, folks. this is life and death. mostly the latter.

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blooms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

-- A. Bartlett Giamatti

on a positive note, huge congratulations to Barack Obama of Illinois for being elected to the Senate, the first black man to become senator since 1979. he will become only the fifth black senator in history, the most recent being Carol Moseley-Braun, also from Illinois.

let's all give thanks for the tiny steps forward we make.

i honestly thought he would have made a good president. he wasn't just the lesser of two evils, an "anything is better than..." choice. he was intelligent, well-spoken, articulated complex ideas concisely without dumbing them down to black-and-white simplicity, and while he wasn't the most progressive politician (far from it) or one who was defined by intense convictions, his choices had feeling and intellect. head and heart. i really would have liked him as our president. i wish you'd gotten to know him better, America.

i'm talking about him as though he were dead. what a shame.

i voted. so should you.

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