Affirmations

The theory behind affirmations, or "Cosmic Ordering" as the Mighty Wizard Edmonds calls it, is that if you repeatedly state your desire for something, you'll be more likely to get it.

My personal theory is that if you repeatedly state your desire for something, you're more likely to work towards it, because otherwise you look like a putz.

I already go on about things I want a fair bit. I want a motorbike, I want to shave my hair, and so forth. Like Chekhov's Three Sisters, I go on about it while never working towards it, because I am pretty lame.

NONETHELESS. I'm going to publicly say something that has been creeping up on me for months:
I want to go to America. I want to stay there. I want to see different states, compare different kinds of American life, get a feel for the geography and the people.

I'm still trying to work out ways this can happen that don't basically boil down to "get a job and spend no unnecessary money for three years." I'm sort of waiting for an opportunity to present itself. I dunno.

Anyway, yes, I am stating this here and now so that one day, I can look back and go "oh yeah that's when I decided to come here."

Also, please please watch this. It kicks all kinds of ass. The song has been wheeling through my head for a week or so now, and the video is utterly captivating!

Elections I have survived

"I don't like him. He looks like a monkey, his smile is fake, and he looks like he only pretends to like children."

Such were my erudite thoughts at the age of ten, when Tony Blair was voted in by the British public. I was only dimly aware of the whole proceeding, and that this meant saying goodbye to the man with the glasses. As I recall, Britain was slightly distracted by a dead princess at the time, but they got over that pretty fast.

For some reason they don't let you vote at ten, which is probably a good thing, or we'd all be serving under the Mighty Wizard Edmonds to this very day.

I tried cosmic ordering once. My pizza still hasn't arrived, High Wizard Edmonds.

There had been elections before that, of course; Maggie Thatcher was elected for the final time the year I was born. Hence my having no vivid memories of the fabled milk snatchery. I think I can be forgiven for not paying attention to these things when I was five, so the 1997 election was really the first time I noticed it - Glasses man versus monkey face, who will win?

Also there was Paddy Ashdown.

I do not remember this man.

The 2001 election was essentially New Labour's sequel. I don't recall there even being a discussion over who would win, and I certainly wasn't asked. This time I wish they had asked me - Prime Minister Anthony Head would have done great things for this country.

Sebastian agrees.

By 2005, I was disillusioned with British politics. Labour won again, but I didn't really care. It seemed like Blair and Bush were joined at the hip, we couldn't have one without the other, and change was a distant hope. With 9/11 still rumbling about in people's minds (or as we Brits call it, 9/11), there was a lot of noise and drama and not much risk of competition. The dynamic duo remained in the top jobs.

Blair and Bush

Prior to the 2008 political campaigns, I'd been rather unimpressed by politics, American politics in particular (I may even have made scatological references, which is understandable given the inspiration for that post). But then! Things got exciting in America. People were finally ready for Change with a capital Chuh; Obama got voted in, and for the first time I actually bothered to be 'politically aware.' I started getting itchy for an election over here. I finally cast off my voter apathy, and was all ready to make a difference, but the months rolled by and the election was never announced.

We had to wait five years for the next one. I'd occasionally ask when it was due, but nobody really seemed to know, or to be bothered by how horribly long it had been since the last one. Only five years, you might say, but from age 17 to 22 is an awfully long time - I've been at least three people since the last round.

Speaking of three people, this is the first time I can recall in which all three candidates have a fair chance at the prize. I'll try to be as impartial as I can here. Nobody likes Gordon Brown (I'm trying!), though many see him as necessary, and the lesser of two evils. David "call me Dave" Cameron seems to have polarised the nation into those who get their news from Murdoch and those who don't.

via @JonathanHaynes

Now, I was already leaning towards the Lib Dems, but I cannot stand Murdoch sticking his finger into the ear of politics and giving it a twiddle. A lot of people seem to feel the same way, and the tawdry excuse for journalism pictured above is why the #NickCleggsFault hashtag was trending on twitter today (and indeed still is). Whether that's portrayed as sarcasm or not will depend entirely on the newspaper, although the Guardian gets it.

My reasons for supporting the Lib Dems, then, are as follows: they are less corrupt. Not because they're better, or more moral - they may well be, but who can tell at this stage? - but because they've had less opportunity to be corrupted. They've been stood in the shadows for so long that nobody's bothered to buy their allegiance, and dammitall if that doesn't excite me. They're like a field that's been left fallow for years.

Will they win? No idea. Maybe we'll have a hung parliament; many say that's a good thing, though I've yet to do the research. One thing's for sure, for the first time in my memory, it's really a three horse race.

PS. From this, you might assume that I'm voting Lib Dem. Nope. I didn't get my random bit of paper off in time. They let you fill it in online, but then you have to print it off and snail-mail it to some office? WTF? So yeah, I really should have done my research sooner.

Election warz!: update

I've been trying to get informed on the debate (no wait, actually information was just being poured into my head until I gave up fighting it), and while I do get confused over which party are the terrorists and which one are the communists (or are the blue guys both of those?), I am getting a bit of a picture of their supporters.

I think the whole debate has been best summed up by a fanatical McCain supporter (feel free to check out her blog, Sarah's Army, to get a feel for what kind of intellectual level she's fighting on) who wrote: "McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else."

Go Obama, says I.

On an unrelated note... my weekend has been pretty awesome! On Friday I stayed up till 7am watching Avatar with the guys. It was properly amazing, the basic concept of the programme is as follows: there's these four tribes: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water; and some of the people in these tribes can control their element, and they're called Benders. It follows one kid who's a bender of all four elements, and is thus the Avatar. Good for him!

The rest of the weekend was basically spent with my Gavin (he's recently written a great blog post about fair trade and our responsibility to the rest of the world - heavy stuff, but so relevant and important right now. And always.)

Anyway, I've got uni in the morning and this whole clock-going-forward shenanigans has completely thrown me off (doesn't it always! At least it was the good one) - although I'm still a bit jetlagged from Friday night / Saturday morning.

Anyways, go ahead and check out Sarah's Army; if you can make it through three posts without mentally quoting Team America: World Police, you're a better man than I.

9/11 and the Fuckery of the Election Campaigns

Oh God, I'd forgotten how much I hate American politics. At least in the UK we have the decency to be politely embarrassed about the whole thing. In America, the party you support have the power and the strategies to change the world for the better. But the other guys? Oh, the other guys are in league with terrorists. They hate The Family (which family is this, by the way?), and will have us all being ridden around like ponies with Muslims and Communists on our backs by the end of 2010. The other guys couldn't possibly lead the Greatest Nation (tm) because their leader is a woman / black / inexperienced / a bitch / republican.

I'll be honest, I don't even know which party is which. Paint one turd red and one blue and I'll be just as unwilling to swallow either, thank you very much.

And if you think I'm exaggerating, that they're not really all overdramatic fearmongers, I'd like you to see how much of this video you can watch before nominating him for an Oscar.



The reason it makes me so angry is that America was supposed to be our big chance at a blank slate. A truly equal society in which freedom and justice were available to all. Such lofty aspirations, and yet the election campaigns are just pigs in dirt, squealing as many buzzwords as they can.

Disclaimer: I don't hate Americans, I'm not Jeremy Clarkson. I've just never heard a political diatribe yet that I liked or agreed with. By the way, if pressed for a vote, I like Obama because he has a nice smile and waves a lot. (At least I'm honest about it.)