 |
|
3-3-03 // 2.00 pm there's no profit in peace NP: Ocean Colour Scene - "One from the Modern" This is all very trad rock, but the melodies are so easy-going and the entire thing is very good spirited. OCS are very much a second or third division type band, but I've always enjoyed 'em. It's a striking, affirming day outside, complete with cloudless blue skies and a bit of a south wind. It's still a bit cold, but it's not that big of a deal. It's the kind of day meant for doing something outside. Sadly, I am inside, sitting here at my desk in my cube in the windowless lab. It stinks, but I've reconciled it all with the fact that it'll still be light for a while when I leave here for the day. I've never thought of myself as someone who's affected by the seasons. I mean, I love gray days and I love rain just as much as I enjoy sunny blue skies and warm winds. But this year's winter has been particularly nasty. Perhaps it's taken its toll on me in some subconscious way, making me more prone to bad moods or irrational behavior. I mean the past two days there's been sun, and it feels like a curtain has been lifted off the world. Sounds silly or melodramatic, perhaps, but it feels true. All I know is that I'm ready to have a more continuous positive frame of thought -- I'm ready for myself, and everyone else around here, really, to throw off that winter funk. I'm stuck in an unbreakable cycle of bureaucracy at work. I need access to this error tracking tool. I can log in to the tool but I can't run any of the queries. I email the sysadmin who's supposed to be in charge of it and he more or less does absolutely nothing. So I go talk to his supervisor and ask him to help. He sort of messes around for a while, and then ends up passing the buck to another higher-up in the office. She ends up saying yet a different person needs to be contacted to take care of this. I contact him, and he says she is the one who will fix it. And of course, now she and the original supervisor guy are both in a meeting. And I'm left here needing access to this thing but can't get it! Lovely, eh? I'm very in the mood for a good dinner at a proper Italian restaurant. Not sure where that came from, but it all sounds very good. It's very obvious that nobody wants to go to war now except for GW Bush and his pals. Can we please knock off all the rhetoric and bullheadedness? And shame on you Tony Blair for being such a weiner in this whole thing. I can't decide who's being more spineless in this entire thing, Tony Blair for supporting Bush despite the overwhelming antiwar sentiment in Britain, or my very own US Senate, who basically gave Bush a blank check to play his bonkers game of Risk with Iraq. What really gets me is that no matter what Iraq does, or no matter what Hans Blix and the rest of the UN inspectors find, if Iraq shows progress or does something to cooperate, Bush is more or less like "well, they're lying", or "so what"? And that the White House would basically say to millions of antiwar protesters "you're entitled to your opinion, but you're wrong and I'm going to invade anyway" -- that's just crass and incredibly dangerous. The gap betwen government and constiuency seems to be remarkably wide with all of this. I mean, how many people do you personally know who are so gung-ho about attacking Iraq? I can't say I know more than one or two. I mean, Saddam Hussein is guilty of starving his own people, of running a fascist regime. But at the same time, you cannot simply ignore and cast aside international convention. You simply do not attack without provocation. And until that provocation comes (if it ever does), perhaps we as a nation would be better served by turning our attentions to diplomacy with North Korea, to finding Osama Bin Laden, to shoring up the incompetence in American intelligence, or finishing the job / rebuilding in Afghanistan. And one last thought before I plug the spout that brought forth this rant -- where the hell has Dick Cheney been the past six months? For the longest time, he was everywhere -- you saw him more than Bush. Now it's like he never existed. Must be hanging out at the "undisclosed location". Oh well, whatever. At least the "orange alert" is over and we can all put away the duct tape and plastic sheeting. Barely over two hours to go in this roundabout working day. Can't wait to get out of here and to let the real day begin.
|