Love/Hate

I love flu shots. I love the idea of being protected from a nasty cold that would sack me like a rookie quarterback for a week and a half, minimum. To be in graduate school is to be in a two-year-long haze of not enough sleep, not enough vitamin C, too much vitamin coffee--basically I'm a compromised immune system on legs.

I hate shots qua shots. Hate needles, hate pokings with sharp objects of any kind. I tried to cure this by giving plasma in college then spending the money on sushi. Now, I often get an irresistible craving for sushi after any and all injects. Come to think of it, I had sushi for lunch after my flu shot.

I love my imagination--I have great, trippy dreams that I'm genuinely sorry to leave. Last night I dreamt about the Doctor--the British one, who travels through time.

I hate that I imagine things turning out badly far more often than the opposite. I was convinced I'd all-but-failed a tricky Hitchcock midterm two weeks ago. Nope, did fine. I was convinced the Republican gerrymandering had turned the country into a partisan battlefield. Nope, turns out the gerrymandering may have cost the Republicans a lot of seats. (Where did I learn this? In the Wall Street Journal of all places. Although I am always telling people that the reporting bears no resemblance to the editorial pages.)

I love my iPod. I'm now addicted to a few hands of solitaire and 20 minutes of an audiobook as I fall asleep every night.

I hate that my iPod has a life expectancy of 8 months (it's 16 months old, and the little guys are known for dying the day after their 2 years of coverage expires.) I just pray it holds out until the "true video ipod" arrives. I bought our current iPod for a cross-country roadtrip, and it salted my biscuits but good to discover four months later that it had been replaced by a smaller, lighter machine THAT PLAYED TV. Damn you to hell, Apple. But seriously, hurry up with that true video iPod, because I can't wait to buy one.

I love Senator Barak Obama. No joke: Every time I hear him speak, tears well up in my eyes. I know now what it means to live in a time with great leaders, and what it must have felt like to lose JFK, MLK, RFK in the space of ten years.

I hate that I cannot delight in Sen. Obama's work without dreading a) the day he gets nailed for a dumb mistake or b) his never getting nailed for a dumb mistake and some idiot takes a shot at him. Maybe this comes from growing up in the wake of the aforementioned assassinations--and living with a man who has never gotten past the death of John Lennon--but I just assume this world is too screwed up for someone like that to get very far. I was openly relieved to read in the Chicago Tribune that Obama had covered part of the cost of a fence between his property and the parcel next door--and said parcel belonged to one of the 8 million corrupt Illinois politicos wandering around Chicago. It was a small mistake, easily rectified, and Obama wrote a letter acknowledging as much. A couple more like that--giving a Girl School $5 extra change for a couple boxes of Thin Mints, putting too much postage on a postcard--and I'll sleep better at night.

I love that I spend my days making stuff up and trying to get good enough at it that someone would pay me to make stuff up for them.

I hate that it took me this long to figure out that this is what I wanted to do with my life.