I turned on the TV for the first time since May and heard some idiot pundit say that Obama will be remembered for his first term because he is just biding his time in the second term and has become a lame duck president.

Is television always so stupid or is today special? It is only now that Obama has begun having an actual presence in politics. We can disagree on whether that presence is negative or positive but these days everybody knows he is there. He spent his first term apologizing for existing, while today he is finally letting us know what he is about.

I have no idea how a family of four can live on $23,498 per year. I don’t even know how a family of one can live on it.

I lived for the last 2 years of grad school on $21,000 but I was constantly running short and had to run up a debt. Every unexpected expense would turn into a major hardship. Once I needed a root canal, at another time the bank made a mistake and kept punishing me for it, then I had to make an unexpected trip, then my laptop died, then Greyhound lost the suitcase with all of the books I was using for my dissertation and I had to buy them all over again, etc. I knew, however, that grad school would soon be over and I’d get a real job, so the debt I was accumulating wasn’t that scary.

How people manage to live permanently on that kind of money is beyond me. And I come from a 3rd world country, so it isn’t like I’m spoiled by a life of luxury.

The longest line I have ever seen in North America was inside a store that had a sale on flip-flops:

A culture where this is possible does not care about beauty.

I just read on a website called “American Conservative” the following bizarre statement:

A growing obsession with physical beauty has shaped our culture, fostered by images, art, and media.

Given that Americans are known throughout the world as people who don’t care about how they look, I have got to wonder what possessed this blogger to say something so patently idiotic.

It was only after living in the US for a few years that I learned that it’s OK to cross the street and pop into the convenience store for a pint of milk without changing into “street clothes” and putting on makeup. For somebody of my origins, living among Americans is both disturbing and liberating. One can wear anything at all, and not only does nobody make nasty comments, but you are guaranteed to get compliments. Because everybody cares a lot more about being nice than about beauty.

I can’t think of a single culture where physical beauty is less important than in the US. In Latin America, the numbers of very young kids with plastic surgery is sky-rocketing. A friend from Venezuela said she barely met anybody under 25 during the recent trip home who hadn’t been operated or wasn’t saving for an operation. In my culture, things are even worse.

Even in the midst of a budget battle nobody give a crap about the economy. Marx was wrong: money is powerless where ideology comes into play. And when personal ambitions and vanities get involved, every practical consideration fades away.

This is for those who have been asking:

I think we have finally found one of those places in Florida where Canadians flock to lose weight. The sun, the beach, a lot of swimming – and absolutely no food. Or at least there is nothing that anybody who is not a hard-core American identifies as food.

Today we visited a “restaurant” called Red Fish, Blue Fish. If you ever come across this den of iniquity, folks, please stay away. It is a scary, scary place that does horrible things to both food and customers.

For some confusing reason, this place is ultra-popular. We had to wait for an hour to be seated. This, of course, made us think RFBF had to be a very good place.

“I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a McDonald’s kind of place,” N joked. And to be honest, I’d much rather have gone to McDonald’s. It serves garbage, too, but at least its garbage is cheap and doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t.

Everything at this place is made of
plastic: forks, knives, wine glasses, and food. The “restaurant” is big and serves a crowd every night, even now during the off-season. The damage they do to the environment is scary to contemplate.

I was served a piece of the driest mahi mahi I have ever encountered in my life. I had never considered mahi mahi to be indigenous to the Gulf Coast but the way it was cooked at Red Fish Blue Fish is an indignity that no formerly living creature should ever experience. The sad ancient fish fillet was lying on something called “Asian slaw.” In case you are wondering what that is, carelessly shredded lettuce leaves and pieces of carrot with a drop of balsamic vinaigrette are what passes for Asian in Pensacola.

N was given a seafood platter that consisted of a scary looking mountain of very salty and overfried batter. After digging through the batter for a while, we discovered that it concealed extremely dry and tortured bits of seafood. One has to be a real enemy of humanity to deep fry oysters in batter.

There were also fries of which I managed to eat exactly one in the entire night. It was so chewy that chewing gum companies should ask this restaurant for the recipe of the chewiest thing in the world.

And if you think this was a cheap restaurant, think again. The prices are definitely not in the fast food bracket.

Yesterday we saw fishers catching really amazing fish right in front of us. I have no idea how the inhabitants of this town manage to serve such incredible garbage while sitting among such a plethora of fantastic seafood.

The mystery of how such a horrible restaurant manages to attract a huge crowd will haunt me forever.

Speaking about gamers, here is a car we saw yesterday:

This must be the gamer who lives in that darkened house. It is a perfect car for a vampire gamer. 🙂

If there are sports bars where all walls are covered with TV screens showing games and sports newscasts, why are there no news bars? Imagine a place filled with TVs that report news non-stop. Such a bar would sell a ton of liquor in the very first night.

Human beings are sometimes just too much. We were boarding this tiny airplane, and in front of the queue there was a pole with dividing tape and two signs pointing to a general boarding area and the priority boarding area. There were few passengers and a single flight attendant who stood on the general boarding side of the tape. You can see the whole arrangement on the photo. I was so shocked by what happened next that I had to take a photo.

Priority passengers hesitated for a second and collectively walked down the priority side of the line. This meant that they had to reach across the dividing tape to hand their boarding passes to the flight attendant, causing discomfort to him and to themselves. But it was so crucial to them to walk these 10 feet on the privileged side of the rope that they didn’t mind.

I’ve never paid for priority or first class seating in my life but if I do one day, I really hope I manage to retain enough lucidity to see how ridiculous people look when they begin to care what side of a dividing tape they walk.