OBAMACARE FTW!!!!

So, I was driving to work at the ungodly hour of 8am and listening to NPR in the car when I catch the middle of a breaking news story about the Supreme Courts decision on Obamacare. All I hear at first is something about the Court deciding that congress didn't have the right to mandate insurance via the Commerce Clause.  I was unbuckling my seatbelt and stepping down on the accelerator looking for the nearest concrete structure to drive my car into when the radio goes on to say that the law was upheld based on the authority of congress to impose taxes.  What a bizarre way for the supreme court to legislate from the bench...but whatever, i'm happy.

 Here is a picture of me drinking and driving in what appears to be a snowstorm.  The wine was a 2008 Martin & Louis Cab. I do not recall taking this picture. 

"On a white, sandy beach, of Hawaii"

India

Here is the kind of thing one will encounter in India:

'tis a sacred cow, wandering around a train station, shitting wherever it pleases.

 Other times, one will encounter colorful moments while sipping chai on a fortress rooftop: 

What do you do when you're feeling sad?

If I'm feeling down, I drive to the 24 hour Kinko's and photocopy something. 

Pizza salad

I made a pizza salad today.  For those who don't know, a pizza salad is the dish you end up with when your pizza dough sticks completely to the pan during baking and you end up scraping all the toppings and whatever dough is salvageable into a bowl and eating straight with a fork.

Since I learned that someone I know is going to India I've been thinking about the country and I find myself romanticizing the time I spent there.  I say romanticize because the truth of the matter is, traveling is hard work, especially in a country like India

It's funny how I can look back on the times crammed into a smelly, dirty, cold passenger train full of rude peasants with nostalgia.  While conveniently forgetting about all the sleepless nights and cramped bus seats and dirty beds and cold showers and confusion I dealt with along the way.  Except I haven't really forgotten those difficulties.  I just remember them with more fondness than I actually felt at the time.

I'm not sure what the word is, but there's a term for this tendency to look back on difficult times with undue positive perspective.  It's done all the time with war.  War and soldiers have always been romanticized, people need to be more skeptical about anything that portrays war as a noble and worthwhile endeavor.  Maybe we wouldn't be spending 700 billion dollars a year on defense if war was looked upon with more suspicion.

Anyway, someone I know (not a family member) has cancer and it makes me sad.  People die.  That is life.  parents, friends, aunts, uncles, grandparents.  everyone poops, and everyone dies.  I like to believe I am more aware of death than most people; so what does it mean that I still find it so jarring to encounter death, in life?  Does this mean the lessons of death are lost upon me?

And the injustice of our health care system has never seemed more perverted and evil than it does to me right now. So, right now, I am wondering what my life will look like in the end.  If I make it to the point where I die from age related diseases and system failures, who will take care of me and how am I going to pay for it?

This was an official India Immigration office, I shit you not.  This was at one of the Nepali-Indian border crossings.

Anyway, I have a ton of advice I'm going to share with that girl who is going to India.  I'm so excited for her, and a little jealous...take me with youuuuuuuuu!  

I laid in bed for about an hour after my alarm.  I was idly picking through my thoughts and feelings, listening to the rat in the ceiling scurry around.  My 60 year old mother limped into my room and asked me to carry some heavy things for her. As I carried the boxes to her car it started to rain.   The drizzle plus the steady East winds made me shiver because I was only wearing shorts.  I checked my to-do list for the day and made one phone call; the rest of the items can wait until later in the day.  For the moment, I want to procrastinate and cogitate.

I want to believe in happy endings.  I really do. 

Tomorrow, everything will be better. I promise. 

Those token attractive girls at dinner parties or other large gatherings of friends and family who look bored or are uninterested in talking or socializing, who often sit with their arms crossed, with a haughty look on their face, who dress and act in such a way as to imply they have a high opinion of their attractiveness and are stuck up, yet lack any discernible personality...I wonder now if these girls are just actually really shy and I was guilty of fundamental attribution error. 

Aloo Gobi

I made the traditional India dish "Aloo Gobi", potatoes cauliflower. It turned out surprisingly tasty.  It was very satisfying seeing those raw ingredient turn into aauthentic-looking Indian food right in my own kitchen.  I had doubts about my ability to make such ethnic food.

Protip: Turmeric stains everything yellow.

I kind of want to go back to India now.  Somebody slap some sense into me.

Good news!  The brothers/hosts of Car Talk are retiring.  God, I hated that show; their stupid snorting laugh, their unfunny jokes, the way they laugh at their own unfunny jokes, their increasingly outdated and irrelevant advice in this age of computerized, proprietized, high tech motor vehicle repair.