A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

Hmmm, so nobody's very interested in reading my novel in serialized form in the blog format, it seems. Duly noted, and that's okay.

What've I been thinking about lately?

The Lakers Riot that we had here in Los Angeles, the celebratory riot in downtown, got me thinking about human nature & class issues. I was unfairly attacked when I was a teenager, by a mob of people, so my gut reaction is to be upset by groups of people giving in to mob mentality. while I've increasingly come to appreciate the spirit of anarchy, I still have mixed feelings about the Rodney King Riots. It was just so unfair that Reginald Denny got beaten up so bad, it seemed like such a misdirection of anger. But then, his beating was no worse than the beating King'd received from cops who were allowed to get away with it. My husband is usually pro-riot, so I've thought about the good sides of that riot of the nineties, and I do think that it was the result of a bunch of disenfranchised people not being able to control their rage, it released some of that rage. Maybe in the long run, that riot was useful? I'm still not sure.

The Lakers celebration riot was not political like the King riots. or was it? I think a lot of people are upset by how shitty their jobs are and healthcare and unemployment, etc., so when my husband said he thought the riots were sort of cool in a way, I thought about it and thought that it was possibly just another necessary release of people's rage. I hope the rioters didn't hurt anyone and that the property they did damage to was to cars too expensive to exist (I CAN'T STAND that some cars cost more than houses), or to Bank of America or one of the fancy new lofts in downtown that's standing where homeless people's homes used to be (where the fuck are homeless people supposed to live, when even Downtown Los Angeles's Skid Row has been gentrified?). At the same time I constantly wonder if violence can ever truly be productive.


The other thing I have been thinking about is self esteem, because when i recently posted on FB about burning my neck with a curling iron because I was feeling down on my frizzy hair and was trying to tame it, I got a lot of sweet and concerned responses, some of them including advice about frizzy hair management. The fact of how quick the responses came and how sweet they were made me think about self esteem, made me wonder how many people my age still have self esteem issues regarding their looks, and also made me wonder if my hair looks worse than i thought it did - HA!
xoxo Robin