At the end of this road, I might catch a glimpse of me

On one hand, doubling up my dentist appointment and eye exam was a great way to get everything done in a day. On the other hand, ow. My jaw and tooth are sore, my eyes are dilated and my head aches from bright lights and squinting. The good part is I ordered new glasses, they fixed my old ones for the meantime, and there's a good candidate for possible sunglasses when I go back.

So I'm in the middle of reading Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States because I've never read it in its entirety, and even the parts I did read, that happened ten years ago, and its part of a mini-class that foxycoxy and I are doing, which involves reading texts together that we've been meaning to tackle but keep putting off, then meeting for lunch once a month and talking about them. Its great and I made a syllabus. So anyway, yesterday I read the chapter all about "Indian removal" and remember how I was in a great mood like all yesterday and the day before? Well, on the way home, I felt like my guts had been kicked in. The one paragraph that I was fixated on for awhile was about how the government agreed to pay all the expenses of 'relocation' but they gave all the money to private contractors, who gouged as much money as possible and provided as little of it to the people as possible, i.e. people starved and got packed into rickety overcrowded ships and drowned and got marched through cholera epidemics, etc., so that contractors could pocket the money. I half-expected the names Haliburtion and Blackwater to appear on the page. And I suddenly just got so overwhelmed with the idea that nothing, absolutely nothing has changed in this country since the day it started, hell, even before it started, and even though its not like I walk around with happy, patriotic, well-meaning, rose-colored glasses anyway, but it still just hit me in this way of feeling so absolutely and completely hopeless. Nothing is good, people are inherently greedy and monstrous. Nothing will change. Hopeless. I was an existential wreck while walking from the bus to the house, except then I sort of let my brain go with it and piece various things together and was thinking about my own writing, what I write, what I'm drawn too, and why I've been feeling dragged down a bit by the novel recently and I realized -- it has no hope. My character, the situations, what I'm saying -- there's no hope. I mean, I have it laid out so at the end he does, but that's not enough. I need to reshape his world, which in turn is about reshaping my own framing of my world and probably why I was getting so hung up on what I was reading. Because yeah, isht hasn't really changed. But there were also people hundreds of years ago saying way more radical things about humanity and government and life than most people today would think, let alone say, so its not all about 'products of times' or whatever, and hope has some things going for it, hope is the thing with feathers. [And I don't even mean the Barack Obama hope, cause that book made me cranky and sleepy.]

Last night I was driving home from the store and heard Beyonce's "Listen" (from DreamGirls) in spanish and was amazed. Not from a technical standpoint, but from a marketing one.