Sometimes I think this country is one giant cosmic joke

You know, I've had a cold all week. I'm two weeks into a new job that's only tangentially like my old job, I have a mountainous learning curve, and I've been firing on only two cylinders all week. Add a drive every morning on New Jersey's lovely traffic-choked highways, and I'm about ready for a weekend. Tonight I got my IRA statement AND my SRA account statement from my last job, and as I wrote earlier, I'll be working until they put my dead corpse into an oven and turn it into ashes.

When the one thing that makes you grin is when people win the double-or-nothing video bonus question on Cash Cab, you know things are at a sorry pass indeed.

I shouldn't complain. I do have a job, which is something akin to a miracle these days. I work with nice, helpful people, I have a supervisor who doesn't seem to automatically assume I'm an idiot or a chronic fuckup, and I'm sure once I get the hang of things I'll be fine. It's just harder being new when you get older. So all things considered, my life is relatively good at the moment. So I really shouldn't get upset when I hear from Brad Friedman that in an upstate New York county, absentee ballots are featuring an option to vote for "Barack Osama", I just want to put my head in the oven.

You think I'm joking?

Here you go:



And here's the source.

I'm starting to feel like Margaret Tyzack as Claudius' mother Antonia in I, Claudius, when she explains her decision to kill herself by saying, "I was born into a world of people and now I live in a pack of mad dogs." No, I'm not suicidal, but living in the same country with lunatics like McCain/Palin supporters makes me think that before it's all over, the living will envy the dead. I mean, look at the kind of morons with whom we have to share this country: