Tucson thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving morning, after some trouble with the rental car company that I won't get into here, I was on I-8 East to Tucson. It was a bright sunny day- like every day in Yuma- and the air was cool and out on the shiny open road I was in a state of unexpected exhilaration. I think I'd marry Pat Green if he wasn't already married, which I'm nearly certain he is, and I could get him to leave Texas, which is highly unlikely judging from how much he sings about that vast expanse of cowboy land. Anyway. His music makes me inexplicably happy, and I was belting out "three days" and I even smiled at the Border Patrol agent, yes sir I am an American citizen and I will drive safe, thanks, roll down the window and turn up the music and off into the rocky bare mountains that hem in Yuma on the eastern side. Off to Tucson, you don't need that whiskey no more Pat and thank God I'm alive and whoops I left my cell phone on my kitchen table and it's too late to go back and get it now!
Off to the homey house just west of the soft pink Veteran's hospital where I will be greeted by the people who knew me as a baby and their ridiculously friendly and impossibly endearing dogs who are only spoken to in Spanish, the formal tense, where I will be loved and fed well and treated as a daughter. Then to spend Thanksgiving drugged with turkey and pie and red wine and curled in a hammock overlooking Tucson's sparking lights on the back porch of the house with dog footprints in the living room tiles, laughing as the Thanksgiving guests make up strange dances to Barbara Streissand in the light of the chiminea. To my dear friend Roseanne, the best conversations you ever had over omelets, we'll stop eating so many eggs tomorrow, really. Drive up to Mount Lemon, desert to sky forest and breathtaking mountain views in 30 minutes, Laura I know it's amazing but please look at the road. Wandering around the historic neighborhoods south of the University, adobe houses painted bright colors, porches festooned with wind chimes and Mexican tiled windowframes.
I fall more in love with this city every time I come. Of course, the life I envision for myself there will be good and frustrating and excruciating and beautiful in ways that I cannot predict. But I'm looking forward to it. To the life God is preparing for me there already.

the internet

I have not written in a while, not because of a lack of time, but rather of inspiration. Work continues to be composed of long stretches of tedium broken by ocassional flashes of usefulness and interest. I spend too much time on social networking sites, obsessively balancing my checkbook, checking the weather in every city I know anyone, and (confession time) even sporadic and unsucessful ventures into on-line dating. I am convinced that the internet is the biggest time-waster known to mankind, above TV and text-messaging even. Whole hours can slip into oblivion, and I emerge neither wiser nor happier, eyes hurting from computer screen strain. Not that the internet is completely a bad thing- on the contrary, life without it seems overwhelmingly and impossibly daunting.
I read an editorial, about how the Internet age has contributed to the growth of libertarian politics by creating a generation of people who are smart, well-informed, and think that they don't need anyone else. A bit scary really. I would also say that it has created a generation of people who are connected to mind-boggling numbers of people like never before, but at a superficial level. So have we really gained anything? A blessing and a curse. Most of the time I think that the Internet is more of a blessing than a curse, but sometimes my weighing of the two sides favors the curse opinion.
When I step back and think about it, it's amazing how willing people are to abandon all privacy, bare their secret musings, desires, and interests, all in the most public of all mediums. In that respect, the Internet operates a bit like a mask, allowing people to be more open, more daring perhaps, than they would be in real life. When you meet someone in real life, do you immediately tell them your favorite things, all the details of your personality, even your income? No. But all that info is right out for everyone to see on Myspace or Facebook, and noone thinks this is weird. And I'm right there with them.
I'm not going anywhere in particular with this. And I think I'm done now. Like I say, lack of inspiration. I'll try to get inspired more often. In the meantime, I'm going to try to have more of a (non-internet) life.