Intermittence

I’m just beside myself tonight.

1. It’s 9:10 PM on Tuesday, November 8. So far, 35% of precincts in the state have reported results, and 77% of voters have chosen to pass Proposition 2, which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman. I’m surrounded by idiots.

2. The Kansas Education Board has chosen to incorporate so-called “Intelligent Design” into its curriculum. Further, it has redefined science itself, stating that “it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena”. We were behind the rest of the world educationally before this. I can’t wait to see how far behind we will be ten years from now.

Disgusted? Me, too.

Donnell and I watched The Last Samurai on Sunday. (It was her first time and my second.) It’s a good movie on a few different levels, not the least of which was that actual acting takes place.

Twice during the movie (the first when the undertrained Japanese soldiers see the samurai emerging from the mist, and the second near the end of the movie as the samurai are fighting the much better-prepared soldiers) I found myself struck by the sheer visual presence of the samurai, with their armor and helmets. They are gods of war, indomitable and ferocious. Watching, I am filled with a visceral desire to be like them…to simultaneously give in to and be the master of physical and emotional force.

The first line of Pearl Jam’s song Wish List goes:

I wish I was a neutron bomb—for once, I could go off

This resonates with me. I understand it, and secretly hope that I will go off one day, thus validating the animal instincts that lay repressed in my mind, blanketed beneath thousands of years of programming.

Then, I am confronted by the fact that I am softer than that, that I am vulnerable…

...and I wouldn’t really have it any other way.