Inner-City Black Lesbian for President!!!

Hell, why not? She couldn't possibly do any worse than our current exalted leader. She would have to be a self-made woman, if she were to have risen from the socio-economic train wreck that is the inner urban landscape, and as such, would have both the perspective to see what rich white America has been sweeping under the rug, as well as the guts to do something about it.
I admit I was raised to be prejudiced—not because of my parents, both well-educated and respectable members of their community, but because until I was in high school, I can't remember anyone who wasn't white and lower-to-middle-class like me. That instills a primitive xenophobia that is hard to shake off. However, as I get older and hopefully wiser, I realize that it is less about color and more about those who have screwing those who don't.
We have got to break the stranglehold that Old, White Money has got this country into. We are letting our brothers, fathers and sons die in wars halfway around the globe so that a few rich white men can make even more money. Bush, Cheney and others of their cadre own parts of the contracts for the military hardware being purchased by the Federal government to supply the war in Iraq. They're selling the tools to fight a war they're running!
An inner-city, black lesbian may not be the answer—maybe there's a young white country boy or girl out there who has the genius we need, but after seeing this country get run into the ground by a little boy playing with daddy's government like it's his own private sandboks (psst! That's spelled with an 'x,' Mr. President...), I'm willing to bet what's left of the farm on a new point of view, because there isn't going to be much left of it when Shrub gets through with it.

Smart enough to know better

We are the educated poor, a class-within-a-class of the working poor. We have above-average education, some with Master's degrees or higher, crushed under the burden of staggering student loans and working for minimal wages, often without adequate insurance for cars, health care or dental needs.
Growing up in a time when the perception that anything was possible, with people getting blindingly rich playing the stocks or investing in dot-com startups with record-setting IPO's, we were raised with the view that hard work and education would ensure a comfortable life, and with a bit of luck, we could even retire relatively rich, ending our days in comfort and satisfaction. The American Dream, indeed. We have been misled.
We have been misled by those in power and those who stand to gain from the tide of people looking for a better lot in life who have been fed the notion that education will ensure that we will be in demand, risen above the uneducated, first in line for the good jobs. This may have been the case twenty or thirty years ago, when the delineation between industrial jobs and the emerging high-tech middle class, when education was necessary to comprehend the new technology and stay abreast of emerging trends, but we have become such a specialized society that the employment market is becoming saturated with qualified applicants. This is great for the furtherance of technological breakthroughs and research, but what of those not at the absolute top of their field? There are millions of qualified job seekers who are edged out by an applicant who has been specializing like an ant since near conception, left to search for the average entry-level skilled position. These positions have historically been populated with many an employee who has been working the same position since their entry into the field, often starting out at the absolute bottom as a high-school student with few needs and willing and able to work for the pittance wages offered therein. A college degree was supposed to have leveled the field, playing experience off of knowledge and ability to bring new ideas to the position, but there are no positions to be had but those which cannot offer enough to even begin to make our looming payments.
Now we who have forgone the long-term investment in the low ladder of menial positions in favor of struggling for an education in order to better ourselves find that we are being left out in the cold in the Bush-ridden job market, consigned to a litany of unpleasant choices in constructing our future, our dreams of a comfortable middle-class life smothered. We live to work so that we can pay our crushing student loan debts, fighting to afford food and rent, disillusioned and cynical, and many of us turn to self-destructive comforts that provide effective, if temporary reprieve. Our hard-won degrees useless, we are left without options in increasingly desperate situations, frustrated and snarling, doing no one any real good, often putting burdens on the state for assistance that the government is exponentially reducing, leaving more and more to fend for themselves like rats. And when too many rats get put in a cage, they start eating each other--crime rates rise as fewer legal opportunities are available, and spiraling down, too busy surviving to take interest in community or government, allowing laws to be passed by the affluent for the benefit of the affluent, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
This cannot continue--the center is corrupt and the outer rings are being whipped to shreds. We, as those educated enough to have a better-than-average grasp of the situation (I don't think anyone really knows, short of maybe Alan Greenspan and a small group of alien residents) have to make the effort to do something about it, as those with the ability to do something have the responsibility to do it, if only by voting (I'll get into the voting rant in another section) and paying attention. Let's band together, organize, DO something!!! A revolution is coming, and we can make it a quiet one. Otherwise, it's not going to be pretty.

Got a boat to build...

So this year has left me with a profound sense of something missing in my life, leaving me adrift--something fundamental, like the ache a quitting smoker has, of an undefined need that if I could just identify it, I could sate the craving and fulfill whatever it is that's creating this hole in my id. Or maybe it's in the ego, or the superego--I'm pretty sure it's in the unconscious somewhere, hiding behind a dresser like a timid puppy, unsure whether my psyche can be trusted not to laugh at it.
I've tried many different remedies to attempt to smooth this away, this speed bump in the psychological development of the Self; drugs (of various flavors), sex (of various flavors), hobbies, exercise, fishing, drinking, crafts--you name it, I've probably done it, which I suppose makes me some sort of demented Renaissance man, like Tommy Lee going to college to learn the art of Zen Buddhist Underwater Basket Weaving. College was an instructive experience, infinitely valuable, if only for the opportunity to immerse oneself in the hallowed halls of the sum of human experience, written, carefully researched, delineated, typeset or freely shaped, post-modernist, Neo-Classical, Chicago, Turabian, APA, MLA, beautifully hand-wrought or painstakingly exacting. It is an ivory tower, with all the conflicting imagery that it brings to mind--luminous, soaring, but simultaneously confining and insular. It filled a niche in my soul that was created specifically for it, like stretching a canvas before your first learn-to-paint class.
It was beautiful, wonderful, difficult and rewarding, and I realized after more than 18 years of schooling that I am not meant to be an academic. I have intelligence and the wherewithal to maintain an academic life should I so choose, but it would be a hollow maintenance of existence rather than a spiritually fulfilling drive.
Speaking of spirituality, I have gone through several flavors of religion in heavy enough doses that there should have been a warning label affixed, or at least a sticker advising that continued use could impair one's ability to operate machinery. I have never envied those for whom religion is a panacea to their own spiritual holes, as it is a patch at best, like a sleeping pill, good for a guaranteed dose of unconsciousness, but powerless to treat the underlying condition. God is a comfortable label our limited human consciousness uses to confine the infinite vastness of our reality to a conceptualization we can come to grips with. All we can see of the elephant is the tail, but it lets us hold on to something concrete, without which our minds would spiral into psychosis. I think this may be the driving force behind science--a drive to define, and therefore compartmentalize our existence, the better to grip the tail. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away from our Sun--there, that's easier than just saying that it's too fucking far to comprehend. It would take me quite a while just to write the number of miles that is on this page, and you wouldn't want to actually read it, so I'll save us both some time.
So I guess the point of this post is that I've found something that has the best chance of any in recent memory of containing the possibility of filling this void, but now that I've found it, I'm unable to pursue it. There is a fantastic school here in Washington that is an *accredited* (who knew?) school teaching the disappearing art of building wooden boats. I don't mean childrens' toys-- I mean daysailers and ketches and restoring yachts and classic pieces of our watery Northwest heritage. THIS is something I could happily do the rest of my life, as I have been around boats my entire life, thanks to a similar affliction affecting my father, who passed on the boat genes to me; specifically, the ones for sail preference. I'd rather sail than have sex (mostly, although there are definitely some times with my wife that qualify as a spiritual experience...), and tuition is reasonable. Even better, while I'm in school, my current student loans would be deferred. Now, I'm not sure of what the market is capable of bearing in terms of hiring those with that level of woodworking experience, but I'm sure those skills are laterally-transferable, say into carpentry, finish woodworking, etc.
So after how many years spent looking, I've found what I want to do with my life. And then I find out that it is so far away that I'd have to leave my wife, ensconced as she is with a good job, a nice place to live and friends nearby, and go live in a little port town, probably with some other boatbuilding students and live the life of a bachelor again. So the dilemma is this: leave my wife for up to a year to fend for herself and be without each other for far longer than either of us could conceive of, or take my wife away from her carefully-built, hard won success to chase a pipe dream of building boats. Or I could stay here in Seattle and keep looking for a job that will pay our loan payments without selling too much of my soul. Some of it's for sale, but if I have to go into retail sales again, I'd rather just take my own life and set up Jen with the insurance payout... :D.
This can't be the best of all possible worlds; that would mean the boat school would be nearby and I wouldn't have any loans to pay off. Fuck. If this is the best of all possible worlds, I'm going to go get smashed and try not to think about it any more. If nothing else, I'll remember this and when I'm old and I've had a depressing career in some fluorescently-lit drab office stamping paperwork for 20 years, I can go do this and revel in the brief reprieve from this so-called "modern world." Maybe the world needs a few more wooden boats to remind us that all is not bigger, better faster moremoremoremore. Maybe what the world needs is a few hours in a creaky wooden sailboat, taking in the sheets and trimming her up so she skims the waves on her way out to where ever.