I'm 22 for a moment

I didn't get into the New York City Marathon. Disappointing! I'm out $7 and one 26.2-mile run. I don't really want to run Cape Cod again, even though it was a great experience, just because I've done it before and I was looking forward to something different -- a big, blowout marathon in my home city. I regret not running Boston this year, because now I'll probably never get the chance. I'm itching to run another one, but I feel like I don't have many options because I don't really have the time or the means to travel too far to get to one (not to mention I wouldn't want to do so without a personal cheering section -- I don't think anyone can live up to Carrie and Dianne with their masks and signs!). Dean Karnazes, the "Ultramarathon Man" I wrote about a few entries back, is doing his own re-creation of the Boston Marathon in October, but I don't really want to pay $100 to run the Boston Marathon course when it's not really the Boston Marathon, and there's little chance of me even seeing Dean as he'll finish several hours before I. (It's "before I," right? Because it'd be "before I will," and the "will" goes unspoken, because apparently I'm trying to sound pretentious.) I would love to do the Honolulu Marathon in December and turn it into a vacation in Hawaii: Congratulations, Rachel, you've just completed your master's degree! Now go run 26.2 miles in paradise! But that idea seems a little far-fetched.

Anyway, that's just me considering my options out loud. Now onto a topic that's been eating at me for two days: my intense, fiery hatred for Ann Coulter.

In case you haven't heard, Ann Coulter is evil. I'm not exaggerating for effect here; she is, almost quite literally, eeeevil. Ann Coulter is usually described in news stories that are attempting to be "neutral" as "conservative author Ann Coulter." Now, you know I am no fan of conservative politics, and yet I feel that to call Ann Coulter a conservative is an insult to actual conservatives, who -- though they may be narrow-minded hypocrites who are so focused on ensuring that two men cannot marry each other lest the moral fabric of the country crumble into towering monuments of gayness that they cannot remove their heads from each other's asses long enough to have any regard for the lives of young American soldiers -- are not necessarily evil in the way that Ann Coulter is evil.

"How evil is Ann Coulter?!" you may be asking. I assume this has been a big of a story outside New York as it has been here, but in order to achieve the jaw-dropping reaction that inevitably accompanies one's hearing of this news, all I have to do is repeat Ann Coulter's own comments about the widows of four men who died on September 11, whom she charmingly refers to as "witches":

"These broads are millionaires, lionized in TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefarazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' death so much. By the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy."

That screeching sound you just heard was the sound of my eyeballs being forcibly yanked away from the inside of my skull. As if that weren't enough, Coulter claims that she made these remarks because she is tired of the way liberals use victims to advance political beliefs.

Gee, do you mean like the way conservatives co-opted the tragedy of Terri Schiavo in order to twist it into a right-to-life debate? Like the way the president invites the widows of soldiers who have been killed in Iraq to stand up at the State of the Union so he can further promote his own agenda? Or hmm, maybe like the way President Bush and the Republican party have used the victims of September 11 to justify everything from the invasion of Iraq to illegal wiretapping of private citizens. Like that kind of shameless, politically motivated ploy for sympathy, Ann Coulter?

This, of course, comes right on the heels of remarks made by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas following the defeat in the Senate of the Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage: "We're not going to stop until marriage between a man and a woman is protected...protected in the courts, protected in the Constitution, but most of all, protected for the people and for the future of our children in this society."

He's not going to stop, eh? That's nice. That's something to be proud of. That's something you want to have engraved on your tombstone: Senator Sam Brownback -- Did Not Stop Until He Could Rest Assured That No Two People of the Same Sex Would Ever Be Recognized As Connected to Each Other in a Relationship Defined Purely by Arbitrary Legal Declaration. Not "We're not going to stop until we've made sure that no child in America ever goes to bed hungry," or "We're not going to stop until a woman can walk through a park at night with no fear of being sexully assaulted," or "We're not going to stop until we've found a cure for cancer." Nope! Apparently none of these things are as threatening or as ominous to Senator Brownback as the knowledge that somewhere in America (okay, well, somewhere in Massachusetts) right now are two women whom the state recognizes to be married to each other in the same way Senator Brownback is married to his lovely wife Mary! This must eat away at him, keeping him up nights. Or maybe what's keeping him up nights is the knowledge that he could do more to put a stop to the massive genocide in Darfur -- a situation on which he has been active in working to resolve, which is more than can be said for the president -- if he didn't devote so much time, money and energy to depriving certain segments of the American population of their basic legal rights.

And now, having ranted for far longer than I intended, I shall retire to my bed and attempt to cleanse myself of unhealthy and unkind thoughts. Tomorrow is a day for new running sneakers and crafting Saturday's weather forecast with my mind!