Shoes

So Ladies and Gentleman,
I know I haven't written the past couple days but that is because the preparation for my new job (!!!) kept me busy.
Shoe update: Apparently the gold Laundry stillettos I wore on Friday made an impression on several people because the next day my doorman asked me why I looked so pretty yesterday, and the doorman of the building down the block introduced himself to me and said I had looked pretty yesterday too. Apparently he sees me "everyday walking by in a hurry and real intent on something." haha that was funny. True I suppose, because often I'm a bit late.
Saturday I wore the Guess black leather pointy-toe slingbacks and was chided for being "tall." I wrapped a band-aid around the sore pinky toe, which helped a lot!
Sunday I wore the Linea Paolo red alligator print open-toe pumps with my long, gray, skinny jeans and they looked well, I thought.
Did anyone see "The Office" last Thursday? I thought it was hilarious!
All for now. Mmmm I love cereal.

Stilettos and Coffee

Day two of walking on over-pressured points. I have blisters on both little toes and one big toe (yech) and walking around in socks and gym shoes made the wee toes ache. So I'm going to venture forth in some new heels and get coffee down the street. Will report back.
(1 hour later)
That wasn't too bad. I just went to the Whispers Cafe and enjoyed a chai tea latte with soy milk. Yummo. I truly was a giantess in these four inch stilletto, yellow, Laundry designed stunners. The first man I passed had his mouth agape and then closed it when I looked at him. I just had my hair cut and styled (for my new job on Monday!) and it looked fierce so maybe it wasn't just the shoes. The best part was that the heels brought my knees up enough so I could write to my friend while sitting on a bench. Hoorah!
Enough for now. Time to babysit!

Adventures in Stillettos

Hello Friends,
So today I started day one of my grand social experiment! The twofold topic: how does wearing high heels affect how others see me? and How long can I wear heels before I go berserk or my feet give out? I'm going to wear high heels for two hours every day for a week and see what happens.
I'm motivated by the 10+ pairs of heels in my closet which I seldom wear, have had for years, and can't seem to give up. Today I chose the open-toe pink suede BCBGirls four-inch heels and wore them as I walked errands around town.
First thing I noticed was that people said "excuse me" and moved out of the way when I passed them on narrow sidewalks. Perhaps because in those shoes I must stand about 6'1" and am therefore a giantess? Men looked at me more than they usually do, and all the clatter of the heels drew attention to me in a most uncomfortable way upon entering stores. So far the only advantage is having the right of way on sidewalks!
Within minutes my fourth left toe began to feel the pinch, even though I had pre-lotioned my feet. Usually when I go out and wear uncomfortable shoes I get a few drinks in me to numb the pain receptors. In the middle of the afternoon that was not an option.
The heels forced me to move slowly and to use my abdominal muscles to stay upright. I also sweat like a mofo but that could have been because of the direct sunlight. An hour later the balls of my feet were chaffed from friction and no cushioning.
Although I had more places to go, after two hours I called it quits and returned home, dragging my tired, limp feet with me.
The rest of today I'm going to wear flats. There is no way I am taking the bus in stillettos. That would not be fair to my fellow passengers! What if I should lose my balance and step on some toes! I guess high heels do make me feel a little sexier but they are also uber-distracting because I keep thinking about my feet instead of the task at hand. Maybe as the week goes on I will get better at not noticing the pain. I am anticipating that I will get all sorts of callouses and cuts. I'll keep you posted. Though really any topic about feet is kind of gross.

Latest

So I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but there has been a lot going on. First of all I've been working a lot which is pimp because it helps pay the bills (cell phone bills, health care bills, credit card bills...) Then I've been trying to land a couple part time jobs which is a little slow because the job hirer is never in as big a rush as you are! Then I've been working on marketing my calligraphy skillz (with a z because they are mad good) to paper stores and wedding planners. Then, I been applying to graduate schools (no z because they are frightening with their ability to reject) for a masters in fine arts and law.
I realized that Law might be a good idea because I want to make enough money to buy a whole bunch of park benches and name them after my father and to get a big monument at the cemetery which won't sink into the ground in 100 years like so many other ones. I was at a cemetery in Springfield, Illinois two days ago, checking out the graves of some ancestors which I had never seen before. Many of the stones were illegible and one had broken and fallen, and another was being eaten by grass. Kind of sad. I really hope that in 100 years my descendants will tend to the family gravestones. As long as someone remembers your name you never really die. In many cultures the ancestors are worshiped, not that I am advocating that because ancestors were people full of flaws and charms like everyone else, but it would be nice to be remembered.
Other things I've been doing: proctoring practice tests for the Princeton Review. I got a polo shirt with the Princeton Review logo on it, mad cool. I've been following the Cubs and Bears games. Today I noticed that I went right for the sports section of the Tribune. I have come a long way as a sports fan! jeez I am impressed with myself.
I've also been hitting up the therapy a lot, which is good for learning how to take care of oneself and to navigate the world. Today I relearned that it is best for me not to hook up with someone repeatedly unless they can offer me a relationship. What I really want in a man is someone who is proud to call me their girlfriend and who will be part of the family (i.e. come to the myriad parties throughout the year) My sister was engaged at 24 and while I am in no hurry to get married it's probably not a good idea to spend time in the vast wasteland of going-nowhere relationships. Unless I am learning something which I am not.
Haven't been exercising enough, but I will get on that on the 25th (oh tomorrow!) because that will give me a month to get in shape before my friend's wedding.
Been listening to a lot of Atmosphere. Great duo. New favorite song is "Yesterday" and I like "Shoes" too.
Alright, time for me to do something career useful.
xoxo

David Foster Wallace is dead

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

---

What Can I Do to Help Barack Win?

If Barack Obama doesn't win the election in November and I didn't try my hardest to make it happen, then I will never forgive myself. That said, I'm wondering if blogging about his policies or the hypocrisy of his opponents will do any good. I'm currently reading his memoir "Dreams From My Father" and it is really good. I mean, he struggled with his identity just like the rest of the us. He has the spark of genius because he recognizes that we have a responsibility to our community, we "are our brother's keeper." I truly believe that.
So I've contacted some people I know on his campaign and asked what I can do. I haven't gotten any concrete answers, but I will keep y'all posted. It's not like I'm short on time - I have plenty! I wore my Obama Girl tshirt today and this Starbucks barista was like "what is an Obama girl?" I was like what do you think it is, moron. So I said "It's the inverse of an Obama boy?" Undeterred, he said "what is an obama boy?" I said "Someone who supports Obama, give me a tall nonfat latte."

Birthday

I had the best birthday party last night. Seven friends joined me at Cru, and since there was a torrential downpour yesterday, the wine bar was near empty - so we all had seats and could hear each other! I saw old friends, new friends, fiances; everyone had a couple drinks - no raging drunkenness. Everyone got along really well (could be because they are all connected to the legal profession so they have that in common). I was all smiles.
Everyone left after two hours because they had to work but my friend M suggested that we get a drink somewhere else. So we went to the Sofitel bar (my favorite) and had two drinks there and caught up on our lives. By then I was tipsy. But while we were waiting for our check, two Scandinavian businessmen ask if they can join us. On learning of the celebration they order a bottle of Moet and Chandon champagne.

Categories for Scattergories

While on vacation, we brainstormed for more categories for Scattergories. The best is Meg's "Places where a woman belongs" but she came up with that a while ago.

1. Things you put in your mouth
2. Great Artists
3. Newspapers/periodicals
4. Apparel Designers
5. Words that rhyme with "duck"
6. Famous Athletes
7. Things you wear
8. Vegetables
9. Suburbs
10. Olympic Events
11. Forms of Travel
12. Meats
13. Things that smell
14. American Indian tribes
15. Valentine's Day presents
16. Cartoon Characters
17. Illegal drugs
18. quadripeds
19. Things Jake does to annoy Helena
20. Members of Congress
21. Dictators
22. Vitamins
23. Streets in Chicago
24. Pets that Erik has had or imagined
25. Swear words
26. Things you find in your teeth
27. Children's books
28. kinds of fabric
29. Acts of Kindness
30. Things that smell when left outside for three days
    

Family Values in the GOP?

Wow. I just heard that Gov. Sarah Palin's daughter is pregnant - and seventeen. Allegedly, Bristol Palin plans to marry the father. If the boy isn't up for a shot-gun wedding I'm sure the entire Republican party will make him think twice.
Gracious.
I don't think there is anything wrong with having a child so young, it's not a right/wrong situation, but I do think it will make any GOP efforts to promote abstinence-only education look really hypocritical right now.
Anyway, I can't believe that the GOP thinks women who went for Hilary Clinton might go for Sarah Palin. This represents the definition of affirmative action according to right-wingers: one woman is as good as any other. As if one could confuse Senator Clinton, who has a marked record of political activism, with the neophyte mayor of a town of 7,000! in Alaska of all places! What kind of complex social dynamics exist in Alaska? Does the state often brush with international politics? Well, Alaska neighbors Russia which is rather scary right now, to be sure. (Putin, I used to give you mad props bro, but you gotta stop invading other countries!)
Regardless, all the brou-haha will blow over soon and then the GOP will be left with the substance of the ticket: 2 liabilities.
Isn't it poetic justice that Hurricane Gustav landed on the first day of the GOP Convention? haha.