Jean-Marie and Eric

Jean-Marie LePen? The mind boggles. I remember reading about him in my high school French class (once a right-wing crackpot, always a right-wing crackpot, evidently), but even back then it seemed like his chance at being taken seriously was gone and not likely to return.

He's frightening and assholic enough to make Bush seem relatively like a left-leaning dream come true. Relatively.

I run into Eric in the office kitchen this morning, and we spend a few minutes catching up. My synopsis of the past few weeks includes a good deal of work-related whinging; his includes the announcement that he's gotten engaged. This makes my chin drop, my eyes widen, something in my stomach swell so completely with happiness and pride that I swear I'm feeling those two emotions in their very purest forms. And it occurs to me that that's a sensation I don't often experience--I'm used to my happiness and pride (and anger, and sadness, and fear) being tempered by other (often contradictory) emotions, which lessens their impact. I wish there were a way of stopping that distillation, of learning to let one feeling take over (however briefly) without finding myself somehow reining it in. But can that be taught? And isn't there something to be said for the tempered emotion (like the mixed drink, or the blended ice cream)?

At any rate, Eric's getting married. Which just goes to show that sometimes the people you fret about most turn out just fine.