I am worried about Barack

Yesterday I had the profound pleasure of listening to Barack Obama speak live here in St. Louis. This man is the closest thing my generation has had to MLK, JFK or even Ghandi. Yes, I said it. Barack Obama is my new hero. I didn't start out on the Obama wagon, but this man is amazing. Inspirational is the word that comes to mind. My favorite part of his speech, a part that really struck a chord with me, was when he said:

"Some of us had grandparents or parents who said maybe I can't go to college but my child can; maybe I can't have my own business but my child can. I may have to rent, but maybe my children will have a home they can call their own. I may not have a lot of money but maybe my child will run for Senate. I might live in a small village but maybe someday my son can be president of the United States of America."

In the simplest terms, this is what the American dream is. That here in America, everyone has the opportunity to work hard and better their circumstances for themselves and for their children. And no other politician has ever been able to talk the talk AND walk the walk in the way that Barack Obama has. I love this man. I really, really love him.

But I am worried. Something that really disturbed me yesterday was the complete lack of security. When Biden and Palin came to Wash U for the vice presidential debate, they shut down every street their motorcades passed on. They closed off the campus. They emptied adjacent parking lots and buildings. They set up roadblocks. They took every single security measure one can imagine. So, with this in mind, my friends and I were sure there would be lots of security. Lo and behold, when we finally got to the front of the line, we were greeted by a set of metal detectors that WERE NOT BEING USED. They just shuffled us through the metal detectors that had been TURNED OFF!

Now I have read about this before. In late February, the New York Times published an article "In Painful Past, Hushed Worry About Obama" where they discussed the problem of security for a presidential candidate whose race has ignited a firestorm of threats against him, for starters. With the militant right-wingers shouting "kill him" and "off with his head" at Palin Klan rallies, you'd think that walking into a large field a few hundred meters from this man would require some form of screening. But no. Nothing.

Michael Shaw, writing for the Huffington Post, is also a little concerned. He describes the same scenario we witnessed yesterday: lines stretching for city blocks are easily cleared when security is thrown out the window.

These are dangerous times. We have hope for the first time in 8 long, tumultuous years. We cannot afford to have that hope snatched from us because of sloppy security. I will wait for 10 hours in line if I have to, so to Barack's security people: please, do your job and stop this nonsense.

Time to Sleep

For those of you now joining, it has been over an hour that I have been here laboring in my attempt to undo the sins of neglecting my child, aka my Bloggie, for over three weeks. I think that this marathon posting session has gone quite well, and when I read the posts tomorrow, I will be as surprised as you about just how many random, distinct thoughts I was able to come up with during my mental diarrhea session. Please scroll down about four posts below this to begin reading what tonight has had to offer. I shall see you again soon. Allah bless.

I am Getting Tired... of Joe Lieberman

This marathon posting session is wearing me out. But this is the price I must pay for not posting a single thing in three weeks. So on Thursday evening Wash U hosted the Vice Presidential debate, and I was lucky enough to be able to find myself on campus to stalk Joey B and Sarah P. We actually lucked out and chose a street to stand at where their motorcades passed on their way to the debate hall. This was a lucky choice because they have several routes available and at the very last minute the route is revealed to the local police manning the intersections, so no one could provide any information on where we should stand in order to see them. The entire operation was quite amazing. Biden stayed downtown, and by most guesses so did Palin. So to shuttle them from downtown to the campus, they shut down every freakin street - including sections of highway - declared a no-fly zone in the near environs,(so I was told by another bystander) and had a helicopter follow each of them from above every length of the way. I didn't see either one as they whisked by us because I was stupid and was too busy trying to capture the brewhaha on my camera, which only picked up flashing lights. YouTube capture mode my ASS. Megan, however, who was standing right beside me, saw them both. Biden waved. Palin didn't. Maybe it was my 5ft x 2.5ft "SHOW ME CHANGE" sign that upset her. Oh well.

The highlight of my evening came about an hour before that motorcade-viewing event when Joe Lieberman, shamed Senate D-Lister (and D don't stand for Democrat here buddy) walked in through the D-list entrance that students who won the lottery to attend were using to gain access to the debate hall. I got my very own chance to heckle him and heckle I did. "Joe! Come back to us!" I shouted. He turned around to face the handful of people standing around the area and looked at me. "Come back from the dark side. We miss you. Obama misses you. He wants you back. Come back Joe, come back from the dark side!"

And you know what he did? He didn't ignore me; instead he laughed quite heartily and waved. It was definitely one of my prouder moments. I could have simply booed or jeered. But Joe Lieberman, being the Judas that he is, must be so used to jeers. It would be like throwing water balloons at the ocean and hoping you could get it wet. What he is probably not used to is a good, heartfelt heckling. And he acknowledged me, rather than ignoring me.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I am pleased that 25 years ago Muzza chose life, because today I can say that because of that choice, I was able to heckle Joe Lieberman in person.

But really, that sort of thing is protected speech in this country. No cop - and there were many around - moved an inch while I did my dirty little deed. God Bless America fo sho, yo.

Nothin But The Benjamin... and the Grants

For the first time in my life today I have held a US one hundred dollar bill. This was very exciting. I have bought several things in my life worth over a hundred dollars: my phone, my ipod, my camera, my computer, my freedom from the Williamstown Police Department etc. However, I have used a credit or debit card to pay for each of these things and on the rare occasion that I've paid cash for something around the 100 dollar mark, I've paid for it with a bunch of twenties. Having five twenties does not carry the same joy as having one Benjy. So how did I come by my Benjy?

Well, I finally have found me a roommate. Yes, someone will now pay half of my rent for me, allowing me to leave the poor house for the first time in about a year. The feeling of financial freedom has corrupted me so much already. Case in point: roomie arrived this evening around 5:30pm. By 10:30pm I had charged $30.00 to my credit card, with nothing to show. Food and drinks. And the sad thing is that I had dinner at home. Maybe someone is gonna come bail ME out if I could just find a way to spend around 700 billion more. Anyway, my point is that roomie paid me her share of the rent in cold hard cash. One Benjy and seven Grants. Who knew Grant was on the fifty? Who knew there was a fifty?! Not I.

Anyway, to celebrate my first real genuine Benjy, I have decided to document it by taking a picture of it and posting it here in my Bloggie. So I set it on my coffee table ontop of a magazine and snapped away. But upon reviewing my picture, I noticed something intruguing. Thanks to the remarkable and brilliant Williams College marketing team, I have Williams memorabilia everywhere. And so, as I snapped my Benjy sitting proudly on my coffee table, so too did I snap my Williams alumni magazine. And I got to thinking about what the real value of this picture was. It was my Benjy, which today is valued at 100 dollars, and by the way things are going will be worth two Canadian cents by next week, but also, my Williams connection. Somebody, somewhere, paid $160,000 so that I could be a Williams alum. So the true value of that picture is actually $160,100.00 which is pretty insane. Okay, I am a dork.

Itsy Bitsy Spider

A few weeks ago I was on the metrolink on my way to a destination I shall not here disclose when a woman entered the train at the Skinker station and took a seat in front of me. She seemed to have known the man who was sitting next to her because she immediately began speaking to him, and he to her, even though she was carrying a book, and even though every other time I've seen her on the train she has been intently focused on the book she was reading during that particular week. This woman is a serial reader. She reads a different book every week. Perhaps she may read a different book every day, but since I only take the train to this particular destination once per week, I only see the different book every week. There is no reason to believe she is not changing books every 15 minutes, even. But a weekly change is most realistic to someone like me, who took over a year to read Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which I then claimed as my favorite book, but this has nothing to do with my point.

The woman sat in front of me. She spoke to the man. They were engrossed in their conversation. But as I looked ahead, I noticed something strange on this woman's back. There was a little spider sitting quietly just around the area of her shoulder blades. Now I am terribly afraid of spiders, and I was wont to scream like a little bitch and run away crying, however I was in public, and if being a brown bearded man on a train dangerously close to the anniversary of September 11 wasn't a bad enough thing, I decided that perhaps I should not take the screaming route. So I looked at the spider and it had not budged. However, it had the potential of moving at a moment's notice, and if it decided to, it could go anywhere. Anyway, the spider was clearly a boy spider, so I am going to refer to "it" as "he/him" from now on and occasionally I will call him by his given name, Spidey. So Spidey was about one quarter of an inch from one end to the next, and he looked very gross.

As I sat there, with my eyes fixed on him, his eight eyes perhaps fixed on me and everyone else around him, I contemplated what I should do. Should I reach over and squish him? First of all, that would have been gross. He would squish all over my hands, and I would have spider guts all over me. Secondly, my squishing him would require me to make contact with a complete strange middle aged woman on a train. It could even be misinterpreted as a caress. She may be offended, but even worse... no, much worse, she might enjoy it and try to get some more. So then I wondered, maybe I should tap her on her shoulder, sufficiently far away from Spidey, and say, "excuse me ma'am, but you have a spider on your shoulder blade." This, however, I realized could then result in a panic on the part of the woman, who, in her panic, could end up throwing her dirty, creepy, crawly, eight eyed monster onto ME.

So after weighing my options, I decided that the spider was, in many ways, a reflection of myself. Here I was taking a trip on a piece of public transportation that I was not necessarily fond of due to the tendency for me to encounter unpleasant things during my journey. Likewise, Spidey was trying to get to his destination also, and to do so, he needed to make use of his own form of public transport: a middle aged woman, and would encounter anti-spider terrorism in the form of large human beings trying to squish him for simply choosing to live his life and not be ruled by fear (of being squished). This was still worth it to him because he has a wife and 10,000 children waiting for him on the other end of his journey. After thinking of it this way, I sat contentedly in my seat and said/did absolutely nothing.

And I felt good about myself.

OMA

Oh. My. Allah. I have not posted since September 12. This is completely unacceptable and I do apologize. However, at the moment I think I will make up for this lack of posting by unleashing a wave of verbal diarrhea (or as we spell it in the Queen's English diarrhoea) in successive posts until I get so tired, I pass out. So here goes.

I have not posted for nearly a month because Ramadhan has kept me busy. I was fasting all day, then going to the masjid on evenings for dinner and prayers, and then coming home and trying to drink as much water as I could before it was time to do it all over again. When you have to drink large amounts of water across small amounts of time during the night, all that really happens is that you drink, pee, drink and pee more. There's no time to blog. Alas, Ramadhan is over and now I am here again, reaching out to you, my sympathetic audience, for your love.

To be honest, I miss Ramadhan. I miss the routine, the masjid, the free dinner, the feeling closer to Allah. I even miss skipping breakfast in the morning. Today, I was in a hurry for work because I woke up around 10:00am, and I was on my way out when I realized, "damnit, I didn't have breakfast." I was so disappointed that I had not in fact eaten at 4:00am as I had become accustomed to, and was now forced to, by a matter of habit, to eat something before leaving the house. It is these little things that make me miss Ramadhan. That, and the fact that Allah is just a lot more benevolent during Ramadhan than say, during any other ordinary month like Shabaan. He said so Himself, no kidding.

Anyway, that's it for that. As promised, I must now write another post. Look up ^^^