Insured.

The insurance bill is not as bad as it could have been. Actually, it's better than I expected but more than I hoped. This is all due to my amazing ability to tell my agent that I do still live in Thurston County, a location I saw the back of in June of 1999. To be fair and look less like a liar, she's never pushed very hard on that.

And most of the accidents I've been in (yes, there is a most, and it's higher than one) have never gone to insurance, and if they have, not to my insurance. The only accident I was in that would have gone to my insurance was when I speeded up on an onramp and missed the fact that the cars in front of me were stopped. I paid for the damage to the car I hit out of the payment I got from when some woman in an Expedition backed into me a couple days earlier.

Better, though, than the three-accidents-in-two-days routine.

No, I probably shouldn't drive. Most of my stories now start with "No shit, there I was backing up in the parking lot when I hit the guy's car..."

It was more interesting when they started with "No shit, there I was in a game and the GM had a gun on his hip..."

(no subject)

Is giving someone complete, unfiltered access to your LJ more or less intimate than sex?

Discuss.

(no subject)

You know...listening to the debates tonight, I really, really am gripping my firm belief about presidential elections tightly in the hopes that it comforts me.

I don't like either of the candidates. GW, not at all, John Kerry, not much. (Yes, it's the vice-presidential debates, but given how often they're referring to the primary members of their tickets, I'm not entirely sure that Cheney and Edwards are different people from them.)

I hate having my voting option being to vote against someone, rather than for someone (or something.) I want desperately for Kerry to get elected, if only so that in eight years we can have a more liberal president, but it's hard to want to go through that period with someone you don't agree with at all.

I have to write up a couple of political pieces - one I've been mulling on for a while and one that came up when I realised that really, there's no difference between Kerry and Bush on the Palestinian issue. And for anyone who actually believed Edwards' bullshit about Israel having the right to defend itself, let me just say a few words.

Are. You. Out. Of. Your. Mind?

The Israelis have the right to defend themselves, certainly. The Palestinians have a right to defend themselves, as well. This is the bit that seems to have gotten left behind. The Israelis have, indeed, had three children under the age of twelve killed in the second Intifada. The Palestinians, in contrast, have had THIRTY NINE children under twelve killed, BY ISRAELIS.

There is no acceptable two-state solution, not even if Sharon pulls out of Gaza - although thank god if he does, since the area is more heavily populated than almost anywhere else in the world. The two people are, due to the Israelis, too entwined to make a two-state solution work. Cheney and Bush, if they were capable of entertaining a thought that didn't actually have to do with corporate wealth, might want to bear that in mind, but then again, I know they don't. And I liked how Cheney made the comment that Bush supports a two-state solution. So what? If you're going to talk it, walk it too, motherfucker. Bush has done nothing that he promised to do regarding Israel, and abandoning the roadmap to peace midway does not mean to me that he supports much of anything.

I hate politics, I hate that we're bound by them, even as I find them inordinately interesting. But the mere subject of politics makes my blood boil - my hands are shaking as I write this. I cannot conceive of four more years under Bush/Cheney - but I can only marginally conceive of eight under Kerry/Edwards.

Breathe.

All I can do is believe and hope and work for the idea of a more liberal president at the end of this, and remember that we cannot run an amazingly-liberal candidate against someone as knee-jerk conservative as Bush and expect to win. But Jesus fucking Christ it hurts to consider that we have either four years of neo-con bullshit ahead of us, or else (hopefully, ironic as it is) eight years of neo-liberal bullshit.

Anything prefaced with neo is not good. Not good at all.