A Quick Thought

Why the hell are couches and all other living room furniture swathed in either drab, muted colors or else covered in some hellish rendition of paisley or plaid? Why can't you find anything bright that isn't from Ikea? And why is it that people somehow think living room furniture without arms is still furniture? Where I come from, we call that "broken," not "modern."

I seethe with discontent.

How To Remove Cat Dander From Two Loveseats

1) Realize that your two loveseats are infested with filthy, filthy cat allergens. Resolve to clean them first thing in the morning.

2) Go to Meijer. Ask the sales person about renting and Rug Doctor, making sure to ask her which formula gets rid of cat dander. Ask again, specifically noting that it must remove allergens which make said sofa unusable. Nurture the small spot of hope that grows within you as she nods and assures you it cleans allergens.

3) Go home with your Rug Doctor and cleaning implements. Begin attaching the upholstery attachments and realize the person before you didn't empty the hose, thus spilling water all over your floor. Hate that person.

4) Read the directions on the bottle carefully, noting how much you are supposed to use. Fill a bucket with the appropriate amount of water, then add the whole bottle, silently deriding the manufacturers for assuming you wanted only the minimum amount of cleaning done.

5) Spend the next two and a half hours washing every inch of your loveseats. Grow more and more angry with each puddle of cleaner that spills from the vacuum. Also vacuum the cushions, noting that curved surfaces are the worst thing in the world for a carpet cleaner to clean.

6) Empty the waste water, noting how a couple pieces of furniture can make a bucket of water look like it was pulled from a swamp.

7) Eat lunch and consider how you will brag to your girlfriend about how you valiantly slayed a million allergens with a sweep of your upholstery attachment. Feel manly.

8) After a couple of hours have passed put a slightly damp cushion on a slightly damp loveseat and test how well your work was. After ten minutes, note your persistent cough and slight tightness in the lungs.

9) Angrily walk to the kitchen trash can and fish out the bottle of cleaner. Note that it is a bottle of pet stain spot remover, and was never intended to be used as a cleaner in the machine. Remember the lady who rented the machine to you and loathe her.

10) Go to Target and buy a bottle of cleaner that actually removes allergens. Briefly consider buying two, so you have one to bludgeon the rental lady with when you return the Rug Doctor while screaming "SEE? THIS IS WHAT ALLERGEN-REMOVING CLEANER LOOKS LIKE! TASTE THE POWER OF NON-HISTAMINE-ACTIVATING GOODNESS! LEARN!"

11) Return home. Add more water to the bucket. Dump half the bottle of cleaner in, noting that this is far more than the original bottle. Believe that adding anything less than what must be a lethal dose of allergy cleaner to the water constitutes a moral failure on your part.

12) Spend another two and a half hours washing the loveseats, making sure to clean all of the pillows it touched, as well as removing the covers on the cushions and washing those in the wash seperately. Note that the cushions are stuffed with down feathers, leaving small feathers all over the living room as a reminder that these cushions will continue to spew forth noxious cat spores that burn your eyes whenever sat upon.

12a) Remove pants. Continue cleaning pants-less, understanding that whoever invented pants probably also invented cat allergies.

13) When finished, empty the waste water. Note how the water is even dirtier than before. Briefly question the wisdom of sitting on a loveseat that will never be clean.

14) Lie on your bed and pray that the allergens are gone. Consider hating cats.

Super-Mega-Ultra-Update!

A lot's happened since my last post. Here we go.

--Found a subleaser who signed on Wednesday. It was a god arrangement for al of us because she needed to move out ASAP, and I needed someone to sign now. I left my futon behind, which wasn't a big deal since Elaine has one.

--I moved to Columbus. Whee!

My dad came down Friday to help pack and move, which went pretty well. He got to meet Elaine's parents, who were kind enough to feed us lunch and dinner. Everyone got along with everyone, and Elaine and my dad got to know each other a little better.

--We have Too Many Boxes. Fortunately, we also have a basement, so the boxes go down there. For everyone out there who doesn't have a basement, get one--it has made moving exponentially easier. Furniture peice we may not need, but don't want to get rid of? Basement. Large collection of books needs to stay out of the way? Basement. Large number of empty boxes which will undoubtedly be useful again someday? Basement. I cannot stress how awesome having a whole floor of storage space is.

Addendum: Washer and dryer hookups also rock. Not as much as a basement, though, since the basement can hold those and more.

--We have couch issues. Specifically, we have two loveseats which are old but comfortable. They were also stored at Elaine's parents' place, and they have cats. I am allergic to cats. We added the two together when we sat down last night for some six-month snugglebunnies and my eyes watered like crazy, so now we have to find a way to de-cat the loveseats before I can use them. Any suggestions?

--We bought blinds yesterday. Hanging them was a manly experience involving drills, electric screwdrivers and much manly dust. But they also fit perfectly. I am very proud.

That's all for now. More updates as the story/life progresses.

The chances of impeachment, and why rhetoric says it won't happen

I've got a politically-connected girlfriend (through her mom) and I'm pretty liberal myself, so ever since the midterm elections, I've seen some murmurings of whether or not the Democrats should try to impeach Bush for mismanagement and such. You know the routine. One of the best articles I've seen about the subject is in Alternet, located here, and author Tim Dickinson says we shouldn't, for what I feel are very strong reasons.

Now, Alternet is a progressive news site, which means that most readers removed the right-turn signal from their environmentally-friendly cars and/or bicycles a long time ago. And predictably, a large number of the comments left at the bottom of the page (which actually takes up most of the page now) are somewhat incessant in their calls for impeachment. If we analyze the situation through rhetoric, though, I think that the chances for impeachment are very small for the same reason Dickinson notes--it looks like a power grab.

Most of the posters on the site are arguing that there's more than enough evidence to try Bush and impeach him. And they have a point--there is a law of the land, and said law appears to have been broken, so supposed criminals need to be held accountable for their actions. However, I think that there's far more pathos involved on the part of the posters than they realize.

For one, consider the history of the posters: they've had to endure not only six years of a president that most feel is horribly unpopular at best and a vote-fixing mass murderer at worst, but they also had to sit through the growing neocon movement during Clinton's administration as well as his impeachment over the Lewinski scandal, not to mention the previous years the Republican spin machine had spent reframing issues and getting people to see issues fron their point of view. And now, after years of being relegated to the sidelines of political action, after watching issue after issue being defined in language they cannot tolerate, voters from around the nation rise up and toss out a large number of neocons, validating the progressives' point of view. And I can't help but think that some of these calls for "justice" aren't just justice, but revenge, an "I told you so!" to all those out there who voted for Bush and, in the mids of the posters, helped cause this whole situation in the first place.

This point of view is problematic for a couple of reasons. It's troublesome for one in that it ultimately sets someone above someone else. In this case, progressives are better than Republicans, moderates, and everyone else who sought to support Bush in some way, and they should be recognized as having been "right" this whole time. And while progressives might believe that the public supports their point of view now because of the way the midterm elections turned out (or at least is more sympathetic to it than the opposition's), the truth is that their point of view puts a lot of people in the wrong, and if there's any drive stronger than a person's need to be right, it's the drive to not be proven wrong, and impeachment would most likely be seen as the progressives' need to be right rather than as the process of justice they claim it is.

But let's move to a more Toulminian perspective (Oooo, big rhetorical terms! If you're not sure what it means, look up Stephen Toulmin). The progressive posters are operating on several warrants that a large part of the nation does not agree on:

1) The war in Iraq was not justified (and, for some, outright illegal from an international perspective.)

2) The presidential election in 2000 (and, for most posters, in 2004 as well) was stolen and not a fair process.

3) The president has repeatedly and willfully violated the civil rights of American citizens and the human rights of both Americans and foreigners.

4) Etc. (9/11 mismanagement, profiteering, and many other issues besides)

You can usually find people who might believe one of those, maybe more. But these warrants are made isolated from historical perspectives, where presidents have repeatedly broken the law in order to achieve objectives--large parts of FDR's New Deal were eventually found to be unconstitutional, for example. What Bush did is pretty reprehensible in my mind, but to go from "People voted neocons out of office" to "Most of America agrees that Bush should be pulled from office immediately" is a pretty big leap in logic. And if those calling for impeachment agree that most people wouldn't support impeachment procedures, then they're admiting that they want a minority to override the will of the majority, which goes against their idea of a goverment of the people.

But all of this boils down to the same fallacy that many religious right people also possess--that ultimately, the majority agrees with them and their point of view. And the truth is that most people aren't as extremely committed as either die-hard progressives or religious right neocons are; they're a mix of beliefs that might lean to one side or another, but aren't as committed to a political ideology as the politicians or political activists are. This is why an impeachment process will fail, because in the minds of many people, justice was served when they voted Republicans out of office and Democrats into power. Now there is a balance of power again, and if the Democrats fire up an impeachment process that, as Dickinson points out, makes it possible for Pelosi to become president (however unlikely that situation is), many will see that as the Democrats trying for a power grab, and such "misuse" of power is why they voted the Republicans out in the first place.

Could an impeachment succeed? Sure, but it has to appear impartial, and that's very difficult to do. The only president that many felt could actually have been impeached by a bipartisan effort was Nixon, and the public almost universally loathed him at the point he resigned--he had only a 25% approval rating when he resigned. But even at the height of the scandal, one in four people supported him as president.

And this is the problem I see with impeaching Bush. Even if we enact all the reform that "empowers" people--eliminating political action groups, limit lobbyists, get stricter campaign laws, and so on--we're still left with the fact that there are large groups of people in our country who do not, and will not ever, agree with you. And what the posters at Alternet almost refuse to recognize is that politics always means compromise. It has to, because otherwise we get torn apart by beliefs and balkanize, huddled behind our little borders thinking that everyone else in the world is badwrong, and only these people right here know the truth. And these posters are committing the very same error in thought that the right-wing people are: that someday, they can be right.

And this is why I'm an independent: because I continue to believe that we can all be right sometimes.

Late-night update

No subleaser yet, but the god news is that all of the news of Democratic wins weren't just media hype. As of right now, the House is Democratic, and the Senate looks like it will be; Montana hasn't been called yet, but the Democratic candidate is leading by a decent amount, and the Virginia race might not be called for a week or so, but there are enough votes seperating the two that a recount might not get called, and the winner would be Webb. So here's hoping continues on this track.

Ohio voted to raise the minimum wage, shoot down stupid constitutional amendments for allowing slot machines and a weak smoking ban, and passed a stronger smoking ban. Elaine's perspective is here--she's not as thrilled about the smoking ban as I am, but I don't think our views are too different from each other, since neither of us have any desire to take up smoking. I am rather giddy about the swift kick in the crotch voters gave to RJ Reynolds, though.

All right, time for bed. Here's hoping we wake up to a Democratic legislature.

More Renting Hate

The woman who was interested in my apartment called today to say she couldn't take it--she said that she just thought she couldn't make it work financially. I had one more call about the apartment, but the lady had a small dog, and our apartment only allows cats. So I'm back to square one. I called the campus newspaper to place a classified ad, and...well, I don't know what after that.

The problem with a one bedroom apartment is that undergraduates want the cheap cost of living with someone else rather than the freedom of living alone. I'm still holding out hope for a subleaser soon, but it's getting harder and harder to do so. It doesn't help that the landlord can't help me out in any way, and the managing company is worse than useless; after all, they have empty apartments to push, so why waste time helping find a subleaser when they know that I have to pay them anyhow?

I'm not sure what to do about the situation. I can't get out of it, but at the same time, I can't pay two rents. I guess I'll hold out hope for the ads and keep papering campus with flyers.

A Nibble!

So I was sitting down to play World of Warcraft, and I started to run an instance when my phone rang. I was hoping it would be Elaine, because I am just That Way. However, I didn't recognize the number, and it was in town.

"Hello?" I answered.

"ALEC," it said, "I AM THY SAVIOR, A POTENTIAL SUBLEASER."

Well, that's what it sounded like.

The lady who called is a grad student and is looking to move out on her own. Since she didn't want to deal with the hassle of a random roommate, she saw one of my flyers (insert silent squeeling in glee noise) and gave me a call. She sounds very nice, and I think I managed to hook her. She's coming by today around 4:30 to see the apartment.

...which, naturally, is even more of a disaster since A) I'm trying to get ready to move, and things (well, books) are everywhere, and B) I've had a horrid cold this past week that's kept me from getting much of anything done, much less make sure the used Kleenix don't clump together to form some kind of ultra-soft, aloe-coated sentience. So now I must spend the next few hours trying to get as much clean as possible while not irritating my cough. Hopefully, it'll be worth it, and I can move in a few weeks not having to worry about paying two leases.