r.sam: a notebook

“I think people of different backgrounds have different issues that they find to be the most compelling, and interesting. So I’m asked about social issues as well as foreign policy issues and economic issues. And, of course I’ll describe my views on those issues to people that have interest. You know, I’ll do my very best to connect with the American people on the issues that they care most about. What I speak about day to day in some respects reflects what I’m being asked about. And so those issues, by virtue of the President’s change of view on this topic has become more current today. How important it is to the people a few months from now, time will tell. But my positions are, I think, out there for people to see and hopefully I will attract the kind of support that I need to be successful in November.”

- Mitt Romney on the importance of gay-marriage issue. 

I thought Obama’s endorsement of gay-marriage was a bad enough exercise in timid political rhetoric in the face of a difficult, polarizing issue. But here, Romney literally says nothing. Nothing except that he’s such a transparently vacuous candidate, that he’s totally willing to admit “The opinions I put out there are mainly to ‘attract the kind of support that I need to be successful in November.’”

good job GOP

10/15/11

It is the crazy ones. The crazy ones who know what they’re doing but only b/c they feel like they have to say they know. They’re just crazy enough to believe what they’re doing will actually work, will actually be whatever It is supposed to be.

It’s the crazy ones who wear a massive mauve bowler with a red piegeon feather in the band getting off the train at the Fairfield stop. The tallish girl with a long mossy dragon tattoo down her whole arm and a few precise makeup accents around the eye that tell you she doesn’t mind working the counter at Target because she’s got something bigger coming –even if she doesn’t. The crazy ones who wear maybe too many patterns. The crazy ones who wear nothing more notable than a ruby heirloom ring on a single average-length finger, but has traveled and drank through parts of the Balkans you weren’t sure still existed or could pronounce (she couldn’t either), all without spending hardly anything.     

The crazy ones who aren’t saying “LOOK AT ME!,” but “Look, I’m going to be me. We often forget that the reason we are looking or listening is b/c we’re curious.

Kerouac said it; Jobs said it; It’s not original at all.  

It’s totally self-serving. But that’s the point. We wish everybody was crazy enough, confident enough to care for the self and whatever that means for you. Because once you accept and love the crazy unfinished uncertain self that you are, it’s a lot harder to hate anyone else.