The Brainucopia is far from empty

It's possible that the Brainucopia has never been so copiously full of thoughts. Between having a new computer along with a Nook, I've been spending a lot of time reading. Reading, reading, reading. I've read a few books, as I posted recently, but I've been reading magazines, blogs, new sites, and lots of Twitter posts. Twitter is oddly addicting for me.

My new favorite blog is Jezebel. It's what I long wished this blog would be, but I"m not that clever, witty, informed, or angry. Great stuff over there.

Topics filling the Brainucopia:

• Women's reproductive rights and the massive assault from the social conservatives and hypocritical evangelical Christian machine. (Kudos to Gary Trudeau on addressing this so scathingly in the past week's Doonesbury strip.)
•  Women as human beings and the assault on that from Republicans, the social conservatives and the hypocritical evangelical Christian machine.
• Wishing that Rick Perry and Rick Santorum would just evaporate in their own Rapture for two. Hey, it's 2012. Maybe it can be just the end of their world. If I believed in god, I'd pray for them to be swooped off into the afterlife so they could take their sanctimonious, woman-demeaning crap somewhere else.
• Trying not to hyperventilate when I hear Rick Santorum say things like this: "When people read the Constitution and say, 'Oh, we get our rights from the Constitution,' that is wrong. The Constitution does not give us rights. It recognizes rights that are written on our heart because we are a creature of God. That's where we get our rights from." (This one kept me awake almost an entire night).
• The fact that there are people who fervently hope Santorum will become president of the United States. This gives me stomach knots.
• People blowing each other up all over the world. This is still a really hard one for me. I just want it to stop.
• Iran. Anything about Iran.
• Super PACs and how unfairly they're dragging us into a plutocracy.
• Shopping for a modest dress that isn't made of matte jersey and doesn't show any cleavage and has sleeves. Is this really so much to ask?

 I offset the intensity of NPR, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Jezebel, Slate, NBC Nightly News, and The Daily Show (yes, TDS because at its heart, it's dead-on in identifying the bullshit of the political world) by checking in every day with the blog, "Crazy Days and Nights." Celebrity gossip hasn't been my thing for a really long time, but it works for me at the moment, even though I don't know who half of the celebrities are. This is kind of shocking to me, considering how much television I watch. Too much HGTV, not enough scripted dramas.

So many thoughts, so little power to influence the outcomes of the situations that trouble me so deeply.