My school’s book club’s selection this month is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve read by Vonnegut, and he’s one of the authors I always mean to read more of. Thus, I was looking forward to this book. And it did not disappoint.

These were a few passages that struck me as I was reading, which I will post for your enjoyment.

This was written from Vonnegut’s point of view:

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, “You know - you never wrote a story with a villain in it.”

I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.

I never realized it until I read that, but the lack of villainy is one of the things I like about his books. They’re not black and white good vs. evil stories. They’re just about people. And I’m all about people being just people.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

***

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, seperating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

I think that this is one of the best passages I have ever read. It’s where the anti-war message of the book struck me most heavily. The images of the Germans healing the American planes, and of the bombs being dismantled and made safe, are powerful because they feel so happy and kind. I feel like that’s how life should be. It makes the reality seem more barbaric and stupid and useless by contrast.

My modem is broken! So no Internet for me until Friday. Sorry, I will be unreachable until then.

I guess my DSL likes to play dead. Back online, but it could fail again.

The picture frame that contains my most recent school picture also houses every one of my old pictures, stretching all the way back to kindergarten. Every year, when a new picture comes in, my family lays them all out in order on the table and looks them over. One of the most interesting things to see is the evolution of my hair. When I was young, it was bone-straight and brown. Over the years, it gradually reddened and waved, then frizzed, then started curling.

What I ended up with was a large amount of frizzy, sort of curly hair that I didn’t really know what to do with. So I put it back in a ponytail most of the time and didn’t think much about it, because my appearence doesn’t have a lot to do with how I feel about myself. I liked my hair, but I wished it would curl more and frizz less so that I could let it dry from a shower without constraining it in some way and then being tied to that style until my next shower. I’ve gone through years without being able to wear my hair down.

Then the other day I got this book that told me to stop using shampoo, and scrunch a little with gel.

And my hair started curling more than it was frizzing. And now I can wear it down. And it’s awesome.

I still have tons of hair, and it still looks kind of weird because there’s so much of it, but I like it. It’s so freeing, and I love how it looks. A lot of people probably won’t, but I don’t really care. I have hair ribbons, and they don’t. So there.

I never have any idea what to write on my About page, so this time I’m trying something different. Wordpress 1.5 lets me run my additional pages as part of my blog, with comments and everything. I’m leaving comments open on the About page so that people can ask me questions. I’ll answer virtually anything. Then you can only get the information about me that you want, without any of the annoying stuff I would put in because I don’t know any better. I love answering questions (can I be a professional interviewee?), and you know you have something you’ve been dying to ask me. With this system, everyone wins!

So I’d appreciate it if you would go to the About page and do your part. Your country needs you, and so do I.

I am currently updating the site and setting up the new design. Please excuse the temporary mess and breakage.

Edit @ 1:06 AM: Am going to bed. Will finish tomorrow. Site has basic functionality.

Edit @ 11:30 PM the next night: Functionality complete, except for the Old Layouts page. That can wait. Also, not everything is formatted as it should be. Some of the static pages are funny-looking.

One of the reasons our two-party system is limiting is that it assumes everyone is either socially and financially conservative, or socially and finacially liberal.

What about the socialists who hate gays? What about the big business moguls who are vehemently pro-choice? Why do they have to choose?

Personally, I’m about as liberal as you can get socially, but I’m still on the fence financially. I lean strongly toward the Democratic system, but I can’t say for sure how I feel because I’m not a real member of the country’s financial community. I don’t pay taxes, I’m young enough that social security isn’t even on the radar, and I’ve never had to support myself. Maybe after I get older money will become much more important to me, and I’ll be willing to give up civil rights in favor of lower taxes. HA!

When I was younger I was always confused when people said that the Republican party was for small government. In my experience, they were the ones who were always trying to censor people and legislate morality. That seemed pretty invasive to me. Then someone said the following to me, and it made more sense:

The Republicans won’t touch your money, but they want you to trust them with your soul. The Democrats will take your money and run, but they’ll let you do whatever the hell you want with your soul.

I’d rather be in charge of my soul than my money.

All of this is tongue-half-in-cheek idle speculation. Not to be taken too seriously.

Tonight I’m going to try to upgrade to Wordpress 1.5. Because I’m also going to try to implement a new design (soon, if not now), the site might be pretty weird over the next few days. Bear with me for a while.

…

Okay, fifteen minutes later, everything went beautifully. I think 1.5 is going to be great. It shipped with this clean, beatiful, technologically-advanced theme that I could never come close to. But it won’t stick around for more than a few days, because I would feel really weird using someone else’s design when I can do my own. Plus, everyone else has one just like this, and it’s kind of plain-looking. So over the next few days, as I get the hang of the new template system, my more cluttered, much less stunning layout will take over. Appreciate Kubrick while it lasts.

Also, my static pages (books, about, etc) will be strange while Kubrick is here.

IE7 is coming.

I hope that Firefox has enough of a loyal base that it won’t matter too much. I think it does. I know a lot of people who have had bad experiences with IE, and would never switch back.

Most of me wants IE7 to be terrible so that as few people use it as possible, but part of me is thinking about how much easier my life would be if it had improved and standardized CSS support.

And you know what? Even if it’s “better” (however you want to define that) than Firefox, I won’t use it. Because I believe in what the Mozilla Foundation is doing, and I think it’s noble and good. It’s something I can get behind. Microsoft just wants to make money. It’s a matter of principle, however foolish that might be in this situation.

Sometimes I feel like my life is a constant struggle between practicality and idealism. It seems like everyone else favors one thing or the other, but I’m constantly embroiled in mental battles between the two. I’ve been trying and trying to write something long and thoughtful about this, but it’s so hard to think of examples.

Meet Margaret Spelling, new director of the Education Department. Spelling has told PBS - which produces and airs much of America’s children’s programming - not to air an episode of Postcards from Buster in which Buster the bunny visits Vermont to learn about how to make maple syrup, and meets a child whose parents are a lesbian couple. “Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in the episode,” she said. And furthermore, “Congress’s and the department’s purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television.”

Read the full article at Democratic Underground.

Things like this make me so, so afraid.

I don’t want to raise children in a world that is afraid to show them gay couples on TV. I don’t want to have to tell them, over and over, that they have to be that much more tolerant and loving than the rest of the world. I want my children to look at same sex marriage the way I look at marriages between different ethnic groups. I don’t want them to grow up in a world full of hate, but I know they will. Society always needs a group to mock and make controversial legislation about.