Thursday, January 15, 2015
Woke up at 4:15 and tweaked a query before heading off to the gym. I've been hitting the jacuzzi first thing Tuesdays and Thursdays before hitting my Insanity workout and that's been a motivator to get my body going so early in the morning. I love the fact that the jacuzzi is up and running again. It makes all the difference in the world, especially on days I don't play racquetball. I can already tell my legs are getting stronger and my overall core is feeling firmer, just after a week of Insanity. I do love these exercise tapes. They really kick my butt and push me harder than I'd like. I left the gym at 6:30, came home and had my oatmeal, then went over all my query materials for a new round of submissions that include a synopsis, not my favorite thing to compose. Synopses are hard and seem to limit stories more than generate excitement. The challenge is to keep them short, snappy, and engaging while hitting all the plotpoints of the storyline. They're a true pain in the you know what.
I had to return to the auto repair place this morning due to a loose cable that was causing two engine lights to go on. No problem. The quick fix allowed me to hang out at Brown Sugar for breakfast. Almost finished with Dave Egger's latest novel, which is getting weirder and less interesting. Maybe the last 30 pages will bring it all together.
Enjoying The Intercept at firstlook.org/theintercept. I'm not an anti-government sort of any kind; however, Gleen Greenwald's No Place to Hide is still swirling in my head. I applaud them for holding accountable those in power and chastising establishment news organizations and celebrity journalists for pushing harder, digging deeper, and exposing abuses of power and outright deceit more quickly. If we're going to use ourselves as the benchmark for others to follow, we might as well walk the walk and practice what we preach; otherwise, let's just agree that the world's a nasty, aggressive, cutthroat place and we're simply a part of that nastiness, protecting our own self-interest and collecting information without regarding for civil liberties, the Constitution, or personal freedom. I hate hypocrisy. We can do so much better with our institutional decision making that upholds the ideals we believe in while still protecting ourselves. Doing anything we want in the name of counter-terrorism seems to lead directly to a place of evil, even for us, I'm afraid. What a world we live in, the world that keeps on giving, the world that always outdoes whatever we can possibly imagine on our own.
