I feel out of sorts tonight. I'm in love with Google.

Ryan is out of town, visiting his uncle in Omaha, so I'm alone for the weekend. It's a really bizarre feeling; not quite lonely, but yearning perhaps? Wistful? I know he's out there, not that far away (nothing a couple hours worth of driving couldn't fix), but it's still weird to have to go to bed by myself. I haven't done that in a while, at least not without knowing that he would be home soon to crawl in bed beside me and press his butt against mine (we've always slept butt-to-butt, don't ask me why). I don't know if I'll be able to sleep without the backgroup snoring noise.

the phrase "new-fangled" is now old-fashioned.

A safer place

I think the thing I really enjoy most about the recent bombing in Pakistan is all the statements about how some people "regret that civilians were killed, but we have to do what we can to take out high-ranking Al Queda members." The apparently logical consequence being that if we don't "take out" the Al Queda members, then they will cause further attacks which will kill civilians. So in other words, we have to kill civilians in order to keep other people from killing civilians.

This whole situation just raises so many questions for me. Would it have been okay to kill 18 innocent people if they had been Americans? What if they were British? How many people is it okay to kill if it means you take out an Al Queda member? What if you think that the person was a member of Al Queda, but it turns out you were mistaken? What if the Pakistani government begins bombing - very specifically, so that they only kill the target and maybe a handful of other people who were in the area at the time - high-ranking member of the CIA, who after all have been responsible for the deaths of innocent Pakistanis? What's ok? How many innocent people is it okay to kill in order to make the world a safer place? And who is the world then safe for?

Missing Motzart

I just finished watching the AKC/ Eukanuba National Championship (dog show), and the Alaskan Malamute won Best in Show. And I know it's been more than a year and a half since Motzart died, but for a minute I forgot, and I wanted to go hug him and tell him that he was practically a winner (he was a Great Dane/ Malamute/ Akita mix, and an incredible dog). I miss the bejeezus out of him.

sweet dreams

I've had dreams about murder the past two nights in a row. I'm not sure if that means anything.
The first dream was one I think I had before - it seemed familiar while I was dreaming it, and I'm not sure if it was really lucid dreaming (I don't think I really knew I was dreaming at the time) I nonetheless knew how everything was going to end. Is there such a thing as foreshadowing, precognition in your sleep? This dream had more of a wistful feel than a horrified one, as the people (a group of girls of which I may or may not have been a part) who were murdered were able to "come back" once or twice, in some form not quite ghostly but certainly no longer alive. The most poignant part was when one of the last girls (played by Katherine Moennig in my dream) to be killed came back, and was visiting her mother - the girl no longer lived at home, and for some reason was prone to long absences, and so her mother didn't know that she was dead. She thought her daughter was just dropping in for a visit, and at the end of their time together, the girl had to tell her mother to get someone to check her apartment - not to do it by herself.

The dream I had last night is less clear in my mind, more chaotic and confused. It was all about accidents, and mistaken identity, and good guys who have to do something bad, or think that they have to, to protect themselves. It ended with the "main character" forcing the ostensible "bad guys" into some sort of acid swamp where they would die a horrible death, leaving behind no bodies and no evidence. At the very last moment, however, something/ someone intervened, saving the good guy from becoming a murderer, but also catching him in the act of becoming a bad guy.

Op-ed

I was listening to NPR this afternoon, where they were discussing the Alito confirmation hearings, and one of the guests was discussing Alito's record in terms of abortion rights. Now, I didn't hear the guest's introduction, so I don't know if he was speaking form a conservative or a liberal standpoint, but he pointed out, as a positive thing, that Alito is not the type to make a radical attack on Roe v. Wade, but instead he favors minor, incremental changes that makes it easier for states to regulate abortions.
That seems like a bad thing to me.
Big, radical attacks on Roe v. Wade are easy to spot and fairly easy to defend against. I really don't believe that there is a huge segment of the population wanting to reverse the past 30 years, to set women's rights back more than three decades. But tiny, incremental changes in law? That barely deal with abortions themselves and focus instead on allowing states to slowly hack away at a woman's reproductive rights? People today are so busy that even those who truly care and actively want to protect their rights can be hard-pressed to notice things like that. I'm a lot more worried about Alito eroding rights over the course of decades than I am about some random psycho campaigning on a "Don't Kill Babies" platform.

Inaugural post.

I need to write more.