If it’s ideological, it’s not funny.

(NBC hasn’t entered the 21st century and still doesn’t allow any of its videos on Youtube, so you’ll have to suffer through their version here instead of me embedding it.)

A while ago, Fox News created a show called The 1/2 Hour News Hour. It was explicitly conceived as “a conservative version of The Daily Show,” and it failed miserably. The reason was not because of some vast liberal conspiracy against the conservative movement.

It was because the show wasn’t funny.

I’m not going to bother to really get into a discussion of how liberal The Daily Show really is, because if you agree with me, I’m preaching to the choir, and if you don’t, it’s unlikely I’ll change your mind. However, if you watch it honestly, you’ll realize that Jon Stewart does, indeed, make fun of Democrats quite frequently. He also makes fun of Republicans more, but that’s because “as we all know, reality has a well known liberal bias.”

In short, the reason that The Daily Show is funny is because it places more importance on being funny than it does at being liberal. The reason that The 1/2 Hour News Hour isn’t is because it didn’t.

That’s what I was reminded of when I watched the opening to Saturday Night Live. The only reason that I watched is is because Senator Clinton brought it up in last night’s debate; other than that, I really don’t think SNL is the slightest bit relevant anymore and it hasn’t been funny since Tina Fey left to create her own much funnier show.

The opening confirms that for me.

Obviously, I’m biased because I’ve supported Obama since before he made the decision to run for President. I’m not arguing that the media doesn’t treat Obama better than it treats Hillary; I don’t think it does, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s something completely valid for a campaign spokesperson or a political analyst to bring up — but not a comedy show.

The skit was not funny; it was the same joke for five minutes and it went on way too long. The skit would have been much funnier if they had poked fun at both candidates. Instead, it let ideology get in the way and didn’t mock the fact that somehow, every time Hillary seems to get cut off, “it’s too important” not to let her finish her thoughts — or any other number of things that she does that are worthy of satirizing. A much funnier — and fairer — skit would have made fun of both candidates equally. To not poke fun at Hillary’s debate performance at all is to suggest that nothing she does is worth mocking.

Being funny always has to trump your own opinions. At first, I just thought I was being too sensitive and imagining that they were putting their personal preferences first, but it made me even more uncomfortable when I saw Tina Fey’s endorsement of Clinton during Weekend Update, complete with outdated and irrelevant reasons as to why more people aren’t supporting her. Tina, I think you’re pretty fucking awesome, but you don’t get it. The vast majority of people are not supporting Obama because Clinton is a woman. They’re supporting him because her positions suck.

I love the fact that Hillary is a woman. If she somehow managed to get elected (which I think is highly doubtful, especially now that’s she insulted every state except the ones that voted for her), I would be irrationally happy simply because she’s a woman. If she were a man, I wouldn’t just dislike her — I would refuse to vote in the general election if she were the nominee. To me, her gender is her only redeeming quality.

I’ve never understood the argument that feminists should vote for her because “it’s time for a woman to be president.” Well, sure, but how is it any less “time” for a black man to be president? Isn’t the reality that we shouldn’t be basing our votes on identity politics? Isn’t it the height of feminism that women across the country are judging her based not on the reproductive organs she happened to be born with, but on the content of her character and her positions? A Maureen Dowd pointed out around the time of the South Carolina primary, “It’s odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line.” I don’t think that’s feminism at all. Yes, Tina, it is a bad thing for there to be a married couple as co-presidents, because it implies that a woman isn’t capable of doing the job alone. Is it really so radical to want the first female president to have gotten there without help from her husband that’s more than love and support?

It’s okay, though. We all know you’re secretly going to vote for John McCain, anyway.

Oh, Michael.

I am completely in love with Irish step dancing. Aside from the fact that I genuinely do like the music, I think the pageantry of things like Riverdance is hilarious. There’s always one moment in any Riverdance routine where the lead, alone on the stage, will do a step and then it will be repeated by A HUNDRED PEOPLE OUT OF NOWHERE. And then the curtain inevitably comes up and you’re supposed to be surprised even though they pull that trick on you at least five times during the show.Also, Michael Flatley is a god among men.

There’s some genuinely good dancing in the beginning, but I can understand how it might not be worth watching without the best dancer alive, so skip to the two-minute mark to see the Lord of the Dance.

I guess you have to understand how Riverdance really took the United States by storm in the ’90s, at least in Irish strongholds like Boston. But I find it hilarious that Michael Flatley was such an incredibly controversial figure. People were saying things like, “But those billowing shirts! And he moves his arms!” The horror!

Also, the man is incredibly conceited. He gave an interview with Diane Sawyer where he said, without a trace of irony, “I am the best dancer in the world.” Even after she named a number of comparable dancers, including some of his colleagues at Riverdance and another dancer who went on to break his taps-per-minute world record, he refused to back down. Eventually, he quit Riverdance because he STILL didn’t think he was getting enough attention. So he went on to form his own show, which he called “Lord of the Dance,” of course.

The man is wearing eyeliner and a gold lamé shirt. He’s dressed like a rock star for what is unquestionably the nerdiest form of dance this side of Swan Lake. How can you not love it?

Costumes

This is Barack Obama dressed in traditional Somalian garb during a visit to Kenya. It does not mean he is a Muslim.

This is Hillary Clinton at a costume party. It does not mean she is a witch.

Any questions?

Democracy may have failed as an export, but Hummer-scale greed is clearly thriving.

Unbelievable.

We get a lot of flak for our materialism in America. A lot of it — probably 95% of it — is justified.

Most of that materialistic crap benefits absolutely nothing and no one, for every $5,000 Birkin bag, there’s also a product like (RED). As annoyed as I am by Bono and his pompousness, the reality is that those sanctimonious t-shirts actually do benefit people suffering from a deadly disease.

The man standing behind this license plate paid $14 million dollars for it in a charity auction. This man may not flaunt his money with his appearance (though that may be a worldwide sign of the difference between rich and wealthy), but the despicably smug look on his face says it all. This man is 25 years old and he spent more money on a license plate than the majority of Arabs (or Americans, for that matter) will earn in their lifetime.

Well, at least it was for a charitable cause, right? Was it for women’s rights? HIV education? Reparations to Alexandre Robert or a legal fund for the tourist with a speck of marijuana on his shoe?

No. It goes toward victims of traffic accidents.

In general, I think it’s pretty much a waste of time to compare one person’s suffering to another’s, but I’m going to make an exception for this. There are a lot of tangible ways that $14 million dollars could benefit Arabs throughout the Emirates and the Gulf. It could save lives. Instead, Saeed Abdel Ghaffar Khouri decided to spend it on a $14 million dollar hunk of plastic with a number painted on it. And I would bet $14 million from my money tree that it’s for just one of his many cars. In a lot of ways, this makes me angrier than hearing about women who are harassed if they don’t wear hijab. There’s no cultural relativism here; this is just the good old fashioned lifestyle of the obscenely rich, and it’s the same in Abu Dhabi as it is in L.A.-la Land.

As Khouri’s brother said, “We wanted to be No. 1.Who doesn’t like to be the best in the world?”

007.

Posting those West Bank photos in the last entry made me realize that I never really wrote about my trip other than the travel journal I kept while I was there, which I might transcribe into here eventually. It’s a little late to do a day-by-day summary now, plus that would be really boring for me, so I’ll just post a few photos. Not all of them are as interesting as the West Bank ones, but at least I wasn’t on a moving tour bus when I took them.

These were the first soldiers we saw in Israel. Because Bush was there for the first two days of the trip, the number of IDF soldiers and police that we saw was about equal to the amount that I was expecting to see. After he left, the number dropped significantly, although there were still way more than you would ever see in America (at least until Bush declares martial law, har har).

This is Haram al-Sharif, or the Temple Mount, depending on who you’re talking to. On our second day, when one of our Palestinian speakers asked where we had been the day before, one of the guys on the trip said we had been to the Temple Mount, and he replied, “You mean al Haram? It hasn’t been a temple for 2000 years.” I’m sure you all know that there aren’t really any images in Islam thanks to Denmark, so there’s a lot of really beautiful calligraphy that you can see if you look at the wide blue band with the white scribbles on them at the top of the first level and below the dome. Walking around the plaza was a pretty surreal experience for me, especially imagining how different this site must have looked on the first day of al-Aqsa Intifada. A Palestinian Israeli guy spent about ten minutes telling us different things about it and afterwards when we thanked him, he said, “I’m doing this for free, for no money, because I only want to ask you one thing. Please pray for peace to come to Jerusalem. I’ve lived here all my life and I’m beginning to think that I will never see peace in my lifetime, so whatever your religion is, please pray.”

Muslim fundamentalists get a lot of (well-deserved) crap for the way that they treat women, but visiting the Western Wall showed a side that almost always goes undiscussed. The Israeli government lets the Orthodox rabbis run the holy sites, which means that when you visit the wall, there’s a separation between the genders. On the other side of this fence, there are some Israeli boys having their bar mitzvah ceremonies. Their female relatives have to stand on plastic chairs in order to see, even though most of these families are probably secular, because if they weren’t, they’d have the bar mitzvah at their temples and not at a national holy site. Women also have to whisper when they pray because their voices are “distracting.”

Every crack in the wall has a prayer in it and there are tons on the ground where they’ve fallen out. Apparently, the rabbis have a special ceremony to dispose of them — maybe they go in a holy dumpster. (You think I’m kidding.)

Speaking of the holy dumpster…

This was taken in the Orthodox neighborhood that we visited. You can dispose of old prayer books and things like that in it.

These were some cool dudes walking on El Wad Road in the Arab Quarter. I think they were the first people wearing keffiyehs that I saw. It’s funny how you take pictures of things that become commonplace afterwards.

Hijab models in the shouk.

Which would be worse: a box left lying on the ground for a toy AK-47 or a box for a real one?

I had seen plenty of ultra-Orthdox by this point (some with some really ridiculous payos — the sideburns), but this was the first guy who I was able to get a picture of quickly enough that I knew he wouldn’t see me and think I was an ignorant American tourist. Which I am, obviously. The strangest thing was seeing the ultra-Orthdox talking on their cellphones…probably because I was unconsciously associating them with the Amish.

Obligatory camel photo:

We didn’t have time to ride it, but considering the guy was dragging it around like a pony at a birthday party, I’m not sure I would have wanted to. Next year in Jordan, I guess.

We took a tour of the security barrier with an IDF spokesperson, who wasn’t as biased as you would have expected. This is a pretty smooth running checkpoint, obviously, or we wouldn’t have visited it.

This is from the University of Haifa (sort of a suburb of Tel Aviv). The third farthest white blob is in Lebanon. Gives a little context into why Hezbollah is such a problem for the Israelis.

This is the only modern-day propaganda I’ve ever seen, from when we visited the Golan Heights. It went from “Israelis skiing! Israelis windsurfing! Israelis swimming in the Dead Sea!” to “THE SYRIANS WANT EVERY LAST DROP OF WATER IN THE GOLAN” in about ten seconds. They filmed this in the ’90s, when it seriously looked like Israel was going to return it to Syria.

I love that they felt like it was necessary to include “guns” on this. This was outside of Carpaneum, the town where Jesus lived by the Galilee. Any time our guide talked about Jesus, he would always say, “allegedly,” like — “Carpaneum is the town where Jesus allegedly walked on water.”

This — seriously — was the Tree of Peace…

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The tomb of the guy who started it all and the tomb of the guy who almost fixed it all. Rabin was the first person to break the uniformity and not have a tomb that looked like Herzl’s.

006.

Here are my photos from the West Bank. Sorry for the crappy quality of the first few photos, we were still on the bus. In case you were wondering, this is NOT from a Taglit/Birthright trip — although if you know anything about Birthright, you probably know that they would never go to the territories. I went on a ten day academic tour of Israel with my college.

Going through the checkpoint into Bethlehem.

Bethlehem is one of the only places in the territories where tourists still go, which is part of why it’s written in English. The red that’s covered up says “to exist is to resist.”

Stubborn?

These were plastered on the separation barrier/fence/wall/etc. I had no idea what they were, feel free to enlighten me. I also liked the red target that says “bomb here.”

This was taken at the Dheisheh refugee center.

That’s Handala standing in front of keys strung together with barbed wire (lots of Palestinian families still have the keys to their old homes).

Our guide told us that this was the painting of a martyr who was from Dheisheh and the red was the names of the other martyrs who had died from the camp. He failed to mention how he died, so it’s just as likely that he was killed by the IDF as it is that he was a suicide bomber. My guess is that he was killed, though.

I’ll post more pictures soon, these ones are interesting but I have some others that were much better taken.

005.

This hasn’t been a great break so far. I guess nothing will really compare to the friends and freedom of the summer. That break was the perfect coincidence of people and parents going away and warm weather and no restrictions. Now everything is cold and we can’t hang out outside and friends are gone. And I’m filled with the unmistakable sense that I actually miss college.

I went to a party last night with all my old friends from high school. I put on pinching gold flats and spent 20 minutes on my makeup and then I got there and someone asked me why I didn’t dress up. New Year’s will just be an extension of this, assuming I go.

I want the holidays to be over. I want it to be February so that everything is still saturated with cold water but without dry air that leaves me scaly. I want to wander around Boston and find stores that I’ve never been in filled with things I would never find in Maine. I want to bring my camera and take photographs that belong on Flickr, not Facebook.

I want to go to Porter Square. I want to go to Addis Red Sea. I want to buy tunics from stores that aren’t Urban Outfitters.

It’s strange to be constantly rationalizing these things. When did I become someone so different?

004.

About an hour ago, I was sitting in bed watching the last episode of Friday Night Lights before the writers’ strike, and the door burst open. Someone turned on the the disgusting fluorescent light that I never use.

“Hey,” I said warily.

It was Dylan, one of the other guys on my floor. He was wearing a t-shirt and ratty blue boxers. He turned to look at me in such a glazed, slow way and gave one of those long blinks that I could tell he was drunk without even talking to him. He came over and sat down on my bed. I couldn’t really tell what was going on. It seemed like one of those weird situations you read in teen novels where the guy comes in without saying anything and suddenly they just start making out. Dylan picked at my comforter and I realized he was clearly trying to get into bed.

I tried the first guess for what might be going on. “Uh, Dylan, you’re in the wrong room.”

He looked around, seemed to recognize that all the girly posters on the walls weren’t his, and stood up to leave. When he got to my desk by the door, he started to fumble with his boxers. Suddenly, I realized why I was having deja vu.

“DYLAN!” I yelled in the voice I normally reserve for campers about to touch the stove or throw rocks at an animal. “Do NOT pee on my floor!”

Last year, when I was up late watching a movie in my common room, my proctor’s boyfriend used her key card to swipe open into our room. I asked him what he was doing, and he incoherently replied, “It’s fine. Linzee said it was okay.” He was standing in the corner just like Dylan when I heard the sound of liquid hitting the floor. By the time I realized what was going on and yelled at him to get the fuck out of our room and stop peeing all over my roommate’s desk, her stuff was soaked. We ultimately got the last laugh because the story is all over campus now, but I never thought the experience would come in handy later.

003.

I was reading an old interview with Philip Pullman and he mentioned the ending of The Amber Spyglass, which has probably made me cry more than anything I’ve seen or read (except maybe for the last five minutes of Six Feet Under).

The mournful ending of “His Dark Materials” wrings protests from some readers, but as Pullman once told an interviewer, “I am the servant of the story.” He added, “The story made me do it. That was what had to happen. If I’d denied it, the story wouldn’t have had a tenth of its power.”

After I finished the book for the first time, I spent hours trying to unravel Pullman’s Gordian knot. But reading that quote made me realize exactly how much of an effect His Dark Materials has had on me because of the ending. Had Lyra and Will lived happily ever after, it never would have stayed with me. It would really be the atheist version of The Chronicles of Narnia: a story that I liked when I was a kid, but not one that ever merited re-reading as an adult out of anything but nostalgia. It was because of the ending that I went back later and re-read and realized exactly how much truth Pullman’s thoughts about Dust and death really had.

Then I imagined myself writing something as sad as the end of The Amber Spyglass. And I felt a flutter in my mind — the edges of a story taking place, something that will develop over years and years into something real and substantial. Characters of my own that I will someday grow to know as well as any author knows her characters, with whom I will imagine in circumstances so sad that I will cry as I am writing them down. It felt like a premonition.

I just wanted to remember that.

002.

When I looked back on my first year at college, I decided one of the reasons that I hated it so much was because I had such a great group of friends in high school that it was difficult for me to make an adjustment. But now that I’m a year and a half out of high school, I think if I met 99% of my high school friends for the first time today, I would write them off as boring. I only keep in touch with four people during the year. I have a friend who is sort of the exception to this because she goes to college with me now, so I consider her more of a college friend than a high school friend. There are a few other people that I still consider my friends, but I really only see them on breaks and I don’t keep in touch with them during the year. I would keep in touch with one more, but she’s so fucking hard to reach that it’s basically impossible. The other and I really don’t have anything in common during the year and it’s really easy for us to just pick up where we left off during breaks. Everyone else from high school that I ever thought of as my friend? Nope. That’s it.

I don’t really think this is such a bad thing, though. I am positive that I think about high school more than anybody else I know, and while I worried for a while that it was because I was nostalgically obsessed with something that really wasn’t that great in the first place, it’s actually because I have an obsessive need to make sense of everything in my life and thinking about high school makes me realize how much I actually HAVE changed. Emotionally, I’ve pretty much moved on, but it was really difficult, mostly because I didn’t have such a great college to move on TO. If I’d been going out drinking or smoking or clubbing every weekend I would have for sure, but the social scene at college is too boring. But I think I really defined myself by my friends in high school and the result that was that I had to spend a lot of time with people I didn’t really like, or people that I thought were boring.

I never really made any secret about the fact that I wasn’t as connected to the group as everyone else. Even the guys I like, I never got to know well until after high school, and while I can’t retroactively pretend I didn’t like most of the girls, there are plenty that I wish I hadn’t wasted my time with. When I think back on my friendship with one friend, the “R” that I feel is mostly regret, but I’m not sure why. I think it’s because despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I really thought that she was good person who deserved more than she was getting. She was just as smart as the rest of us even though she could never get into honors classes. She was a good friend and an honest person, even though in middle school, she made up a bunch of people, including a fake boyfriend, and IMed us with them without a hint of regret or shame for over a year, and continued to lie consistently throughout high school. When I think back over all the times that we genuinely had fun together, it makes me really regret that she turned out to be the kind of person who would honestly prefer her current friends rather than her two best friends for years. I ran into her at someone’s house party this summer, and there was a moment when she and I were sitting at his kitchen table, and we made each other laugh. Thinking about it makes me want to cry, because even at the time, I knew it was the last time that it would ever happen. It was the last spark of our friendship flaring up for a second before it faded away completely.

Now that I’m in college and I don’t have just one group of friends anymore, I realize how limited I was by it in high school. Even though I hung out with more people from more groups than most of my friends did, my epiphany is that I would have had much cooler friends, and been a much more interesting person myself, if I’d spent more time hanging out with my friends from outside my group instead of going to Hoy’s house to sit around and watch them play MarioKart. I had a great summer and I barely spent it with any of my close friends from high school. I hung out almost entirely with people I didn’t consider close friends in high school, and I wish that I had also spent it with two others, who are really the two people who I have completely lost touch with that I regret more than anybody else, even though I was never really close friends with either of them. I didn’t spend any more time with them than I did with lots of people who were just acquaintances, and way less time than I did with people who were supposedly my “best” friends, who now I could not give less of a crap if I ever spoke or thought about ever again. Most people (probably including me) are unoriginal idiots and you can find some version of them not just in every school in the country, but in every grade of every school. I remember I used to look at the lower grades and think about how one funny girl was like another version of a funny girl in our grade, or how one overachiever would eventually get all of the same leadership positions as the same person who had them at the moment. Most of your friends are just determined by space and time and finding whatever version of that person is currently in your proximity. I know people who are like almost all of my friends now that I’m at college, but I’m not friends with most of them because they don’t really seem that interesting. But I don’t have a single friend who reminds me of the people I wish I’d known better.