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hitting the wall

One of the unfortunate characteristics that I inherited from my mother is the occasional bout of vertigo. It doesn't happen often; it only occurs when I am approaching complete physical and mental exhaustion. The symptoms aren't that bad. I generally have trouble stringing coherent sentences together, I feel the need to lay down and "veg", and the room starts spinning if I get up and move around suddenly.

All three things started happening to me late Thursday afternoon. I think all the work at Mrs. Geek's school during the last few weeks was finally catching up with me. That, and some overenthusiastic consumption of food and drink over the Labor Day weekend. I know, I know... poor me (though it likely had much more to do with the former than the latter.)

So, I basically planned to work from home on Friday. Again... I know... poor me.

There was one flaw with this plan. I had to run over to a computer lab in another building right before I left Company O. on Thursday night. To get into that lab, I had to borrow a key that I share with a handful of other people. I left that key in my coat pocket when I went home on Thursday night. That key was needed by my co-workers on Friday, so I went to work on Friday for half a day. That pretty much tapped me out though, and I spent much of the rest of the day horizontal on the sofa at home.

I am equally fatigued on a completely different level. I am weary from outrage over the whole New Orleans debacle... or maybe "numb" is a better word. Perhaps this is due to the fact that news over the weekend from the people that those near and dear to me know was largely good. Housing in Jefferson Parish just outside New Orleans and in Gulfport, Mississippi owned by friends and relations came through the disaster relatively unscathed. This has taken some of the immediacy of the situation for me. The rush of emotion has suddenly left me and I feel... empty.

Perhaps it is because the scope of the thing is just getting too large to ingest easily. The stories coming out of Katrina's wake are so horrible... and they continue to multiply. Outrage on the part of Mrs. Geek and myself over the situation also leads to passionate recitations of faults and flaws with friends and acquaintances of like mind. I am afraid to talk or read about Katrina and New Orleans anymore.

I suppose my deepest fear is that any sense of outrage on my part will be utterly wasted. Certainly, that the Bush Administration could screw this up this badly does not, in retrospect, surprise me all that much. We saw many of the flaws that made Katrina so awful appear in the Administration's approach to the occupation of Iraq two years ago... well ahead of last year's election. Yet a lot of people voted for Dubya on Election Day, and would still prefer him over John Kerry today, according to a Pew Research poll that came out last week (though people preferred every other living ex-President including G. H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter to Dubya in the same poll.) So, I am afraid that my outrage is a "blue state" outrage. I worry that there is still enough love for the Dubya in his core base that he is still "carving his face into the side of Mt. Rushmore" (as one person put it after 9/11) in the eyes of many. I fear that his core base is big enough that they still hold a majority.

said drgeek on 2005-09-12 at 1:33 p.m.

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The Wayback Machine - To Infinity And Beyond

those first two estates - 2009-02-04 12:58 p.m.
nativity - 2009-02-03 9:28 p.m.
I am with Brahman - 2009-01-28 9:43 p.m.
angry - 2009-01-25 2:58 p.m.
i am - 2009-01-23 8:33 p.m.