This year started out badly and didn't get a fuck of a lot better. I started with a compressed nerve in my neck, swiftly followed by my mother's death and went on to weeks of persistent illness. I feel like I've been sick the entire year. Now, at the end of December, the compressed nerve is making a comeback. Oh frabjous day...
The company I work for is being dissolved by greedy ideologues who declare - without a scrap of evidence - that outsourcing of course is more economical than having people directly on staff. The multi-million dollar contracts will be signed sometime in April and then all staff are simply waiting to be absorbed by the IT Borg Services company slurping up their section of the operations or else get laid off. I'm going to take advantage of some job placement training that's due in January/February, then I'm going to start looking. I don't fancy waiting around to be fired. My manager, whose pretty cool, knows what I'm doing and said she'll help with my resume, send me job leads and even do practice interviews if I'd like.
I keep up with the news but have resisted the urge to comment. Pretty much everything I said back in 2008 about the wrong track the respectable people on the Left were determined to take has come true, not that they appear to notice. The Boyz of the Blogz continue to be as shallow, narcissistic, clueless, and self-congratulatory as ever, no matter how many times the Incomparable One and the Shrill One smack them upside the head.
My political perspective doesn't align with most other blogospheric positions, left or right. I am unimpressed by the street rebellions (though I agree with Eric Hobsbawm that it is like 1848 all over again), rolling my eyes at the wasted opportunities of the Occupy movement, and deeply cynical about the antics of hacktivists, from Julian Assange to Lulzsec to Anonymous. A customer of the company the Spousal Unit works for got attacked by Anonymous a while back and it was days of effort to keep the little fuckers from bringing down the site. No, not amused by these hooligans whatsoever.
I watch an allegedly liberal intelligentsia unable to escape its collective fantasy that anyone who rejects Obama can only be doing so because they are racist, not because the guy is to the right of Richard Nixon. No, I won't be placated by the knowledge that the Right is worse - shitty governance is shitty governance even if the choice is that or obscenely shitty governance. It's bad and sad when you realize Nixon would be an improvement.
In the absence of material improvements to living conditions brought about by the Long Recession (which, truth be told, really started when Reagan took office), increasing numbers of people will vote their resentments. If it won't get better, you might as well make other people hurt. The high-minded left doesn't want to consider that the dumb-shit cop who pepper sprayed the protesters at UC Davis is a perfect representative of the portion of the 99% who must be wooed away from the reactionary right if any high-mindedness is to have an actual effect in the world. That's the deep failure of the left in this country since LBJ.
So, that's been this year for me - pain physical and emotional, job stress, and political estrangement. Instead of blogging, I've been watching old TV shows on Netflix, reading books, cooking lots of amazing things, tracking local food prices, trying to exercise, visiting with my dad, seeing my friends and generally have this thing called a life.
It's kind of nice.
Anglachel
