Hot topics chez joella

I'm worried that I appear only to talk about shoes and music. I don't only talk about shoes and music, but I only have clear views on shoes and music, so they are easier to cover in the shortish mildly alcoholic rants that make up most of joella's conversation.

But exercising the household and associates at the moment are:

1. Iraq. Obviously. How can this be happening and Donald Rumsfeld still be smirking his smirk on taxpayers' money? And how much do those photos owe to white trash pornography?
2. Gaza. Obviously. How can a debate have shifted so far to one side that Colin Powell saying, hang on actually this isn't a great thing to be doing guys if you don't mind me saying so makes headlines? Moving the middle ground to an extreme, (like Thatcher did in the 80s), so the locus of debate moves to encompass what would previously have been unthinkable, now *that's* what nightmares - and human rights abuses - are made of.
3. The relationship between self acceptance and empowerment, and what happens if it's not the one you thought it would be. This is a slow burning debate, following a disturbing article I read about the growth in eating disorders in black South African women after democracy. "If your position in society changes, what happens to your identity?".
4. And a related issue... getting older and (arguably) increasingly freakish. My position in society changes even if society does not. Yet my cohort is changing society all the time just by existing. Is there a double hermeneutic in here somewhere?

That's quite enough, and Morrissey is on Later, so back to music. I have to go watch.

joella