> 140 characters...

I've been off spending time on Facebook and Twitter trying to catch up with friends and family in the past year, and tonight I feel the need to write a longer passage. I'm having a temporary case of severe cynicism...

I'm struggling with the fact that the Palin twit continues to find a voice and listeners. I'm dismayed that there is so much political polarization running amuck rather than doing something productive. It's disturbing that people with the biggest egos are out there in roles of managers, executives, and other powerful positions. Luckily, I suppose, for them, their egos seem to be enough; unluckily, for the rest of us, I think we'd prefer real substance, strategy, and commitment.

Then again, maybe we don't care about real substance. We watch staged reality shows. We pay attention the the trails behind people like Heidi/Barbie. We see spin-doctoring come into play to repaint bad choices into uncontrollable addictions. We think Simon's the bad guy because he tells people that can't sing exactly that.

We hide our real feelings, or, apparently, many of us eat our real feelings to spare those of others. We fill our lives with so many activities, and then need to fill them with other activities to alleviate the stress that we're under. We hate the actual wars that go on and spend endless hours manipulating electronics in virtual war games.

We need to know the news at every given second, and with microblogging, we don't seem to question the credibility of the source. We can't leave the house without knowing the weather prediction for the day and we accept those unreliable predictions that seem only marginally better than bursitis in a shoulder. Secretly, we all wish we could have the weather person's job where we could make mistakes over and over again, and it was considered acceptable. News flash: life, in general, is not an exact science; humans are quite fallible.

There are, of course, parts of life that are pretty wonderful and, honestly, I find human foibles and flaws far more interesting than the more perfect aspects (whatever the heck those are). On those days where real life just doesn't seem enough to clear the senses, I can fall inside a book or a painting and gain new perspective. I know tonight's melancholy and cynicism can be attributed to the evils of caffeine and insufficient sleep. I can hope that tonight will be filled with a restful sleep...and tomorrow will start anew first with a big wet kiss from buddy, Crash. Definitely one of the few parts of morning that I enjoy. To bed. To sleep.