What was Great in 08

So it’s a month late for a “year end/best of” post. But here’s my list of the my personal Best of 2008.*

Music
In 2008 I got into a few artists that I only peripherally listened to in the years prior, here are the albums of those peeps that I listened to the most last year:

Cat Power…The Greatest
The Roots…Game Theory
The Fugees…The Score

I also started listening to more Lupe Fiasco, Talib Kweli, Dead Prez, Atmosphere, but more songs than albums stand out.

New music I really dug in ’08:
She & Him…Volume One
Sea Wolf…Leaves in the River
Chris Mills…Living in the Aftermath

Best soundtrack:
The Hottest State (even though it came out in 2007)


Concerts
Sadly I didn’t see much live music in 2008. So with that in mind, here are my winners.

The best show of ’08 that I didn’t attend
Outside lands Music festival August 22-24. The line-up looked awesome and I love San Francisco, wish I could have made it.

The best show I did attend
The Feist concert at Hammerstein Ballroom on April 30th. The simple and elegant shadow-puppetry wasn’t at all as lame as it might sound, it was in fact beautiful and she had an incredibility endearing stage presence. Also, I ended up singing the version of Inside + Out on this album for about four months of last year.

Movies

In the theatre
Tie between Rachel Getting Married and Slumdog Millionaire

Netflixed
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Lars and the Real Girl


Books
2008 was the year I decided to finish everything that George Orwell has ever written. Having already read a handful of his novels, the book of his I probably enjoyed the most in 2008 was Burmese Days and Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin was a good primer with interesting insight.

Personally
Without getting too personal, here are some of my personal bests of 08…

Best Moment
Hard to say exactly, but election night was pretty awesome and my solo bungee-jumping/waterfall-rappelling/rainforest zip-lining trip was really cool too.

Biggest accomplishment
Unfortunately it’s not anything I wrote (although I did have a big feature come out in May). I think it’s my relationship with my Little Sister. We were matched last January and I was a little trepidatious about how challenging hanging out with a 13-year-old would be, I’ve been surprised how much she likes and trusts me and how even though I’m under no disillusions about “changing” her life, I do feel like having me to hang out with is something she looks forward to.


*Note: Many of these things didn’t come out in 2008, but I discovered/rediscovered them during the year, so they still fit in my personal Best Of.

How Divorce Screws Women …

…and kids too. I’m the last person to advocate that people who shouldn’t be together stay in a bad relationship, especially for the misguided notion that it will be better for the kids (it never is). But it (pretty unsurprisingly) turns out that it’s usually the woman (and almost always the kids) that get screwed over in a divorce.

Far from the cliché that women take their ex-husbands to the cleaners when they split, a new study from the Institute of Social and Economic Research found that the incomes of ex-husbands rose by 25 percent after divorce, while ex-wives incomes fell sharply, and 27 percent of the women in the survey wound up living in poverty (three times the rate of the ex-husbands).

The reason was usually the kids—the dads leave, and the moms (who may have left work to take care of the kids, or at least paused their careers) are left to take care of the kids on their own, add not only the new additional expense of more childcare, but subtract his contribution (and most likely ANY future contributions, the study found that only 31% of fathers actually pay child support for their children).

As many people who grew up with a dad who only occasionally made any kind of financial contribution can attest, it makes the business of making ends meet for single mother extremely difficult. The problem lies not only in the fact that so many men don’t bother to contribute to the raising of their children, it’s that the system works in their favor. So many payments can be missed before anything is done and the hassle of going to court is often more than a single working mother can swing, or even when she does, a ridiculous amount of time can pass before anything is done, and even when it is (garnished wages, warrants for arrest) it does little to help the family that needs the day to day money to survive. In I’m sure many cases (as was with my family), all of these avenues are pursued to little avail, many years pass, the family struggles by, the kids reach 18, the thousands of dollars owed are no longer worth it to the overworked system, and the guy gets another free pass.

Is Borders Racist?

Yes it’s a big corporation, but I've always liked Borders, it started as a small bookshop in Ann Arbor, MI, they carry Paperchase products that I loved in London…and I get free gift cards to their stores from my credit card. But today when I went to spend said gift card at the Borders in Columbus Circle something happened that made me wonder…is Borders racist?

I was buying my Little Sister the book Caucasia by Danzy Senna, a book that yes, is about race issues (amongst other things), a book I read years ago and bought in the general fiction section of a book store. But alas when I went to the fiction section to find this bestselling, award winning book…it was nowhere to be found. So I asked an employee, who looked it up and told me it was in the “African American literature” section…now this wasn’t the African American Studies section, which is totally valid and for non-fiction books…this is a section of novels….for black people.

How is this OK? They don’t put the Joy Luck Club in “Chinese American literature” as far as I could tell fiction books for adults were divided into general fiction, western, romance, (maybe thriller or mystery or something like that), and African American. This is like calling the Rap and R&B CD section “African American Music.” Just seems kind of offensive in my humble opinion. This is the first time I’ve noticed this, maybe other bookstores do it too, maybe it doesn’t bother other people…just seemed a little Jim Crow-y to me…

A short break for being earnest..

I am sometimes reluctant to be thankful, or to at least to say it out loud. When things are less than wonderful in my life, my pessimistic nature prevents me from realizing how good I really have it in the grand scheme of things. And when things are going well I don’t want to tempt fate, or look like at fool when it all goes south.

But this Thanksgiving, at this moment, I’m thankful.

Aside though from all the things that I have to be thankful for, I’m also thankful for the insight that I’ve started to gain this past year. The realization and acceptance that things don’t last, the good, the bad, the boring in-betweens— none of it will be here for very long.
.
While I’ve always been a master of change, I’ve also always craved permanence. But this year, for no one particular reason I’ve started to realize and become OK with the fact that life isn’t made of forevers, it’s made of “for a little whiles.” That can suck, sure, but it can also be pretty awesome and this year, in my small life, it hasn’t been ½ bad.

Mission Accomplished!

I know America will come down from this high, I know in the next eight years (that’s right I’m going to just assume) there will be times when I disagree with and get annoyed with our president. But right now, and certainly last night, I am so happy and so proud of my country for the first time is such a long time.

My night last night was surreal, I traveled to different parts of Manhattan and the crowds and feelings in the streets and wide spread good will was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

Aside from the tears and dancing (there was A LOT of dancing) and shouts, here are a few things I am thinking about today:

• It is an amazing feeling that we got together and elected a black president, but I’m really wary of all this “there’s no racism in America anymore” thing. Yes there is, there’s a lot of it both blatant and institutionalized, and the implication that with a black president, we’ve “made up for it” and no one should be concerned anymore is very dangerous.

Which brings me to…

• I am so so scared about someone shooting this man; even last night as he was giving his acceptance speech, I kept thinking, “watch out!” I think they should get him a bulletproof bubble for public appearances.

• Did you all hear the pocket of McCain peeps booing when he mentioned Sarah Palin? I think he would have lost without her, but you know everyone on his side is just kicking themselves about the stupid lady-pandering choice.


• California voted to discriminate against gay people. I really don’t get it, I don’t see why anyone would care, how people in love could be a threat to anyone. And in CA of all places, it’s just sad.

• Also a good day for newspapers finally!


• It must really suck to be a McCain supporter, especially in New York City, I guess they mostly stayed indoors. Still, I think there's one thing we can all agree on, thank God, this f-ing election is FINALLY over!

• I wish the new President started the day after he was elected and not in a couple of months...speaking of which, remember that fuckwit that's still in office? He called Obama last night, and called Michelle Obama a "good bride" WTF!?!

You got a lot of work ahead of you Mr. Obama, but you’ve given a lot of people a lot of hope, not an easy thing.

Baracking My Vote!

Of course I voted today, no points for guessing whom I voted for. I only waited in line for about a half hour (compared to the 2-3 hour waits some of my friends have reported). Now I’m only a mild conspiracy theorist, but I think it’s clear that I’m on some sort of government list. I’ve been registered at my current address for well over two years, but this is the second time that I’ve voted that my name is mysteriously not on the books (despite having a voter registration card with all the correct info). So again I had to vote on the paper write-in sheets that I’m pretty sure they don’t count, and didn’t get to use the fun machines from the 1950’s that I’m also dubious about… oh well at least I get free coffee and free ice cream…

Undecided “Real” Americans

Two things baffle me in these days so close to election.

1) The fact that McCain’s campaign seems to think it’s a good idea to insult and alienate possible voters by saying that they aren’t American or aren’t “real” if they live in an non-rural area (note to McCain: there’s lots of peeps in the rural areas think you are full of shit too, so your “real America” perspective has a few holes in it).

2) That anyone is actually authentically undecided, or can be swayed by anything that either one says or does at this point. I think that “undecided” people just don’t want to tell you that they are voting for McCain because they don’t want to have to defend a choice that makes such little sense. That or they really want the poo poo platter.