Today's Offerings

My two big "accomplishments" for today were 1) participating in a nearly two hour telephone conference for my alumni association and 2) attending a big political rally up in Atlanta. The phone conference was for our first organizational meeting where our association board more than doubled in membership. We had to elect officers, receive our committee assignments, and also have a bunch of people who like to hear themselves talk do just that. :-p

The political rally left me pretty disenfranchised. For one thing, this is Georgia politics, which basically means the "Good Ole Boy" system where rallies consist of over-the-top red meat speeches, chest thumping about being a fourth generation Georgian, and other blustering. I don't come from a family background that is either entrenched in the political system, loaded with money, or otherwise has control of the infrastructure. In other words, it is mostly a system of graft with the most friendly face you can stamp on it. I really found myself wondering why I was there and why I wanted to go, other than that one camp paid my way.

Back to the alumni, I'm finding myself there mostly misunderstood, and I suspect this will grow particularly as the additions to the board move it in a direction that will help cement a regional clique of people who either live and breathe the unreal Northern VA life or commute regularly back there. I'm really not sure if I'll have much of a role in the next year because the things in which I am interested appear to be so narrow that I am often the only person who is interested in doing it. But we'll see what happens in the next year.

Anyway, I think that most of today was a wash for me (in terms of having something to show productivity wise), mostly six hours of listening to people talk and then about 4 hours of driving around. I'm pretty exhausted mentally, so I decided to head to the video store to rent Lord of War, which they were out of and so instead rented War of the Worlds. (I like movie combinations that would qualify for the "Before and After" category of Wheel of Fortune.)

Anyway, last night I watched The Island. It is an intersting movie, I think, and well worth the rental. It might have been lousy in the theaters, but it was fun on DVD. We also got a new sound system for Holidaymas and the movie was really good with our subwoofer. One thing that I really like about Dystopia is that there is always no clutter. That really appeals to me. Second, every now and then you need to watch a sci-fi movie that blows a heck of a lot of things up. And for some reason that really appealed to me as well.

Anyway, I'm still down here in GA waiting for The Next Big Thing and hoping that it will come soon. I've really gone through a lot of self-doubt and have been trying to figure out a) if I have any talent at all and b) if I do whether the International City can be more than a stopgap home for me.

But it's not all gloom and doom.

I really enjoyed having some of my friends down for the last weekend. It was a real ray of hope and I enjoyed seeing them again. I miss having friends around locally to be able to get out and do things, or not do things as the case may be. We all really missed them when they left. Hopefully we'll be able to get up there soon or have them back here again.