Today’s my last day at a job I’ve held for seven years.

That’s seven years worth of crap to clean off of my computer, out of my drawers and out of my cabinets. I’m kind of a pack rat when it comes to information.

There’s every single piece of design work I’ve ever created here, from simple order forms to 80 page booklets. There’s thousands of web files, graphics, Word docs, and notes to myself. There are 10,000+ emails.

There are hundreds of web bookmarks, piles of old software (hello, Windows 95 Plus!), a stack of old software manuals, cryptic CD-R labels, a handful of zip disks and floppies.

There is a cup of chewed up pencils and souvenier pens from seven years of managing trade shows.

There are old and revised employee manuals, five health benefit summaries, and ten half-used pads of paper.

There are 8,000 songs in my iTunes folder. Perhaps I’ll leave them in case the next person will like my music? Wouldn’t that be a treat to sit down at your new job, turn on your computer, and there are 8,000 songs to listen to? Of course, if they have a different taste in music, which is highly likely, they will delete them or ignore them or never even open iTunes in the first place.

There are six people I’m leaving behind. Six people, most of whom I’ve spent the last seven years working with. I’m used to seeing them everyday. Now I won’t.

It’s an odd thing to leave a job you like, a place you don’t mind working and people you’ve come to consider friends. I’ve always shaken the dirt off of my shoes at the door of every other place I’ve worked and never looked back. Not this time.

I feel like I’m moving out of my parents’ house

I’m also excited about my new job, about a major career shift, about meeting new people and trying different things. I’m a believer in change, and I think this is a really good move.

Still, it is a strange day.

So long folks! Try the fish!

Hey, you busy? No? Just cruising some blogs? Checking out a little National Geographic porn during lunch? Purchasing that new little outfit you’ve been eyeing from www.leathered-chaps.com? Yeah, me too. The internet is cool like that.

What? Congress is thinking of handing control of the internet over to telecommunications corporations? Aren’t there very few telecom companies left, what with all of the consolidation and mergers? That doesn’t sound good.

No, I didn’t know that this deal would make it possible for the telecom giants to effectively destroy what has made the internet great, by giving them the opportunity to restrict bandwidth to non-subscribing Web sites or grant higher ratings to deep-pocketed companies in Web searches. Wouldn’t that make it difficult for bloggers and small internet retailers to gain more readers?

Good Lord! These telecom companies could even start charging for each email you send like they’ve been wanting to for years, or charge you by the bandwidth you consume like long-distance phone calls.

Why on earth was such an idea was even brought to the table? The internet’s biggest asset is that it is an equalizer and accentuates sites that have the most unique content. Big companies can still advertise the hell out their products, but smaller stores can also make it by having internet buzz.

Don’t worry, you say? The Democrats introduced the Markey Net Nuetrality bill to thwart the efforts of the telecom lobbyist and their Republican puppets? Thank you FSM, we shall yet be saved!

WHAT? THE VOTE HAS JUST HAPPENED and THE BILL WAS VOTED DOWN? Where’s the outrage? Where’s the main stream media’s leftist bias? Where’s the discussion?

In case you aren’t clear about what was at stake in this debate, you can go to this site and check out the many reasons why selling off the internet to telecom giants is was so very, very wrong.

I was going to post a picture here to go along with this SF Chronicle article about three 8th graders expelled for showing a porno to their class, but every time I Google Image Searched “8th grader porn,” I received a host of undesirable and unimpressive pictures. After seeing the results, I think I might actually have to bleach my hard drive as well as my eyeballs.

Anyway, so the link above goes to a piss-poor story about three teenagers who brought porn to school and “slipped” it into the DVD player while the teacher was grading papers or something (cue the angry parents complaining about bad teachers; counter-cue the angry teachers complaining about bad parents; counter-counter-cue the angry white AM talk-show hosts complaining about the liberal media; counter-counter-counter-cue God abandoning us to chase a shiny object that caught his/her attention).

The reason I linked to this story was to say that porn and school go hand in hand in pants. Back in my day, we swapped Bo Derek Playboy pictures and talked about boobs as if they were ripped from our infant mouths without just cause, leaving us hungry evermore.

Porn was everywhere from elementary school through college. Given this academic fact, I can only surmise that if there were porn DVDs in 1980, we’d have been trading them too.

I remember my fellow student, a tomboy named Emily, was the Godfather of the elementary school porn connection in my town. She possessed a seemingly limitless supply of every naked woman a boy needed to see. As her reputation grew, Emily became increasingly less cautious in her dealings, and one day she was tracked down and busted out by the tetherball court as she “slipped” Tommy Brown a centerfold.

The next day Emily returned to class, in a dress, porn-free. Unlike today, where kids get expelled for little things like porn and concealed weapons, back then getting busted was punishment enough. Disappointing your parents and teachers was not an option for most of us, something I think might have changed since I was in school.

There have been rumblings around the internets for a few days about the forthcoming issue of Rolling Stone, and the inclusion of a scathing decimation of President Bush by Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz.

Not only did Rolling Stone up the ante with a sensationalized cover illustration for the issue, they also release the entire article on their site.

After reading the article, I can honestly say I learned very little, for the President’s blunders and idiosyncrasies do not go unnoticed in the mainstream media. However, seeing his list of major disgraces assembled, itemized and reported in one manageable article made my jaw drop anew.

Political denial is just like any other kind of denial for me. Once in a while, I need to rattle my perspective with a concentrated dose of reality in order to stay on task. Wilentz’s perspective definitely rattles.

From the article.

Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen,” Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

Wilentz believes that Bush’s greatest failure is his own denial of personal failures, evidenced by his unwillingness to replace key White House personnel even in the face of a quagmire in Iraq and falling poll numbers. Wilentz also hammers on Bush’s inability to listen to the other perspectives, reminding us that Bush was supposed to be a uniter, a moderate, compassionate conservative for a new generation of socially liberal, fiscally conservative Americans.

There is so much to say about this article, but I hesitate to continue and risk regurgitating Wilentz’s arguments in a less cohesive and eloquent manner.

Personally, after the outrage and the embarrassment and the denial, a return to perspective on Bush leaves me a strong sense of despondency. Such a failed leader should clearly step down. The fact that Congress will not impeach him let alone censure him is cause for great and lingering sadness, one I will not forget come election day.