



www.flickr.com
|



...And when he does, people are going to snicker via twitter and say vicious scornful things in their blogs or broadsheets or on the TV chat shoes. Those, dear Dickerson, are the rules of the game. Sanford has played it long enough himself to know. So your pity is probably wasted on him.The minute Sanford started speaking, the reviews poured in via e-mail and Twitter. He was rambling, confused. He didn't tear up enough when talking about his wife. He favored his mistress. He answered the questions too thoroughly. All these judgments seemed absurd. A man standing in front of a bank of cameras in the middle of a complete collapse is going to say a lot of things poorly.
Well, of course they did. They don't know the man. But they do know a little about him. For instance, that he made political hay of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair (of which he said, gallantly: "The bottom line is... he lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”) He earned conservative street cred by playing the family values card and bashing gays, but where was he this Father's Day? With his four kids and faithful wife? Um, no. With his Argentine Mistress, whom he visited on the taxpayer's dime at least three times.I'm not offering Sanford's humanity as an excuse. I'm just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford's human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he's caused, the hypocrisies he's engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.
...what he doesn't seem to get is that that's OK. We aren't being hypocritical when we indulge in "pointing at his self-indulgence." And we aren't obligated to treat the hypocrite with the same degree of respect once he has been exposed. There are actually elaborate, age-old (maybe even hardwired) rites for the ridicule of hypocrites. And that's precisely what hypocrites deserve: ridicule. They have earned it, and it's some compensation for those they contemn.What Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say is that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world. Yet in the constant flow of abuse, joke-making, and grand conclusions about his failings, it seemed everyone having a good time pointing at his self-indulgence was also engaging in a form of it.

Question of the Day: Are there such things as red flags on Craigslist Missing Connections, or are all Missing Connections red flags in and of themselves?Your were looking for a doormat - m4m (Framingham)
Reply to: pers-sgwgk-1238525880@craigslist.org
Date: 2009-06-25, 12:10AM EDT
You came into my store today looking for a doormat. I got to say bro you were hot. I got kind of nervous talking to you and glad you liked my shirt. If you see this ( I doubt you will) and want to go out sometime I would love to buy you a beer and kick it with you. Just tell me what color shirt I was wearing and what store it was.

The trouble with a kitten isIf kittens were born cats, they'd have gone extinct thousands of years ago.
THAT
Eventually it becomes a
CAT.
I'm really not a ragey person. Rage is like vomiting to me. Even when I feel like I've got to, I won't. It's just too abominable. I probably owe my aversion to raging out to my father. He was a bit of a hot-head (100% Italian — and 180 degrees from my mother's cold, northern temperament), and I found it so selfish, unbecoming and tedious that I vowed not only not to go there, but not to be there when others did.
I have been mostly successful in this, although it's not as easy as it sounds. I don't pretend not to have issues. We all get angry, frustrated, threatened. But rage takes it to a whole nutha level.
A few years back I dated a tall, incredibly handsome, and frankly brilliant local boy. He could be a little patronizing , and would editorialize unnecessarily at times. It was always happening when he put music on. We're the same age, and shared many interests, and yet he would always ask me if I knew who the artist was, and be sure to tell me how "surprised" he was when I did. We're talking no-brainers, like Chet Baker singing "My Funny Valentine" here, not Yohimbi Orchestra doing "Psychiatric Care for Geese."
Still. I endured it, and despite the fact that the sex was awkward at its best, we were sorta inching towards actually getting serious.
I'd stayed over one night, and in the morning I asked to check my email on his laptop.
The dude still had dial-up. I was like, "wow, how does this work again?"
And instead of answering "oh, just click the icon there," he unleashed a string of epithets on me that would make the ragingest Masshole on the Pike blush, and then went off to have his shower as if nothing had happened. Now, if we'd had a little thing going where we playfully insulted one another, but this was out of the blue and bordering on Tourette's. Frankly, it was shocking. And a deal-breaker for me.
The Orphanage has a hot-head-in-residence who occasionally unleashes the beast. The last time she lost it it was in front of everyone, and we all just shrank back in stunned silence. Really, it was like watching someone helpless to stop themselves masturbating on the T. We all felt like we needed a shower afterward. Rage, after all, is a kind of emotional incontinence — projectile incontinence at that. It was like being psychically spewed on. All these rancid, age-old but undigested issues of hers heaving out in flaming chunks.
(She apologized some months later, and of course we forgave, but you never forget something like that. I mean, you'll always remember that girl in fifth grade who puked all over her desk during the social studies test, and she will always be "that girl in fifth grade who puked all over her desk during the social studies test.")
Rage takes the primary emotion of anger, which, according to psychoanalysts Glick and Roose, provides motivation "when a goal is interfered with and when organisms wish to overcome the obstacle to that goal," and basically removes the primary obstacle and the goal, leaving "incomplete or disorganized forms of anger" to explode like a microwaved chihuahua all over more or less innocent bystanders.
There are loads of hypotheses regarding sources of rage. Some blame evolution, overcrowding, even brain-damage. Most psychoanalysts agree with Dartmouth's Jim Platt, who says it comes from suppressed anger about lack of control:
Frequently the underlying anger is related to a perceived loss of control over factors affecting our integrity—our beliefs and how we feel about ourselves.... Rage is the accumulation of unexpressed anger and perceived disrespectful transactions that after multiple “stuffings” finally flow to the surface. When we become enraged, usually there is the belief that someone is deliberately attempting to incite us to become angry.There's no question getting around Boston is frustrating, whatever mode of transportation you use. As a cyclist, my biggest frustration is the lack of connectivity in the broken network of bike lanes. There are several trouble spots. One is the Boston end of the Harvard Bridge. If I take the Charles River bike path, this is my on-off ramp:





But you don't have to believe Kundera, who is, after all, not a theologian. The question of whether God and his angels have a sense of humor is as old as God himself, despite the fact that, as the great Reinhold Niebuhr points out in his essay "Humor and Faith", there is only one instance in the Bible when laughter is attributed to God (Psalm 2:4) — and where it is, alas, coupled with derision (news-flash!: he may not be laughing with us, guys).Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things, make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil’s domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness).
Laughter is not merely a vestibule to faith but also a 'no-man's land' between faith and despair. We laugh cheerfully at the incongruities on the surface of life; but if we have no other resource but humor to deal with those which reach below the surface, our laughter becomes an expression of our sense of the meaninglessness of life.In other words, you can laugh out in the lobby, but once you're inside, zip it.
Our current global economic crisis has forced many cutbacks in city government. Unfortunately, this means that our mounted patrols are now being disbanded. This was a hard decision but it was better than the alternative, removing much needed uniformed officers from our streets. We are currently searching for a new and safe home for these horses. Thanks again for your concern.















So instead of health insurance, Obama is giving us a memo. He has to do something, since so far he hasn't done anything. At least not anything for us. And if you think hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, you have never met an dissed drag queen.In California, two federal appeals court judges said that employees of their court were entitled to health benefits for their same-sex partners under the program that insures millions of federal workers. But the federal Office of Personnel Management has instructed insurers not to provide the benefits ordered by the judges, citing a 1996 law, the Defense of Marriage Act.