Tuesday, July 26, 2005
(8:48 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Tuesday Hatred 10
Imagine -- ten weeks of hatred. It could be the title of a novel, an epochal novel. I thank everyone, from the depths of my heart, for their faithfulness to the labor of hatred.I hate that it's really hard and really slow to start reading a "real" book in a foreign language for the first time. I was thinking that in the transition from "exercise mode" to "actual reading mode" in French, I had made some missteps that I could avoid with German, thus rendering the transition from repetitive German exercises to a reading of one of the greatest stylists of the German language smooth -- indeed, transparent. Doubtless I did make some missteps, but dictionary reading is dictionary reading, and the only way out is through. I'm at a page an hour as it stands. I have approximately 180 pages to read in the next 33 days. I'm sure the speed will pick up.
I hate that I'm so averse to travel. I really dread it any time I have to take a trip, particularly if it involves driving. In fact, I'm going to edit that: I hate driving. I need to go grocery shopping, and that feels like a "trip" that I want to avoid (I also need to get an oil change, preferably before this weekend, when I am driving to northern Michigan). Tonight a friend is visiting from out of town, and I decided that we would travel by public transit strictly because I didn't want to risk getting stressed out and angry about not being able to find a parking spot, etc. -- I would much rather sit in one place where I knew for a fact that a bus was eventually going to come, rather than wandering endlessly in Lakeview, saying, "No, that's a fire hydrant, no, this is permit-only, no...." It gets to a point where this fatalism sets in -- the sure sign that a given spot is "not a spot" is that it is, in fact, open.
Also, I feel like I'm getting robbed every time I buy gas. Not only are prices really high (by historic American standards -- I know that Europeans have been paying the equivalent of $40/gallon for the last century and that they're morally superior for doing so), but they seem to be fluctuating a lot more than at any time in my life. We're talking a difference of $0.20 a gallon in the space of a day or a few blocks.
I'd like to sell my car, but that feels too much like an IMF austerity measure. Once Anthony and Hayley go to England, though, I'm either moving to Hyde Park or to an apartment within two blocks of a train stop. They have decently priced studios right in actual Logan Square, as opposed to this shadowy ambiguous area where I live where they called it "Logan Square" on Craigslist because they were hoping to attract "Logan Square" people rather than "Humboldt Park" people. Through the dynamic power of capitalism, however, the "decently priced studios" thing might disappear by the time I need to avail myself of it.
I hate the commercials for the Republican candidate for governor of Illinois. I also hate the Six Flags Great America commercials, for the song and especially for the mascot -- Worst Mascot Ever.
UPDATE: I also hate how on all the news shows last night, they were acting as though the AFL-CIO split was self-evidently a problem for the labor movement (this was Fox, so of course they hoped it was the crushing blow for labor and for the Democrats). Guys: the Teamsters and the service workers unions are still unions. I don't think they lost any members in the institutional transition. If labor unions stop supporting Democrats, who have been really tepid in their support for labor anyway, that means they'll have more resources to devote to organizing workers. Sheer ignorance.
