Aggrieved

Feeling mad at the world today. For a variety of reasons. Probably mostly because I couldn't sleep last night and got so frustrated just lying there, being tired but not able to sleep. I finally hauled out the laptop and watched an episode of The Office off Netflix in the early morning hours.

Everything in the newspaper aggravated me when I read it after I got up. From Rick Perry's decision not to accept stimulus aid for unemployment because Texas businesses would have to pay more to unemployment insurance in the future (now they pay about $24 per employee per year), to the ignoramus in the editorials who thinks teen pregnancy is caused chiefly by sexually abused girls trying to avoid more sexual abuse (?) instead of by lack of education. God forbid we teach teenagers how to avoid unwanted pregnancy and STDs. This is Texas, remember. We have certain standards to uphold, and the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the country is one of them! We're number one! Oh, wait, I just double-checked my facts. We're number two. We've got work to do, folks. More abstinence-only education, please.

Even the octo-mom is pissing me off now. I felt mostly empathy for her and concern over all the hostility aimed at her and her family. Now I'm thinking it really is irresponsible to keep having children when you don't have the means to care for them. When other people are going to have to care for your children because it would be an impossible task to care for them yourself, what were you really thinking? Where's the projection into the future of how it's going to be?

I know I'm in a bad mood when even a comic strip like "Sally Forth" is irritating. Like I said, everything in the paper was provoking me. I don't even want to get started on Disney's harebrained remake of Escape to Witch Mountain into a "Rock" vehicle, Race to Witch Mountain. You can tell from the ads that movie is primarily focused on the taxi driver Rock character and not the children. How could they take a good, interesting story about very smart kids who are also aliens with curious powers and make it into the story of the adult who has to drive them somewhere and mugs to the camera at every opportunity. I can see the Disney meeting. "Kids love the Rock!"

I need a massage and a box of thin mints. Or maybe Jane Austen and some fluffy socks. Yoga and Enya music? Something has to be able to make it better.