“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

…Aldous Huxley. I wish I had a first name like “Aldous”. I think, if you’ve got a name like that, you can pretty much rest assured that you’re meant to be a writer, or at least something that involves getting your name in print a lot.

I wish I could say that I’m too skeptical and cool to believe in the power of names — and mostly, yes — but I did name my daughter the most librarian-esque thing I could come up with. She was beautiful and outgoing from day one, and my first thought was, “Oh no you don’t, cheerleader genes. Wherever the heck you came from, get thee back! This kid will have a doctorate, damn you!”

…Oo, can’t type the word “doctorate” — big mistake. Grad school, it turns out, learned the art of looming from Godzilla; and it’s been freaking me out with the gain on eleven, ugh. In short, I can’t figure out what to apply for other than my top choice, the near-impossible bet. It doesn’t help that, for my undergrad, that’s all I applied for (twice, both when I first went and when I went back), and both times, I got in. This is different — this is my marginally-good GPA up against a 4% acceptance rate, and it would be stupid to count on it. But nothing else sounds even a little good.

Argh, okay, enough — if I tear any more hair out than I tore yesterday, I’m going to mess up my new, Torchwood-imitating haircut.

Here, have some awesomeness. (That is, all my open tabs minus the GRE study examples, which I would love to have you do instead of me, but yeah, no chance, right? …Not even the math? Please??)

First, are you interested in the train wreck that is the current American economy? I work in the thick of it, and my family is pretty political and businessy, so it’s almost all I hear about. But wow, is it a tangled mess, and so far in all my reading and talking, no-one’s made better, clearer sense of it than Douglas Rushkoff does in this article. This is easy language, wonderfully written, and dead-on accurate; plus, it doesn’t stop and “doom doom doom”, but actually gets into what average people can do to protect themselves and their loved ones from the inevitable fallout. FANTASTIC stuff. My best find this week!

Secondly, you grok BookTV? It’s pretty awesome — C-SPAN does these interviews with top nonfiction authors (so no J.K. Rowling, thank the gods…the woman interviews like the block of wood from the Monty Python skit!). They’re spectacularly interesting, really. This one that I’m so hot on now is with Matt Taibbi — the Rolling Stone editor who did the piece I posted recently called “Jesus Made Me Puke”, about the fundie weekend-warrior camps. He’s written a great political book about the war &etc as well, and talks about it here. A thoroughly useful way to waste ten minutes, if you ask me.

Last up…Wikileaks will soak into your brain and pickle it with wisdom! Seriously though, it gives me a tad more faith in humanity, that this website exists. But they do know how to drop bombs* now and again, whew. The one from last week is a eyelid-stretcher: a 200+ page US military counterinsurgency manual, called “Foreign Internal Defense Tactics and Procedures for Special Forces”. (The good news is, you can just read the wikileaks article, instead of plowing through that monster!) It may sound bland, but what this is is the US government’s approved strategy for handling situations like Iraq — strategies which were actually mostly developed in Latin America — and it will scare the camoflage pants off you. The general idea is, go in where some tyrannical government that’s of strategic importance to us is under threat by a rebellion (exactly like the one that formed this country, yeah), help train and arm the paramilitary forces keeping the rebels down, assist with censorship, press control, and putting restrictions on labor unions & political parties…help the tyrants conduct warrantless searches, detain people without charging them, and conceal human rights abuses from journalists.

And we’ve been doing this, systematically, around the world, for many decades now. And since it’s confirmed military policy, we’re almost certainly doing it in Iraq. Nice.

Two hundred years ago, this was a basically idealistic government, a government that didn’t want to become involved in the world wars because it was afraid of becoming too centralized, too militarized, too wrapped up in appeasing allies and allying with shady people abroad, to successfully protect its fragile democracy at home. Jefferson was a vocal worryer that any foreign wars we conducted that weren’t absolutely unavoidable (he would have agreed that the world wars were, by the way, but certainly not Iraq, Vietnam, Haiti, Hawaii, etc.) would lead to a military economy that was stuck needing more and more foreign conflicts to support itself, and had a vested interest in eroding American civil rights as a way to open up the market for more militarization.

Now we find this, the document that is essentially the missing piece of the Doom Puzzle that the Patriot Act is one of the corners of…not only are we eroding our own rights at home, but we’re actively suppressing human rights in other countries as a way to further our interests.

As I get older, I’m continually flabbergasted as I see more clearly my position as a screamer on a sinking boat, a writer in a dying empire — or at least a dying democracy.

So weird. It leaves you thinking, “Is there something I should be doing about this? Besides preparing for the worst?”

Anyway. Wow, it says something that my “happy distraction thoughts” have become ones of collapse and chaos. THAT’s when you know you’re in college!!

*word to your moms