Emptying the Notebook

As I await the end of a long season of Dancing With the Stars, and an even longer season of American Idol, some thoughts that have been dancing around my head trying to get out.



First off, I now understand how my wife must feel about the fourth month of the football season when she walks in and sees yet another game on the tube. She's a good sport, and will often even sit and watch some of the games with me, just as I do with her and the aforementioned shows, but I know she's thinking, when does it end? All the while I just sit in a blissful stupor, focused on the next series of downs and how the game I'm watching fits into the playoff picture.

The three presidential candidates raised over $70 million dollars last month. Just imagine if we could get people to raise that kind of cash to pay for improvements needed in our public schools, or other worthy causes that would help to better society.



Speaking of the presidential race, let's take the Clinton campaign, please. With some due repsect to Hillary Clinton, will she please go home now. Granted, that may be a tall order, considering she is from about a half dozen states that we know of, but still. When this whole thing started she was the favorite of many, including myself. But as we got to know Barack Obama, many of us switched our allegiance, for a variety of reasons, to my knowledge none of them being because we are bunch of male chauvinist sexist pigs. We became enamored of the messenger and the message, and Barack became our guy, oops, our person. Don't want to be gender biased here. It happens, sometimes someone better comes along, and that is what happened here. But Clinton is like the jilted ex who won't go away, even though we've stopped calling, returning emails, and have replaced the pictures on our wall. We've moved on long ago, but yet, she won't go away, can't take the hint. If this keeps up it will get to the point where we're going to have to start checking our big kitchen pots for boiling rabbits.



Ok women, lighten up already. And stop crying, those of you that are, about how the media is biased and how Hillary doesn't get a fair shake because of her gender. Yes, there is sexism in society, just as there is racism, ageism, all of it, it's there, it's real, we get it, get over it. Oh, how can a man know what it's like to be a woman, how can a man understand that experience. Well, last time I checked, I'm a member of the human race, with the ability to sympathize and empathize with people who are not male or white, or 37 years old, or who live in Arizona, or who have brown hair. In other words, get over yourself angry, bitter white women, not all men are jerks who want to see your gender fail. We have moms, and daughters, and females who we admire, so come off the gender card already. Clinton wouldn't have made it this far if our society was made up mainly of mysoginists, and it was a nice run, but it fell short and it's time to move along, showing a little grace and class wouldn't hurt either.



Likewise, most White guys are not racist pigs anymore than we are sexist pigs. Granted we may be plain old pigs in many ways, but that's another matter. Can we stop with the notion that Whites won't vote for a black man. That's a bunch of racist crap if you ask me, to assume that all White people think alike, and that their main reason for not voting for a Black man is racism. Hardly any Black people voted for Bush, does that mean they all hate White people? Most people make their voting decisions based on a variety of factors, race or gender may be one of them, or not, but to say that is how you explain someone's vote is overly simplistic and immature. If Obama couldn't get support from White voters, how do we explain his victory in Iowa, which next to Utah is probably as pasty a state as you will find. Again, racism exists, and racist people are out there, probably more so in certain places than others, but to suppose that all Whites think alike is just as silly as expecting all women to support Hillary or all Black people to support Obama.



Some random things that I can do without: texting at the gym, tattoos in general, window stickers that give a memorial to someone that died, especially when that person is old enough to have died of natural causes, people that still drive around with W stickers on their cars, pulling up next to a big diesel pickup truck with my windows down, Sportscenter highlights showing hockey, Nascar, and the WNBA, the X games, snowboarding, and ultimate fighting being considered to be sports, the endless war in Iraq, the notion that somehow the war in Afghanistan is the good war, fake patriotism, people that tailgate me on the freeway, passing on the right side, failing to signal a lane change, blaming European imperialism for all the ills of the world, corporate radio, the notion that the government has control over gas prices, complaining about the weather, pro basketball games where the winning team scores in the 80's, old bald guys who drive convertibles, personalized license plates that simply state the model of the car, car pool lane cheaters, students who leave hot cheetohs on the carpet in my classroom, getting behind a huge suv or truck in traffic, conspiracy theories and revisionist history, when my dvr inexplicably cuts off the last part of PTI, any more NPR stories about the earthquake in China, the sound of Hillary's voice and the redness of Bill's face (holy crap, lay off the bottle already), people who expect me to return their calls or emails within a reasonable amount of time, and basically anyone who disagrees with my view of the world and the way things should be. Allright, not really that last one, I like when people disagree with me, but I was on a roll.



Otherwise, I'm good to go, and I feel much better now having emptied my head of all that. Now, only about three and half months until football season starts up, and for what it's worth, a woman finally won on Dancing With the Stars, and as long as the dorky David doesn't win American Idol, I'll have nothing to complain about for awhile. Unless the Lakers lose the next series and I have to sit through a Spurs-Celtics final. Don't get me started.