down to the earth i fell with dripping wings, heavy things

I never realized how romantic economists were. There are two economists currently taking up time in my life: David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. Ricardo, a Portuguese Jew, was disowned by his family for marrying a Quaker. Mill, who suffered a nervous breakdown in his early twenties because dad James was scholastically INTENSE, had to wait 15 years for the love of his life’s husband to croak until they could “consummate” their relationship (as my professor worded it.) I’m just wondering what these guys would be like on dates. Granted, they didn’t really have dinner and movie a couple hundred years ago. But, it’s interesting. Love marriages back then, it was more like, “what love marriages?” I guess they were ahead of their time in other ways too. And, how much of a girl am I for concentrating on that? Ugh.


I miss watching ER on Thursdays. That was sort of a staple for me all throughout high school. I would peek my head into the rooms of Chicago’s County General, with all its frenetic energy, airy mechanical sounds, and moody black and green tile. It added a certain weight to my week. I miss its sleekness and how I never really related to any of its characters that much, but that wasn’t a bad thing. I also miss how every case they had would hit you square in the chest in some way. There’s just something about illness, especially when it’s unfathomably abrupt, the way the really bad days creep up on you, and you’re thinking the whole time, “What in the world did I do to deserve to endure this?” That kind of shit. The thing is, despite my following the show relatively closely, it never was a favorite show at the time. I had this weird thing about ensemble shows. Too messy. Lo and behold, most shows, like 98% are, in fact, ensemble shows. Anyway, I had this realization today when I was sitting through a panel on health care reform. It was a moment when I realized that I knew both everything and nothing on the subject and felt totally wiped out by it, like all my blood cells decided to indefinitely drift in one place in my veins. You’d probably be dead if that actually happened. Anyway. I miss having to look forward to something epic on Thursday nights, and it’s my junior year of college, and I still get bummed that high school’s over.

Another thing that bummed me out was that a man stormed out of the health care reform panel after the panelists didn’t answer his question they way he wanted them to. There was this air of awkwardness once the doors slammed. And, eventually, the room shrugged it off, but it stayed with me. I almost wanted them to address it. Maybe it’s just how I couldn’t get over how dumb that was, how disrespectful that was, and how you can’t really make anybody happy. I think it has to do with the goal of public service—it’s a line of work where, theoretically, you really, genuinely want everybody to happy. That is the aim: general opulence, as Smith puts it. You have to enter it with your own line of vision. You decided who the good guys and the bad guys are, and then it’s off you go. But, at the end of the day, somebody somewhere will still think you’re the biggest, seriously misguided stink out there.

So it goes.