Barack Obama is My Hero

Ugh, when I restarted this blog after the summer vacation my intent was to post roughly twice a week. I haven't quite met that goal, and frankly I blame the football season. Every Sunday I stay up until 2 am to finish watching all the "afternoon" games and then Monday I'm a train wreck having to go to work on about 5 hours of sleep. After Tuesday it's time to start my weekly fantasy football notes for my "main" league; those suck up two solid days of writing effort and can wear me out. After that, I'm spent on writing, and so this place remains empty. (Oh, also on a side note, I'm looking for a job - but that's much less important than weekly fantasy football notes.) So that's the quick synopsis.

Today is Monday, and again I'm tired, this time after watching the Steelers stave off the Chargers late last night, but I'm also determined to slap out a freaking post. I've been wanting to post about the election results ever since the magical day itself but haven't found the time. Now we're two weeks status post election and it already seems like ancient history, which is too bad in some ways. I wish I'd touched on it back during the actual week of the election, but oh well. I'm posting some quick thoughts now just so I can look back in a few years and remember how damn fired up I was.

Barack Obama won the election two Tuesdays ago and it's by far the most fired up I've ever been after any election. For a week straight, I watched as the world celebrated his win. What a telling thing, to watch the entire world go absolutely apeshit for his victory. Think that happened in 2004? Think everyone's had enough of Bush? (Frankly, the whole scene reminded me of the end of Return of the Jedi, when the Emperor's just been defeated and the second Death Star destroyed, and everyone around the universe is celebrating. There's happy music playing, people are dancing, and some Ewoks are playing drums on neo-con skulls.)

It was Wednesday morning here when the results were in. Gwen had woken up in the middle of the night to check the results so she had already told me in some sleep-addled fog. But after waking up officially and looking at the screens, and then hearing it on the radio while I drove in, it became real - and awesome. I had to get up at the crack of dawn that Wednesday to do an Army weigh-in. After the weigh in at 6 am, I killed time in the darkened internal medicine waiting room watching the TV normally seen by our patients as they wait for appointments. I just flipped around the channels watching result after result and I just had a huge grin on my face.

The results were pouring in and there were cutaways to scenes around the country, and the world for that matter, of people just going nuts. I wanted to be out there with them. I was totally fired up. And I don't normally care too much about politics. But suddenly I just was like Stan's dad on South Park in their post-election show (those guys schooled me good with that one).

That whole day and the rest of the week I was just beaming. It was like the Giants had just won that amazing Super Bowl again - that's how I felt. (Though not quite THAT good. Come on, this is the fate of the free world - but that's football. Actually, the parallel there is eerie. I watched that Giants Super Bowl hoping for a win, desperately hoping, but bracing for the loss. Same thing with the election. I was ready to be let down - again. And then - I wasn't. And I went nuts.) Driving in my car the whole next week, I'd just think about the election result and pump my fist in celebration. I loved it. I must have listened to "You Got the Touch" on my Transformers Soundtrack twenty times, making up mental montages of Barack Obama smiling and waving. For a few days I'm pretty sure I became an Obama groupie.

On Saturday after the election I was at work and took a break to wolf down a salad. I sat at my work computer and watched his full acceptance speech and I was downright emotional, nodding silently (salad spilling down my white coat), bordering on tearful. Actually, in retrospect, it was a little ridiculous. But that's how much it affected me. Craziness.

The guy came out, calm and collected, stammer-free and delivered a knockout speech. Best of all, his thoughts were coherent, his sentence structure solid, and he even used some compound words! Mostly, I just thought he sounded very presidential. Man it will be nice to have that back, I thought. I pumped my fist a few more times.

Now a few weeks later things have started to settle down again. All eyes are on Obama and he has a huge task facing him. I have no idea how things will turn out, no idea how effective a president he'll be, and over time now my euphoria is fading back into reality and I'm slowly reverting back to my politically apathetic self. I have other things on my mind. But that week was pretty cool, in retrospect. Hopefully my excitement will be justified and my hopes will ring true and it'll carry over for four years of generalized improvement in America. Regardless, at the very worst, it was nice to have some hope forcefully rekindled in our great nation.

Quick, somebody hand me a flag. After the last eight years, I finally feel like waving it again.

"I wanna be an American Idiot"

Today is election day, which is something of a relief. Not necessarily because we're electing a new president, but more importantly because we will be ending the non-stop campaign coverage which has decimated our lives over the past three, no wait six, no wait twelve, no weight eighteen months, like a series of prolonged carpet bombings. After an hour with any news channel, I find myself wandering, disheveled and emotionally battered, not to mention hoarding canned goods and bottled water.

It's pretty disheartening to see what American Elections have become, and the massive amount of money poured into the campaign machines. It's possibly even more disheartening to watch the news media's coverage of it all, with the not-so-subtle leanings of the different channels to the blatant fear-mongering to the anything-for-ratings style presentations of "facts".

The funny thing is I don't even watch TV on a regular basis (other than football). Everything I just complained about basically comes from the last many months of me walking back and forth past our waiting room at work, which features a large TV often tuned to said coverage. I'll catch a minute here or a minute there, shake my head, and go on about my day.

(The only upside to all this election madness is the wonderful, wonderful Daily Show with the funniest man alive today in my opinion, Jon Stewart. He has succeeded in making a mockery of the news (and especially the election news) on every level, and I for one love him for it.)

Frankly, I get pretty tired of talking about politics, so I don't do it that much other than cracking jokes with people who I know think like me. In terms of the spectrum, I'm pretty liberal, but actually right on the border between liberal and libertarian. Which means that socially I'm almost a pure liberal, but economically I can go either way depending on the day of the week or my mood, but I usually end up somewhere in the middle.






In many ways, I'm still in disbelief over the past eight years of American "leadership". For one, the 2000 election of Bush over Gore was one of the shadiest things I've ever seen in national politics; honestly I think it was worse than Watergate, because at least we know what happened with Watergate. In the case of the 2000 election and the Florida debacle, we don't even know what really happened. Counts, recounts, Jeb Bush. All I do know is that the whole thing seemed ridiculously shady and yet no one talks about it or has forgotten about it. I still don't think Bush was actually elected then, but here we are. No use crying over spilled milk I guess.

What's worse though is the fact that the US actually reelected Bush in 2004. I'm going to type that again. The US actually reelected George W. Bush in 2004. This is about as baffling as it gets for me. About 50% of people said "Hey, this guy ain't bad - I'm voting for him!" I'm still completely stunned by this when I really stop to think about it. To be honest, though, I don't stop and think about it too much, because when I do, I get upset and bitter. (See next paragraph.)

As far I'm concerned, any country where 50% of the people reelected "W" probably deserve whatever is coming to them. A horrible war or two, massive debt, a housing collapse, the ire of the rest of the world, repealed civil rights, economic disaster - nothing is too horrible to wish on them. Oh wait, it's all already here. Strong work America! Eight years in the toilet. At least we have a lot of empty platitudes involving the word "Freedom" and how much we love it. It sure has been fun!

(Whoops, I stopped and thought about it. See? Bitter.)

Anyway, about two weeks ago I cast my absentee Texas ballot (for Obama, shock), and so I guess did my job as a citizen. (Though there is almost no point to someone with my views voting in a state like Texas.) As of right now the polls say Obama will win, so that's good for me.

Either way, everyone's somewhat of a winner when a certain somebody steps down from office in January. I think we can all agree on that.

My Summer Vacation, by Mike S.

Today was my first day off since the 13th of October, and I promised myself I would do two things. One was work out, the other was write a blog post. And once I hit "publish post", it looks like I will have managed to do both. (For the record, I also slept in, played some Madden, and drank a lot of coffee.)

Work has been ridiculous lately and a scheduling disaster happened which put me on the wards for two weeks straight. The team I was rounding on was large (rarely less than 15 patients in 14 days) and was constantly turning over, meaning that I was constantly turning over the paperwork, and staying long hours on a daily basis. It reminded me of my residency days in many ways, and not the fun parts.

As Gwen and I work toward separating from the US Army here in the next eight months I'm constantly wondering when I can flick the "mentally checked out" switch. Clearly, it's not yet, but I sort of wish it was.


Summer came and went, and based on some of the emails and messages I received it seems people are tired of loading this page up to see once again the Joker's long purple coat and little else. My apologies for that. I would say there are two reasons for the discrete lack of blogging of late. One reason was the immense traveling we did at the end of summer. The other reason was, and is, quite frankly - the football season.

Readers may or may not be comforted by the fact that though this particular blog has been dormant, the blog I run for my "main" fantasy football league (I have four leagues, hence the "main" distinction) has been quite active on a week to week basis. Most readers, however, will also lament that it's a blog about a fantasy football league, and little else, and there really would be no reason at all to read it unless you were a part of that league. Hence, I will not link it here. The point of mentioning it is that the other blog takes up the time I'd normally focus here. (Actually, come to think of it, it's staggering to think just how much the football season affects me in terms of time, mood, sleep, and overall health. But that's for another post.)

So I've been wanting to fire up the old Discostup blog again but between work, travel, and football season I haven't really had the time or energy to sit down and really crank out anything worth reading.

Also, in the past, I've made the mistake of trying to "come back" with a monster post, intending to make up for all the lost time by blasting readers with a mega-post. I won't be doing that this time, though given how easy the words are coming off the keyboard at the moment, I might just ramble on a bit further than I intended.

When I last posted I had just seen the Batman movie (see last post!). About two weeks after that Gwen and I headed up to Stockholm, Sweden for an extended weekend. After Stockholm we had about a day to collect ourselves before gearing up and spending two weeks in San Diego where we are both currently looking for jobs. Back in August (and into early September), I should add that it was really only Gwen actively looking at that time. (I hope all who know us are sitting, because I'm sure what I'm about to tell you may shock you. Yes, it's true, Gwen beat me to the punch in terms of job hunting. I'll just give you a minute.) My interests at the time were more in line with hitting the beach, taking a load off, and of course participating in the 2008 version of Best Day Ever, which centers annually around, what else, a fantasy football draft.

Upon our return from San Diego, Gwen and I went through the usual post-vacation depression and dove back into work. We unfortunately haven't been able to travel all that much since, because of frequent call and all the time we spent Stateside, with one large exception. Earlier in October I alone (Gwen was working) was able to meet up with my parents and some family friends (Ceil and Ken) in Venice, Italy over another long weekend.

And so, before moving on to other topics great and small, in other posts, I will briefly recap the recent travels.

First up was Stockholm, a clean and expensive city with good seafood and the best phrase for saying 'Hello' we've ever encountered. The way to say hello in Swedish is to simply say "Hey". When you don't know that, however, it can make for interesting encounters, like the time you enter a store and an employee looks at you and says, "Hey". Interpretations could vary in meaning and tone, from "Hey!" (what the hell do you think you're doing?!) to "Hey" (with a quick head flip, as if you're my best friend and I've known you for years). Either way, the response in the beginning is always a guarded return "Hey" and then quickly moving about your business. As the weekend went on, however, it was kind of fun to play with, and saying "Hey" became kind of an amusing game. Often I'd have to prevent myself from responding "Heyyyyyyy" with varying tone inflections or the like. Regardless, "Hey" is the best "Hello" there is, at least in any country I've been to.

Another amusing part of the Sweden trip that I almost forgot was that the Olympics were on while we were there. I sort of got into Team USA hoops (and I've always loved Track and Field), so a few times Gwen and I went around looking for a TV to watch things (usually me dragging Gwen to watch hoops). Sweden does not have what I would call a strong Summer Olympics team, but this olympics they did have one key figure who dominated all their coverage - it was a table tennis player. Amidst all the Asians who dominate the sport, he seemed to be like an out-of-place Viking in a samurai movie. His picture was everywhere in Stockholm, like a Swedish Michael Jordan. For some reason I just found this hilarious.




This guy can have any woman in Sweden



And with that, let's move on to some pics:

Stockholm-Aug 08

Next up was our trip to San Diego. Two weeks of fun in the sun and of course, Best Day Ever 2008. Gwen did a lot of job interviews, and I tried to relive a small portion of "Summer of the Bum" (the real event occurred back in 1997) by hanging out with friends, hitting the beach, and basically just kicking back. I'm not going to rehash the entire two weeks but it was a lot of fun and the trip sort of sealed the deal for me that I need to go back to San Diego when I'm done with the Army.

Best Day Ever 2008 was actually stretched into a Best Weekend Ever 2008, and of course culminated in the annual Mick's League O' Micks draft party which was held at the Papa Roston's Pleasure Palace. Unfortunately there aren't many pics of the occasion on my camera (and the few pics I do have are of Eryn in his "thong" on draft day. Yes, he lost a best involving last year's fantasy team and had to draft for a few rounds in nothing but a thong this year. Most people losing this bet would have sheepishly complied, but let's just say that Eryn is not the shy type, and several of us learned that day that there are some things, once seen, that cannot be unseen.) Let's just move on.

The last recent trip I took was to Venice, where as I mentioned above I met my parents and some old family friends. The weather was nice (so nice that I got eaten alive by mosquitos) and we had a great time catching up. Going in I thought Venice would be a little too touristy and quaint for my taste, but I must say that though it is a very touristy city it still has something really unique and cool about it. It's definitely worth a trip, especially considering that there is Italian Food and Gelatto everywhere. The centerpiece of Venice is Saint Mark's square which more or less defines the classic "European Square". Saint Mark's Basilica, which is the centerpiece of the square, is really eye catching and even a person such as myself who's nearly burnt out on European churches at this point can be really impressed.

As always it was great to see my parents, even if my dad did develop a crack-like addiction to "Spaghetti Bolognese" (the guy ordered it EVERY meal. That's not an exaggeration.)

I leave you with Pics:

Venice Oct 08