Audiobooks, my new best friend

One thing for which I'm discovering a new-found appreciation is audiobooks. Since I commute by train, and wear my ipod at the gym, and wash dishes with the headset on, I'm learning that that time adds up to a whole lot of book listening that can be going on. So far I've made my way through Obama's narrations of his own two books (albeit abridged) and right now I'm listening to Jeremy Irons' recording of The Alchemist, which I'm liking a whole lot more than I expected to.

The plus is that - if the reader is good, and both Obama and Irons are not surprisingly fantastic - I can "read" books like I haven't been able to read them before and really want to pay attention in a way that's been difficult with parenthood. The negative is that the eye reads a whole lot faster than the voice, so that for a very large book, for example Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, the total running time is a prohibitive 38 or so hours of listening time. The then-positive is that that is probably a book that I will NEVER read if I try to make my way through the hard copy. So I might just give it a shot by audio after all.

On my mind

Commenting on this entire political cycle just feels beside the point somehow. I'm sick and tired of it, I just want it to be over, but it's still got three months to go and I completely fail in my desire to look away. At least unti the Democratic convention, what is the point? Obama's going to continue to take his "victory lap", McCain is going to continue to toss any insane accusation at him that crosses his campaign's mind, the polls are going to hover in the "close but in Obama's favor" range, everyone's going to argue about why Obama just isn't doing better, one outlier poll will indicate a runaway victory for McCain, the tensions will mount, the tempers will flare, the pundits will declare one or the other the obvious choice, while other pundits talk about how until the conventions none of this matters. Lather rinse repeat. And yet I STILL CAN'T LOOK AWAY. As if the minute I stop looking some fundamental campaign-changing event will suddenly take place and suddenly McCain's new found momentum will vault him and his scary smile into the White House for another four years of a president that is wholly ineffective, that no one likes all that much not even the Republicans, and that everyone crings and tunes out whenever he speaks.

And part of me - beaten down by eight long years of the mind-numbingly relentless constitutional debauchery of the Bush Administration - simply can't let me believe that it's actually possible Obama could win. Everyone blissfully forgets who's making our voting machines, among other things. And Ohio - Diebold land - still seems to have the power of being a decisive state yet again. Oy. It's going to be a long 98 more days...