Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The purpose of a political party isn't to get elected, it's to promote their vision of what should be, to make something happen. If a party keeps trying to change itself to be more and more electable, people won't see what it stands for. It may get elected sometimes, but it will cede the power of making change to the other side. And it will lose whether it gets elected or not.

"Democrats don't need to win the election, they need to win the argument - that will lead to getting elected. What the Democrats have been doing is ceding the argument, hoping to get elected in an environment where more and more people are convinced by the other side. That's a losing o strategy no matter how well they succeed at it."

-- cos, 2005-02-12

Trying to sleep.

Thoughts refusing to slow down,
Chasing each other around my skull
Like rowdy children playing "don't touch the floor"
Endangering the springs of the cushions
Of the lobes they're jumping on.

Trying to sleep.

Watching thoughts inside with my eyes turned 'round.
Thoughts bouncing and careening in Brownian motion[*]
Caroming off the bones of my face,
Rebounding off the back of my brainpan,
Bashing into each other.

Trying to sleep.

Thoughts colliding and changing direction,
Sometimes two will strike each other and stick
Forming bewildering juxtapositions and conflations
That distract me, and amuse and frighten
Those to whom I later speak them.

Trying to sleep.

The pressure of ideas waiting to be written
Raising the temperature of my brain
Until the medulla, slick with sweat,
Tosses uncomfortably against the cortex,
While my body turns between the sheets.

Trying to sleep.

Who painted the insides of my eyelids such distracting colours?

[*] Yes, I do know that I just called myself an airhead.

Last night I wore my red, leopard-print, velour top and came to visit anniemal She liked what I was wearing, and hey, I like that top too, but I mentioned that the one problem with it is that it tends to shed. This morning I looked over at Mel, a largeish, longhair, extremely mellow, black cat, who was lying in a sunbeam, and caught a glint of bright, shiny red on the top of his head. Sure enough, two or three short threads from my blouse had wound up on the cat, gleaming vividly against the black fur.

Then it hit me: instead of having cat hair on my clothes, I'd gotten clothes-hair on the cat. Turnabout! Revenge! Ha!

The older I get, the more I find myself wishing for "do-overs" -- to go back and re-live sections of my past doing things differently...

...But it's not because of regret for the choices I made then; it's dissatisfaction with having had to only make one choice. I don't want to undo what I've done; I want to go back and do the other things in addition to what I did do, learning what I learned from what I did and tacking on what I would have learned from what I might have done instead. Accomplishing goals that I had set aside for other goals.

(And I'm kind of wondering how many people will give me an Ugol on this.)