Scott, Anne and I spent the weekend cleaning house. We split the duties, and collectively we swept cobwebs out of corners, removed dead weeds from the yard, mopped or vacuumed the floors, scrubbed the walls, and put away the detritus that collected in the living room over the last several months. Then we started looking ahead, planning things like where we should put mail or important papers, and finding a place for the pile of CDs that's been on the floor since we moved in. We got a new little case of shelves for the living room, and reorganized things throughout the house.

We moved on then to repositioning the furniture in the living room and the bedrooms; Scott had gotten a wall mount for the television he uses as a computer monitor, which he's been planning to do since he first moved in, and we were looking for a place to install it. We considered shifting all the furniture in the living room so that the couch could be closer to the screen, but only one set-up is possible with our house's orientation of walls, windows and electrical sockets. On the other hand, we would have to rearrange everything in the master bedroom in order to get my computer desk in there instead of the living room. We shifted everything in the bedroom (bed, chest of drawers, night table, bookshelf, and plastic drawer tower) to make space. Now it looks like a room in somebody else's house, or a new room altogether.

While I moved my computer into our bedroom, Scott used his new stud-finder to find him a stud, and a good one this time, not some wimp who was afraid of committment and was only going to stay with him for a couple of months. Scott got a position on his stud, and drilled into the wall for an anxious fifteen minutes in search of it. It turns out that in our wall, there's a lot more dry-wall than stud in the hole where the wall-mount screw had to go. There was a chance that putting the television up would cause a chunk of the wall to rip right out and crumble down onto the floor. Each of us took a flashlight and looked into the hole he'd drilled, trying in vain to make sure that the stud was reliable enough. It seemed that the only way to know if the mount would hold was to test it, and so Scott put it in and pulled down hard. Everything seemed okay, so he set the television onto the mount, ready to remove it at the smallest sign of trouble. He let it go to see if the wall could hold the full weight--and it stayed! So now we have two new-looking rooms, suddenly, after months of slowly accumulating furniture.

I've recently been aching for something to help me break the tedium of my lazy job and slow life, something that would let me feel just a bit of the excitement or wonder that I felt at times while in college, and at least occasionally after I graduated. For the better part of a year, with the exception of our visit to Maryland and New York over the winter break, I've felt dull-witted and sedentary, stuck not only in time and place but also in thought. I didn't have much that made me feel anticipation, enchantment, ambition, or really any deep emotion at all. In talking to Anne about it, she identified what I was missing: a sense of novelty. I felt pretty foolish when it was revealed to be such a trivial thing. Since I have no intention of leaving my job or house, and I can't start graduate school until Anne has gotten her undergraduate degree, I thought that I had better find something else to help me feel a passion for living.

It's a small change, the rearrangement of furniture in our bedroom, but it seems like even that is enough, at least for a while, to make me feel the wonder of being around something new. Now when I turn out the lights in bed, or first walk into the room, I feel like I'm staying in someone else's house for a while and moving on soon. I wonder if it's childish of me to cherish this feeling, but I don't really care. For now, I feel more energy to write and think creatively, just by looking up from my bed and seeing a computer where there was no computer before, or by having to recall that the bookshelf is across the room. Once the novelty is gone again, I hope I can find something more lasting and deeper to sustain me.

Lately I switched my reading habits from blogs to a news aggregator called truthout. I'm a bit conflicted about this site and others like it, since they don't give any revenue to the providers of the content (usually mainstream news sources, with a healthy dose of smaller journals like Mother Jones and In These Times). I've been thinking recently about the things discussed in articles like this one by Eric Alterman; namely that the internet is a really good source for independent political commentary, but its chances of picking up the slack from newspapers is slim. Most likely the news sources of the new century will be inward-looking and local, and broken in disparate pieces which would lack the power the last century's newspapers had to put focus on particular issues.

Anyway, it's late and I don't have the energy to write much more, but I'm going to try to keep up this blog again from now on and I thought I might as well start now.

I finally drove Hoffman home today, and he is a very good car indeed. The Washington Post, however, is very, very bad. They are the opposite of Hoffman. The editor of their Outlook section, John Pomfret, needs to go, as Bob Somerby says in today's Daily Howler. Yesterday Pomfret put into print two of the most execrable opinion pieces I've ever seen, side by side under the banner "Women vs. Women" (I ask that you not click on the links to these two articles just yet). The first, by Charlotte Allen, dredges up a catalog of ugly stereotypes about women, going all the way back to the Victorian era to reference women's supposedly frequent fainting spells (and cast doubt on the theory that it was because of their tight bodices), following up with pseudo-science by linking proportional brain size directly with intelligence, and then fatuously referencing the results of a recent study to trash women's driving skills. The second piece, by Linda Hirshman, absurdly claims that the split in the female voting bloc between Clinton and Obama in the primaries is a result of women being too flighty to band together and take power. This strange conclusion relies on the impossibly disingenuous premise that the goal of feminism is to seize power rather than to achieve equality between women and men in decision making and rights.

These two articles are astoundingly disgusting (although Allen's piece has gotten the majority of criticism), and they would not have been allowed into print if they were written about any other group of people. The Post knows that it could not get away with publishing such nasty slandor if it were of blacks, Jews, Arabs, or other such groups, because the backlash against the paper would lose them both readers and respect. It is a sad commentary on the state of the mainstream media today that they can still publish pieces that call women stupid and flighty, and not make any more substantive response to their numerous A-list blogger critics (and a flood of negative reader response) than to call Allen's piece "tongue in cheek". Firedoglake shows how phony this defense is with a description of Allen's previous work, and her obvious long-term agenda of dismantling feminism.

It seems likely, instead, that Pomfret published these articles for two reasons: pushing the Overton window, and creating a controversy to get lots of links and clicks to the pieces online to shore up their dwindling income. This is why I requested above that you not click on the links to the articles themselves. You can see long block quotes from both articles at many of the other blogs I linked to, so you can see what they're like, but I don't want to reward the Post by directing even one more reader to their page. A commenter at Feministing suggests going after their advertisers, which sounds like an excellent idea to me. Regardless of what to do about these two articles, the bullshit that they exemplify are by no means limited to the Post. You can see similar assaults against women in The New York Times style section just about every weekend; the L.A. Times published an equally insulting piece about women last Friday; big pundits like Chris Matthews, Andrew Sullivan, and Tucker Carlson all have deplorable records when discussing (or, in Matthews' case, even talking to) women. And I probably have no need to link to anything to reference the sexism on display in all facets of the mainstream media in the coverage of the Clinton campaign, which will probably become legendary.

As Somerby says in the post I linked to above (about a related but slightly different issue), "at various times, reformations of institutions are needed—reformations which may include widespread purges." I've been thinking today about how to help bring about such a reformation of the media, and really of society (although with respect to society generally the term purge has a rather different connotation that I wouldn't wish to apply). Why is this disgusting and damaging behavior still so common in 2008, and what can be done about it?