It's Personal

It’s been my busiest week of work in 2007. Every kind of project I’m involved with somehow had to be worked on and finished this week. It’s making my brain hurt and I’m tired. Normally I’m bored and have too little to do. This is different. It takes me back to jobs of yore. Why oh why can’t I find a job that has the perfect amount of work? Something that keeps me interested and engaged in what I’m doing, but doesn’t require me to work a single minute of overtime? Something that makes the day fly by but that I don’t think about when I’m at home? It’s always been feast or famine for me. My life is like “The Three Bears” and I’m ready for my “Just Right.”

Combine a heavy workload with what happened at Virginia Tech this week and it’s been my worst week of blogging (you know, since I started it way back in March). Events like Virginia Tech are tough for me to talk about, yet I feel like they should be talked about, even though I know everyone else has already said it better. I guess I fear letting it sink in too much because I ultimately end up in a pit of despair about what humans are capable of doing to each other. It starts with VT, spins to the pain we’re causing children and families in Iraq, spins to everything happening unchecked in Darfur, and then lands right on the Holocaust. I start to feel like we never learn and that the world is never going to get any better, only worse. Which then leads me to wondering why I would want to bring a kid into all this. And eventually I sit wide awake in bed, like I did this morning, thinking about what it would have been like to have been in the VT French class as the gunman walked down each row just shooting people. Bad bad bad.

So I try to keep away from the news and think about other things. Thank god for the distraction of other blogs. I know a lot of people feel strangely about writing things they might consider trivial in the face of the VT massacre, but I am so grateful to have the opportunity to read about something else.

I thought I was doing a little better until the Supreme Court went and announced their judgment in the “partial-birth” abortion case. I’ll put it out there: I’m really liberal and I’m proud to be that way. I’m also very invested in politics and find myself frequently upset by what’s happening in our country. I take things very personally. Now, I also realize that there are people on the exact opposite side of the fence from me, and that they feel exactly the same way about their politics as I do about mine. I don’t think of [all] Republicans as idiots and I don’t think the Democrats always get it right, but I do know what it feels like not have any of my interests represented by our elected officials. I vote in every election and yet for the last 6 years very little of what I consider important has been worked on, while so much of what I disagree with has been pushed through. I’m sure there were Republicans who felt like this during the Clinton years. It sucks and I get really pissed off thinking about how only half the country at a time is getting what they want. It just doesn’t seem right. I could easily go on a tirade about everything that the Bush administration has done that I disagree with, but I don’t have the energy to go there now. But I do take it VERY PERSONALLY when the government starts telling people what they can do with their own bodies, whether that be abortion, euthanasia, or medicinal pot. I find the idea of abortions in the second trimester very upsetting, but there are rare cases when it might be necessary. This is a decision for a woman and her doctor to make. I can understand why people are disturbed by the idea of abortion. The thing is, it’s their choice not to have one. Everyone should have that choice. This ruling by the Supreme Court makes it clear that John Roberts has no intention of sticking with precedent and every intention of chipping away at my rights. This is as personal as it gets.