FOX has gone over the line–using racism, prejudice, and fear to smear Barack Obama. Join over 428,000 people in signing the petition today! Click here:
http://pol.moveon.org/stopthesmears/?rc=fb.fox

The petition says: “FOX must stop injecting racism, prejudice, and fear into our political dialogue. We intend to hold FOX, its advertisers, and its personalities accountable for FOX’s attempts to smear the Obamas.”

Click here to sign the petition — then tell your friends about this group:
http://pol.moveon.org/stopthesmears/?rc=fb.fox

This petition will be hand-delivered by a big group to FOX’s headquarters–in front of other media, so FOX feels the pressure.

Here’s what happened this past month: First, a paid FOX commentator accidentally confused “Obama” with “Osama” and then joked on the air about killing Obama. Next, a FOX anchor said a playful fist pound by Barack and Michelle Obama could be a “terrorist fist jab.” And then, FOX called Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama” — slang used to describe an unwed mother.

FOX won’t stop until it becomes too painful to continue—until the public calls them out and advertisers start getting worried.

Click here to sign the petition–then tell your friends:
http://pol.moveon.org/stopthesmears/?rc=fb.fox

***I found the above text on Facebook and I wanted you to check it out. Regardless of whether the petition or any of the action that they say they are going to take is true, I feel like it was worth mentioning.

First off:

Gas cards save lives.

Grandma and especially Aunt Sally, summer would not have happened had you not been there with those little envelopes I’ve come to love. So this is my lame thank you, on the internet, heartfelt nonetheless.

Also.

The lymph nodes in my head are swollen. I don’t feel good. I’m exhausted. I hate my job, my manager, the uniform…everything.

On one of the rare days that I get out of work before midnight (this time at 6), Danny and I went up to Red Rocks to see the sunset. It had been one of those marvelously hot days, but the clouds had rolled in and there was no sunset to be seen. We decided instead to just hike around for awhile while there was still light in the sky.
As we were hiking, we came to this rocky place where the trail obviously stopped. Since it’s Red Rocks, you are forbidden to do any climbing, which is of course the one thing you really want to do. There, maybe fifteen feet in front of us, across the rock, was a deer. I stopped and we spent a few seconds looking directly at each other. Danny, behind me, whispered, “Don’t move,” and we stood there as the deer came closer and closer. I waved, some lame attempt at trying to communicate my own fear and the fact that I wasn’t going to harm it. It came closer still. We walked back, and it went parallel to us for a minute, before finding some apparently delicious shrubbery.
We saw five deer that night. Little babies with their mothers, one jumped out of the bushes not five feet from us and nearly gave me a heart attack. Another was eating grass by the side of the trail and we almost passed it before it jumped away.
There were some bunnies, too, but seeing the deer that close was amazing.
We made it to the car right as the sun had dropped beyond a preferable level of light and we headed home.
7/11/08

I’m late for work, again, but that’s nothing new.
Things at Dairy Queen are hardly tolerable, but then again, I wake up and think, God, I really need this money, so I go and I work. I rarely get shifts that end while there is still sun in the sky, and this whole getting off of work at midnight thing is starting to wear on me.
Danny is really the only person I’ve been hanging out with, and he starts work at eight every morning. By the time he gets off work, I’m usually at work, which gives us the night to hang out.
It’s frustrating. My manager won’t honor any schedule requests and our cleaning lady is out for awhile, so we are left to manage ourselves (as usual) with the added task of cleaning every night.
Since the robbery, we close at ten thirty, meaning that if we’re lucky, we leave work by eleven thirty. If not, midnight.
These are the times I sincerely wish I was rich. They are few and far between, but not having to work until midnight seems like a pretty sweet deal.

Aunt Sally has begun the fall collection; white dishes in a box. I am excited now, more excited than I was before. I can’t even wait to have this as my own place. My own room, for the first time in a long time at school. A kitchen, tables, chairs.
Fun.
Fall semester is shaping up.

Are you proud to be an American?

Dark sky, half moon gleaming above it, guides me home. Steering the bright lanes of the highway, windows down, I think, music turned up to distract me. There was so much to say then, words spilling somewhere, gushing. Somewhere in the translation, the words end, confused and garbled in the night. Here is my basic fear: that I will never be able to form my words into thoughts, to create something tangible and real. But then again, I think that this is the beginning of something different, and entirely new part of this life. I intend to think differently about it, waiting for it to happen and then embracing it. I mean, it might work out. Who knows?

For every high, there is an equal yet completely opposite low.
I cried from Kansas City westward for a good hour, letting tears spill down my face with my windows rolled up. I sped past the trucks, other vehicles no doubt wondering what was happening inside that speeding steel box.
We left in good spirits, hugs all around, our belongings packed safely in the trunk. The weekend, which had begun with such a passion, although angry, had ended so well, smiles and my own feeling of contentment at spending a weekend curled in that space with the people I never thought I’d love the way I do.
We sat in St. Louis, sipping on white wine and watching the movie that Emily starred in last year, “American Gothic,” I got a text message. One of our friends was hospitalized for the reasons that no person should ever put on themselves. My addled mind failed to wrap around it, until the next day. Things have settled down now, but there is still some sort of unease in the air. I can’t explain it, don’t want to. But I never thought that this sort of thing would be something I would ever have to face. It’s not real, I kept telling myself, this isn’t happening. But it was. It did.
The drive home was beautiful.
Exactly 866 miles in exactly 12.5 hours. Three stops. Rain at the beginning and at the end. I turned the music up and rolled the windows down. I wasn’t exactly excited to come home, or to leave St. Louis, or even Chicago, but it was finally nice to get home and raid the fridge.
I’m garbled right now. My life is once again on the cusp of something new and different, and I can’t even wait for junior year to begin.
Emily and I can’t wait to start our new lives together.
Let the highs and lows (hopefully few) begin.

Even though the air has a chill to it, the apartment is still hot. Two couches, a card table, end tables, oddly spaced lawn chairs and bits and pieces of our various lives are scattered on the floor. A single lightbulb illuminates the room, casting a pall of darkness into it. The air is silent save the sound of gunshots echoing loudly from the television screen, the only source of noise in the otherwise still room. Blankets and pillows, remnants of the houseguests and various tenants of the quiet building on the street, such a quiet little oasis next to an industrial yard. Waking up in the morning, planes from Midway pass overhead, their jet streams searing sound into the air around the house. Pigeons stalk the balcony, the ever present battle for the grounds that have been theirs since before the boys moved in only a year ago. And yet, this has become like a second home to us, sleeping on the couches and in the beds, sleeping wherever there is room in an at times packed house. The shower is cluttered with our bottles, mingling with theirs, our pink towels, blue, and theirs brown and red. We drive to the beach, play football in the rain, run into the freezing cold waters of Lake Michigan, spend the nights living hard, partying for no reason other than the joy of the company that we share. Card games, laughter, the jokes speed out anew. We are for some reason caught in some strange bubble, with nothing left to hold us back. Two of us sat at the train station, on a crowded street, parked with our hazard lights on, blowing bubbles into the streets of Chicago. A cab driver passes, smiles at me and then asks me if he can have some. We smile, waiting for someone else to join this motley crew. We eat fresh cherries bought at a market on the South Side. We drive the streets, intermingling with the horns of angry drivers and the frustration that I feel in traffic. But there is nothing like the sight of Lake Michigan on your right and the city on your left as you drive up Lake Shore Drive, the epitome of the Ferris Bueller-esque ideals that perhaps we still hold on to. Waking early, we sought the addresses that we had penned earlier, scribbled notes in crayon on a used piece of paper. The phone rings, and the realtor is on the other end, begging to show us the house of our dreams. And we answer, there, arriving a moment late but not quite. She shakes our hands and then we begin the tour, our hearts melting a little at the sight of the quaint two bedroom apartment that I cannot wait to have my name signed to. And so, the adventure continues……..

The alarm clock went off too soon. It was set for five a.m. Tuesday morning. The sun was barely peeking up, pink light overwhelming my eyes. I rolled over and slept until six.
I finally got on the road about seven, seven thirty after the obligatory gas refill somewhere on Colorado Blvd.
From there, it was no stopping until just outside of Limon, when I received a ten minute reprieve from the road courtesy of a Colorado State Patrol officer who issued me a warning. I had seen him coming up behind me and just pulled over before he had the chance. I think he appreciated that. I got a “Colorado State Patrol Official Courtesy Warning” for going “five to nine miles per hour over the posted limit.”
He was a nice dude, so all went well.
I stopped for fuel before entering Kansas.
I stopped for fuel in the middle of Kansas.
I stopped entering Missouri.
I arrived thirteen hours after leaving my house.
It was nine fifteen when I pulled up in front of the Bates’ household.
The sunset was absolutely beautiful. It pushed me through the last good hour of light of the drive. Behind me was the glowing orange sun, set in pink clouds, and ahead of me was the full moon, large and low in the sky.
Emily hobbled out of her house on crutches and we hugged.
We spent that night doing the usual….slept late yesterday morning. Had dinner. Went and visited her dad. Sophisticated, sort of. We watched John and Kate Plus 8 while waiting for him to get home and then we all shared a bottle of wine.
Got home. Stayed up with friends. Locked my keys in my car. Fished them out with a hanger or two. Felt incredibly productive. Slept in.
Emily got her cast off today.
And we are leaving this afternoon for Chicago. late start however, it’s already 2:15 and we are not even close to leaving.
ah, summer.
This was a good choice.

I leave tomorrow on the twelve and a half hour journey that will end in Saint Louis. From there, on Friday, we progress to Chicago.
Apartment hunting (for real, this time).
Fun with Emily.
We shall see how things go.