Tuesday, October 11, 2005
(9:38 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Tuesday Hatred: No Number, No Subtitle
I hate when the Tuesday Hatred is late.I would say that I hate how my sleep cycle seems to be completely disrupted lately, but I don't actually hate it. It does keep me from doing my absurdly early Hatred and Confessing, but it also allows me to stay up late. Last night, it was 11:30, and I felt as though I could continue reading indefinitely -- it feels like years since that has happened. I do hate how hard it is to get out of bed when it's cold out, but I also love it at the same time.
I hate that when I'm reading a boring book, it takes much longer to read -- even though the writing is perfectly crystal clear and there's basically nothing "difficult" about it at all.
I hate how addicted to e-mail chess I've become, and to e-mail more generally. I hate how often I forget to put the closing quotation mark in link tags. I hate that The Valve's comments apparently can't handle HTML of any kind.
I hate that one of the ferrets seems to be having some kind of allergic reaction to something in its cage. I took him out and held him for a couple minutes, during which he didn't sneeze at all, but I realized that I didn't know what I could do for him and so put him back in, at which point he immediately went into another sneezing fit. Now they're both fine, but they're poised expectantly, waiting for me to let them out. Maybe I will. The ferrets in our house are like that minor character in a sitcom who is the focus of one episode every couple seasons.
I hate that I'm already done with n+1 and have to wait six more months for a new issue.
This is something I discussed in Matt's comments, but I think I hate what RSS readers have done to my blog reading. Before RSS, I used to have three or four blogs that I would check a few times a day, because they were regularly updated, but then with several others, I would visit every few days, or even just every week, and get a real tapestry effect out of all the posts that had gone up in my absense. (Matt's site is a good example of that effect, as one of his commenters points out.) It gave the blogs more solidity. Now, I mark something as read, and it's just gone -- I suppose that there are flagging technologies built into RSS readers that could get around this problem, but I would prefer to go back to the primitive model.
In general, I think we all need to slow the fuck down.
There's always the chance that this is just nostalgia for back when blogs were cool, back before blogging started to feel like a duty -- or for back when the print media was more lively, less corporate. Blogs are becoming more "corporate" in a way, more of an establishment thing, more integrated into the established networks of advocacy and lobbying -- at least the political blogs. It happened very quickly -- now we're all shills for Google at the very least (I count myself as a shill as well -- no self-righteousness here -- I just happen to have run afowl of the terms of service), if not yet for the Democratic National Committee. I've made about $150 from the blog, through a combination of my one Google check and two donations -- this is after two and a half years. I'm not even close to breaking even. Perhaps if I'd been more pro-active about turning this blog into a money-making device, I could afford that piousejaculations.org domain. As it stands, we're stuck with boring old Adam Kotsko.
There are economies of scale that I'm not actualizing here. Synergies. There must be. Perhaps I need to critique the religious right more often. I could speak in vague terms about how they are going against the real teachings of Jesus -- which are, presumably, "good," whereas the religious right is "bad" -- but I'd have to be very careful not to mention the fact that there are real live people, even whole churches full of them, who are making a good-faith effort to live out those teachings. Christianity is the religious right, and Christ is a weapon to be used by good liberals (who know what is good, and with whom Christ must presumably agree in general -- after all, Christ was the ancient world's foremost advocate of a single-payer national health system for the Roman Empire!) against Christianity.
Good liberals understand Christ (or -- sorry! -- Jesus) better than any Christian ever could, and one thing is clear -- he didn't intend for a distinctive social body to arise that took his teachings seriously. He taught this thing that we call "love." What is love? Baby, don't be a Republican. Don't be mean. Don't be harsh. Support the welfare state. Don't let on that you're grossed out when two guys kiss. Make friends with a black person. Buy organic foods. Love. If people understood the principle of love, then all problems would be gone. Because of love. It's really remarkable, this one little word that solves all our problems.
Let's say it together: Love. Ahh. I feel better already. That's good shit. Jesus was on to something.
I think I can do this -- if I criticized those hick Christians (who live next door to the suburban liberals), while simultaneously congratulating liberals for being liberals, then I could get some serious traffic. I sign up for BlogAds, and before you know it, my credit cards are paid off and I can finally afford that jazz CD, and maybe spring for the cage-free eggs. I love Miles Davis!
What's funny about this is that I already buy cage-free eggs.
