It's not a metaphor. It's not an exaggeration.

The Republican Party has a plan. The plan is to destroy everything. Look at these things (not in any order):

-- destroy the ability of working people to act in their own behalf
(abolish collective bargaining rights)

--destroy education
(abolish public schools)
(oppose national funding for school construction)

-- destroy modern medicine
(defund CDC's center for injury prevention and control)
(defund health care reform, but it goes farther than this)
(prevent vaccinations)
(disallow life-saving medical procedures for women)



-- destroy protections for children
("modify" -- that is, repeal -- child labor laws)
(oppose school breakfast programs in the name of economy)

-- destroy the environment

(really, so petty: end the capitol's own compostable dishware program)
(stop protecting wild lands from exploitation)
(redfine rape so it means nothing) (they backed down on this. Voluble outrage can make a difference!)

I can't do this anymore. But you get the picture.

It's not just that the Republicans don't have out best interests at heart. What they have at heart is actual harm and ultimate destruction for everybody and everything.

They want us to be poor, uneducated, ill, without rights or prospects. The war on women is part of a larger war on everybody.

I have my ideas about the ultimate motivation for this, but I am not certain of it. Perhaps it is the mindless instinct of a foul, dying beast, determined to take everything and everyone down with it.

I got illustrator for my birthday

I got the student and faculty suite of photoshop and illustrator plus a bunch of junk I don't care about. Now, of course, my computer is infested with demands to register at adobe.com and the update spam I had already turned off (several times) appears to have been turned back on. Damnit.

However, they are shiny!

I am flummoxed in Illustrator though -- when I make a vector object, and I want to go on to a new one, how do I tell the program that the next thing I'm going to do applies to the new vector? So far I have only gotten to the next vector by accident. In paintshop 9, you clicked "apply" to exit one vector and start another. Illustrator seems to have no such thing.

Also, very bad, stupid, terrible manual, which doesn't actually tell you stuff like that. Mostly it tells you how wonderful the program is. I did learn some things from reading the manual, but until I can do this one thing, I won't be able to do anything. Because, as it is, weird artifacts show up between the objects when I go to start the new one, like chunks o'color, or extra line segments, or everything changing to the properties I want the new one to have. Or worse -- stuff I really can't identify and don't know how it got there.

edit: I can't make photoshop do anything either.

On another front, I can say "Muj syn je student na universitu karlovy. Studuje medecinu. Moje datr studuje morske biologie." Only that's missing all the antennas because I'm lazy, and the antennas on the r in "marine biology" indicate a sound that nobody who is not Czech would imagine making voluntarily. You might make it if someone was licking you and you weren't sure whether it was delicious or creepy.

I can even say "Muj manzel je mrtvy." The only thing missing are the antennas. The U in muj has a little tiny O hovering over it to indicate a sound that I cannot distinguish reliably from a regular non-palatized longish U. Or sometimes it seems to sound more like an O. The Z has a little V that turns it into the sound of the S in the English "treasure" (quite straightforward, relatively). The y in mrtvy has an acute accent which makes it sound like the i in atropine instead of the i in pin.

In case it's not obvious, I said "My son is a student at Charles University. He studies medicine. My daughter studies marine biology. My husband is dead."

I had to look some stuff up. Mrtry (dead) was the only word I had to look up for more than confirmation.

I can give terrible directions in Czech, too. I can't say "the station is to the left of the post office," but I can say "Look at the post office. The station is to the left."

In general, I find that I am learning much more Czech philology than useful language, and I wonder if this is a personality flaw of mine.

On another note: Jason's mama offered to take care of the dog and cat while we're gone. I'm floored: it's too much! But I agreed. Now I have to clean the house, out of respect.

On an unrelated note: the keyboard appears to be finally losing its mind -- one key at a time. Right now the letter C is unreliable and I have to pound on it sometimes. So if you see it missing, you know why.

Head thing is a tag because after I realized I had to chage the tickets I had almost a whole week of not sleeping and not doing much of anything else either.