I’ve not really spent much time Thinking Big Thoughts or Making Astute Observations or even coming up with Incisive Takes On News lately. Frankly, I’ve been too busy working, too busy with my local atheist group, too busy coaching my high school mock trial team, too busy gearing up to teach a class, too busy playing Civilization V and re-reading the Baroque Cycle. I cut my index finger badly with my new ceramic santoku knife, so typing is a bit awkward, but that’s not anything I can’t work around. No, it’s stuff like my poor dog won’t stop scratching despite a trip to the groomers and a dose of anti-flea medication; I’m mourning a disastrous Packer game yesterday; the weather has been glorious, and the Freud movie analysis club did Basic Instinct. All told, living my life has felt consuming enough that I’ve not had the desire to write in a serious way for a little while.
And you know what, this is okay. We can’t all be Thinking Big Thoughts, Getting Our Collective Danders Up all the time, or even Writing The Great American Blog every day. It’s okay to drop it down into second gear, pretty much coast for a while, and not worry about kicking it up again until the need arises.
At least I know it’s not me. My right-wing friend seems to have found no better pop culture target to go after than John Cusack, my favorite writers at my favorite Big Thoughts blog find the most notable intellectual event of the day being the ten-year anniversary of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, and even fivethirtyeight has found itself reduced to musing about the Senate race in West Virginia. For a month before a significant mid-term election, there sure doesn’t seem to be a ton of exciting stuff happening. Parodies of Christine O’Donnell’s “I’m Not A Witch” advertisement are about the best thing going. Memeorandum’s lead story is the “controversial” and dark but quite funny Bansky opening sequence for The Simpsons, for crying out loud.
When the biggest thing to write about is The Simpsons and my dog’s mysterious non-flea-related itchiness, it can’t really be all that bad.
Without commenting on the merits of the piece on John Cusack*, I find it odd that conservatives feel the need to denigrate the acting and/or careers of liberal activist entertainers. There's like an implicit argument that we shouldn't take them seriously because they can't even act or whatnot, but the inverse of that is "So if they can act, or they're successful, we should take them more seriously?" Which, of course, we shouldn't.* – Okay, okay, I like Cusack. That might factor in to my need to comment on this.