Light your world with only fire

Unsure of the etiquette involved in beginning a blog, (do we introduce ourselves or just skip to the promiscuous sharing of daily details?), I thought I'd start out with a few broad strokes that should give you a fairly accurate, if Picasso-esque, view of me:

• I hate the president, but I have to admit that I *love* hating him, which adds a disturbing shade of dependency to our relationship

• I'm having trouble reconciling my identities as prickly, smart assed, liberal feminist and newlywed military wife, or, to use the kick-in-the-teeth DoD term, "dependent." Interestingly enough, this battle takes place on a purely ideological battlefield, since in real life my husband and our marriage fit me like lived-in jeans right out of the dryer. BUT... the battle is still important and still rages, and there are very real casualties.

• Like many women who Pay Too Much Attention, I often have trouble filtering out the Useful from the Not Useful. These are nice little value-neutral titles that I use when I really mean the Not Fucked Up and the Completely Fucked Up. Sadly, I've spent large parts of my life absorbing the messages of the beauty industry, resulting in an unhealthy preoccupation with the shortcomings of my body. I can now catalogue these in several different systems of organization.

And finally, I have a terrible habit of saying exactly what I mean at the worst moment possible(examples to follow).

So with that out of the way, I'd like to take a moment to praise William Manchester for writing A World Lit Only By Fire, a book which has been doing an excellent job of discouraging me from spending any time at all on my own writing. Had you said to me a month ago, "Hey, tell me something fascinating about the Dark Ages," I would have scratched somewhere inappropriate and shrugged. But now I would respond happily with, "Well, for one thing Martin Luther was a weird cat-- did you know he had a horrific childhood and frequently hallucinated having battles with the Devil in which he and Satan flung handfuls of their own feces at one another? Seriously, his journal has whole passages about it-- Scheisskriegen (shit wars). So when you think about it, undermining the superstructure of the Catholic church, and indeed the whole of christendom at the time, probably didn't seem that intimidating."

Yeah.

Random personal note: I'm totally digging the new place, even though it constitutes my third move since this time last year. So far, my husband and I have done one large Electric Slide across the US map-- Austin to Pensacola (pause eight months and wait out two catastrophic hurricanes), and then sliiiiide on back to the Texas coast. More on hurricanes later-- they've had a lot to say to me, and weirdly enough, it's not all been bad. But I'm liking being back in Texas. I have a job with a bit of a point to it, and am getting the hang of married life a little more.