A few months ago, I ordered myself a Rolling Stone subscription on some sketchy website using my super sweet student discount. I never saw an issue of the magazine, so I figured I had been scammed. Little did I know, the magazines were somehow coming to my home address, so there was a stockpile of them waiting when I arrived in Denver at 3 a.m. last night.
Flight delays are fun, huh? I checked into the airport in DC at 12:30 p.m. and arrived in Denver well over twelve hours later thanks to the clusterfuck that was the Boston airport. Not that I’m really complaining. I had Dave Egger’s What Is the What with me, which provided many hours of distraction along with the perspective check of, “Hey, waiting in a climate-controlled airport with plenty of food and water for half a day is not even remotely bad when compared to walking through the Sudanese desert for months, starving and half-naked.”
In general, I’m just glad I was able to get home last night and didn’t get stuck for a few days. (I’m also glad that I wasn’t in the position of these poor people on a flight out of Denver last night.) Plus, my luggage never left Boston, so I’ve been able to justify not leaving my couch because, you know, I don’t even have any CLOTHES to wear in public.
Which leads me back to my real point: I love Rolling Stone. For starters, I always feel pretty damn cool reading it, a la William Miller in Almost Famous. But I really, erm, read it for the articles. I started with the oldest magazine so I could read them in chronological order (OCD, people. OCD), so I’m back in mid-November reading articles about the election and the bailout. Naomi Klein’s article on the bailout made me veddy veddy angry, and Matt Taibbi’s roundup of his favorite moments on the campaign trail made me even happier to be an elitist liberal. Take this quote, for instance:
“The collapse of the Bush administration left the Republican Party utterly bankrupt of ideological advantage. The Bush era made it impossible to sell the party as fiscally conservative ($10 trillion deficit), militarily superior ($12 billion a month fighting a handful of Arabs in sandals to a blood draw), or even as the party of ‘moral values’ (a raft of Republicans caught offering to suck off strangers in restrooms or texting little boys on the Internet).”
Politically correct, Taibbi is not. But still, GO BARRY.
So if you need me over the next few days, you can find me on my couch, in my high school pajamas, weeping into a Rolling Stone as I watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
[Posted by Mallory]
six words to change the world. 