Current Events Keep On Slippin' Slippin' Slippin' Into The Future

...or maybe it's the past.  Guess it depends on how you look at it.
A politically opinionated friend posted an illustration showing a bogus comparison between our two Presidential candidates.  I really wanted to respond to the, uh... well, lack of information on the left side, Romney's side, because the news and information sources I read had a lot to say about it, while the other side, the Obama side, was an imbalance of information, which, like the other side was intended to bring us to a wrong conclusion.
    I mentioned that I wanted to say something, but I knew that it would mean going back a few weeks to find the stuff I'd been reading, so I questioned whether I wanted to get into it.  What happened instead was that the conversation drifted to the Obama side and I wound up trying to provide the balance.  It took a while, but information was pretty easy to find.  But it wasn't what I wanted to write about.
    My problem here is not that I don't know the basic information.  I know that It was not Romney's business to promote the general welfare; his business was to make money.  I know that many of the businesses that Bain got involved with closed, and many relocated some of their operations overseas.  I know that that is just a fact of business because we live in a global economy, and businesses move to where the can make the most and spend the least.  I also know that if Bain got involved with the company you worked for, it's probable that IF you got to keep your job your wages would be lower and your benefits fewer.  I know that Bain made money --billions of dollars-- whether the partnering companies stayed in business or not and whether their employees stayed employed or not.  I know that the billions of dollars went to the top, and those in the middle and bottom saw little if any of it. It also appears those billions were not properly taxed, and that much of it went into offshore accounts. Little of the billions generated benefited the US economy at all.
    So does any of this matter?  We-e-ll, here's the deal. It's only business. Mitt Romney could run, among other things, on his very successful health care program in his home state, but since that's a dicey issue in the Republican Party, it's just not possible.  So he's running on his business record.  President Obama could run against Governor Romney on his support for the Ryan budget plan.  But since few people understand that the Ryan budget plan is, according to the economists, a sure fire way to get us back into a recession, if not an actual depression, the President's campaign has also focused on Romney's business record.
    But even if I know all that, I still want to be able to say that this economist, or that journalist, or the CBO, or the Tax Policy Institute, or  somebody  who has some sort of clout in this area, made this particular point in this particular report on this particular date, even if it's only because that particular writer had a certain way of putting something that I found eloquent.  My problem is that new information, new articles, new blog posts are published every day, and the one I want to find keeps sinking into the murky past, and sometimes I just don't want to spend the hours it might take to find that one piece of information or one clever phrase.
    I just need current events to stop moving so fast.

Great Expectations

Today, Wednesday the 11th, was my 50th birthday.  I think it's a big deal, and I was hoping for some kind of big event, but it never happened.  So I'm a bit depressed.

I hoped that Gaby would have contacted our friends and my friends from work and worked with them to arrange a party or get-together of some sort.  It could have been at home.  It could have been out at the club.  Some of my friends from work had actually told me that they hoped Gaby would remember to put them on the guest list.  I wanted a big event.  But it never happened.

I hoped that when we were out at the club Monday night that Gaby would mention to Shantelle, the MC, that I was having a birthday in a couple of days, but he didn't.  It didn't matter, really.  There weren't many people in the club that night.  But still, it would have been nice.  Instead, he complained that we had eloped, which sent me into such a deep blue funk that we didn't talk for the next two hours or so.  I had strongly suspected he might not have planned anything, and what he said just seemed to confirm it.  I told him I couldn't talk about it for a couple of days, in the hopes that I might be wrong-- that he had some kind of surprize planned.  I also didn't want him to try to throw something together at the last minute just because he felt guilty.

Tuesday with family was better.  Gaby made a cake, and at my request we all drove out to a restaurant that was inconvenient and expensive.  My Dad bought me something I'd been asking for for every birthday and Christmas for the last three years or so.  But all in all the evening wasn't much different than any other family night.  It wasn't a big deal.

And I had to work tonight.  I had asked for the night off, but that request was denied, or ignored, or not even noticed, or whatever it is that my boss does when he makes the schedule.  Not that it matters.  Nothing else was happning.

So I'm feeling deeply and profoundly disappointed and depressed. I'm also trying hard not to let my feelings come to the surface because I don't want anyone to think that I don't appreciate the smaller contributions to my big day.  But it still wasn't what I hoped for, and I can't help the way I feel.