Here and there

Having gone and shouted "Bertie, Bertie, Bush is mad; blood, blood on your hands" etc. outside the Dáil at lunchtime (we chanted the semicolons, I swear), I returned to wrestle with a frenzied plethora of printer errors and eventually managed to deliver fourteen edited typescripts to the two academic editors who were waiting downstairs to look at them. Skin of teeth job (as usual), but it got done, and tomorrow I can send the volume off to the typesetter and breathe a super-king-size sigh of relief.

(Said a callow young Socialist Worker to a seasoned colleague at the demo, "Didja ever think of storming the Dáil, didja?")

I'm with glitzfrau in the matter of refusing to allow the war to colonise my head (hey - I just thought of a new word: Dubya, he's a horrorist). I will be outside the US embassy at 6:00 this evening, lending my voice to the expression of sadness and anger at what's happening, but I'm going to make an effort not to obsess about it. There's a point at which one crosses the line into ghoulish glee and voyeurism; I don't want to do that.

Action where action is needed (our plans for a fundraiser, for example, are still very much afoot), but there are other things to be doing. There's still a huge food crisis in Africa; our benighted government is still trying to gut the Freedom of Information Act; and, damn it, I still have a novel to write and songs to sing and flowers to grow and games to play.

(And oh, how lucky I am to be able to say that.)