I am currently gladdened by the fact that Jennifer Weiner, the acclaimed author, is not someone I went to college with.
I was willing to swear that there was a Jennifer Weiner in my class at U of Somewhere. So I went to her blog and found her profile with her pic, and when I saw that it wasn't her, I realized: No, that was a Jeanette Weiner, not Jennifer.
Somehow, other peoples' success only makes me feel inferior when it's someone I actually KNOW.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Now That I Think About It....
I'm not recanting my earlier belief that Maya Keyes shouldn't be made into a campaign issue.
However...
It's not as though she was hiding her orientation. She has posted photos of herself kissing another woman on her blog, despite the fact that her father was running for public office. Admittedly she didn't SPECIFICALLY mention her last name...but anyone who didn't fail connect-the-dots in kindergarten could pretty much put it all together--so clearly she wasn't too concerned with her anonymity.
Notice anything strange about my blog? That's right--there are no pictures of people. There are a few pictures: a quilt, a pipe in my basement, a dim shadow picture of my Christmas-lit house, and a very silly white cat acting the fool. If you can piece together my identity from those pictures, I've got a job for you over at CSI.
You'll find that I don't mention any real names. Or exactly where I work. Or exactly where I live. The best chance anyone would have of finding me from my blog posts would be to piece together my travel patterns from my CTA rantings, then ride those lines til they saw someone sorta fitting my description. And there are lots of fat sleepy white chicks riding the Purple Line--I think I'm safe.
So though I don't think Maya should be a campaign issue, I do think that the people who are yowling about "invasion of privacy" should think a little bit about what, allegedly, was so private.
However...
It's not as though she was hiding her orientation. She has posted photos of herself kissing another woman on her blog, despite the fact that her father was running for public office. Admittedly she didn't SPECIFICALLY mention her last name...but anyone who didn't fail connect-the-dots in kindergarten could pretty much put it all together--so clearly she wasn't too concerned with her anonymity.
Notice anything strange about my blog? That's right--there are no pictures of people. There are a few pictures: a quilt, a pipe in my basement, a dim shadow picture of my Christmas-lit house, and a very silly white cat acting the fool. If you can piece together my identity from those pictures, I've got a job for you over at CSI.
You'll find that I don't mention any real names. Or exactly where I work. Or exactly where I live. The best chance anyone would have of finding me from my blog posts would be to piece together my travel patterns from my CTA rantings, then ride those lines til they saw someone sorta fitting my description. And there are lots of fat sleepy white chicks riding the Purple Line--I think I'm safe.
So though I don't think Maya should be a campaign issue, I do think that the people who are yowling about "invasion of privacy" should think a little bit about what, allegedly, was so private.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Ten Things You Probably Don't Know About Me
This got started from a post over here--I can't resist a challenge. (Jen's are way better than mine, however.)
1. My big toe is shorter than my second toe. Apparently it's a genetic thing, but I don't think too many people who have this, have it to such a great extent as I do--it's a good 3/4 inch shorter than the one next to it.
2. Through most of the time I was a heroin addict, I was also a junior high teacher.
3. I have slept with a man who later turned out to be a murderer. It was a fairly high-profile case a couple of years ago--the guy killed his brother--and even when I dated him I could tell there was something not-right there.
4. Though I hate most vegetables, I love spinach.
5. In the 1988 presidential election, the first time I was eligible to vote, I voted for George Bush Sr. I have apologized for this misdeed many times since, but I'm still pretty sure I'm going to hell for it.
6. My first boyfriend was top dog on the school chess team. He was nowhere near as geeky as this makes him sound.
7. I once lost a wallet containing upwards of $800. (If you find it, would you make sure it gets back to me, please? I could use the money.)
8. My first car lasted me slightly more than a month. It was a 1985 Ford Tempo and one day as I drove to an orthodontist appointment, the engine spontaneously burst into flames. No one ever quite figured out why.
9. Though I've never had a sexual experience with another female, I consider myself bisexual--it's just that the opportunity has never come up. When JP and I lived together, we used to speculate as to whether our friend Sophia would be amenable...alas, it never happened.
10. As a child, I was always jealous of the "Brady Bunch" kids because they had so many brothers and sisters and always had someone to play with. And I always wanted to be one of the Partridge Family, though I thought it was grossly unfair for the little girl to get stuck with the tambourine.
1. My big toe is shorter than my second toe. Apparently it's a genetic thing, but I don't think too many people who have this, have it to such a great extent as I do--it's a good 3/4 inch shorter than the one next to it.
2. Through most of the time I was a heroin addict, I was also a junior high teacher.
3. I have slept with a man who later turned out to be a murderer. It was a fairly high-profile case a couple of years ago--the guy killed his brother--and even when I dated him I could tell there was something not-right there.
4. Though I hate most vegetables, I love spinach.
5. In the 1988 presidential election, the first time I was eligible to vote, I voted for George Bush Sr. I have apologized for this misdeed many times since, but I'm still pretty sure I'm going to hell for it.
6. My first boyfriend was top dog on the school chess team. He was nowhere near as geeky as this makes him sound.
7. I once lost a wallet containing upwards of $800. (If you find it, would you make sure it gets back to me, please? I could use the money.)
8. My first car lasted me slightly more than a month. It was a 1985 Ford Tempo and one day as I drove to an orthodontist appointment, the engine spontaneously burst into flames. No one ever quite figured out why.
9. Though I've never had a sexual experience with another female, I consider myself bisexual--it's just that the opportunity has never come up. When JP and I lived together, we used to speculate as to whether our friend Sophia would be amenable...alas, it never happened.
10. As a child, I was always jealous of the "Brady Bunch" kids because they had so many brothers and sisters and always had someone to play with. And I always wanted to be one of the Partridge Family, though I thought it was grossly unfair for the little girl to get stuck with the tambourine.
Monday, September 27, 2004
Why I Don't Drink Wine, Either
Wine Person Taking Things Too Seriously By Half
Crikey, people. It's a bunch of fermented crushed grape juice. It's not "the bad girl" and it doesn't "wear high heels"; it's not "savage" or "animalistic" or "gunmetal" or "monolithic"...
It's GRAPE JUICE. With bacteria and mold and such.
Let's keep some perspective, shall we?
Crikey, people. It's a bunch of fermented crushed grape juice. It's not "the bad girl" and it doesn't "wear high heels"; it's not "savage" or "animalistic" or "gunmetal" or "monolithic"...
It's GRAPE JUICE. With bacteria and mold and such.
Let's keep some perspective, shall we?
Things That Make You Go "Alan Keyes, What The Hell Are You Thinking, Man?"
The story thus far...
Apparently Alan Keyes--you know, the "gays and lesbians are all selfish hedonists" guy--has a daughter.
And apparently, if all signs are correct and everything's of credible provenance--apparently his daughter is a lesbian.
Kinda puts his comments about Mary Cheney into a whole new light, don't it.
Personally, I think Maya Keyes, Mary Cheney, the Gingrich sister and Deborah Mell (Gov. Blagojevich's sis-in-law) should form a support group against their stodgy, hypocritical relatives. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at one of THOSE meetings...
But seriously: Over at Chillinois, there's a comment thread (filled with trolls, of course) where the question is raised: "What do we do about this?"
Answer, from my stance: nothing. This is a woman--a human being. She's not a symbol or a weapon or a trump card--she's just another human being who wants the right to be in peace with the person she loves. Not unlike the rest of us--but unlike the rest of us, she has a father who's in the public eye and who disapproves of her choices. But that shouldn't disqualify HER from happiness.
Okay--so if it's all true: fine. We know it. And knowing it, we can judge her FATHER's words a little more accurately. But let's not use this information to involve Maya Keyes in something that isn't her fault. She had nothing to do with the fact that her father is a bigot.
To put it another way: There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish for my mother's empathy--she lost my father, I lost JP, but in her mind those losses are totally unalike--orders of magnitude separate her great loss from my "small" one--all because JP wasn't white. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish I could change the racist parts of my mother and let her see me as I really am, when I'm happy and comfortable with a man she can't even bring herself to meet because of his race.There isn't a day goes by that I don't wish my mother wasn't a racist--because the thing she doesn't realize is this: her racism didn't hurt JP and it doesn't hurt LJ--it hurts her, and it hurts me. It keeps us apart, and it keeps her from knowing who I really am.
It's the way I would imagine Maya Keyes feels about her father.
Apparently Alan Keyes--you know, the "gays and lesbians are all selfish hedonists" guy--has a daughter.
And apparently, if all signs are correct and everything's of credible provenance--apparently his daughter is a lesbian.
Kinda puts his comments about Mary Cheney into a whole new light, don't it.
Personally, I think Maya Keyes, Mary Cheney, the Gingrich sister and Deborah Mell (Gov. Blagojevich's sis-in-law) should form a support group against their stodgy, hypocritical relatives. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at one of THOSE meetings...
But seriously: Over at Chillinois, there's a comment thread (filled with trolls, of course) where the question is raised: "What do we do about this?"
Answer, from my stance: nothing. This is a woman--a human being. She's not a symbol or a weapon or a trump card--she's just another human being who wants the right to be in peace with the person she loves. Not unlike the rest of us--but unlike the rest of us, she has a father who's in the public eye and who disapproves of her choices. But that shouldn't disqualify HER from happiness.
Okay--so if it's all true: fine. We know it. And knowing it, we can judge her FATHER's words a little more accurately. But let's not use this information to involve Maya Keyes in something that isn't her fault. She had nothing to do with the fact that her father is a bigot.
To put it another way: There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish for my mother's empathy--she lost my father, I lost JP, but in her mind those losses are totally unalike--orders of magnitude separate her great loss from my "small" one--all because JP wasn't white. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish I could change the racist parts of my mother and let her see me as I really am, when I'm happy and comfortable with a man she can't even bring herself to meet because of his race.There isn't a day goes by that I don't wish my mother wasn't a racist--because the thing she doesn't realize is this: her racism didn't hurt JP and it doesn't hurt LJ--it hurts her, and it hurts me. It keeps us apart, and it keeps her from knowing who I really am.
It's the way I would imagine Maya Keyes feels about her father.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Yeah, You Never Know, Do Ya.
(Or, Why My Brain Is Twisted Into A Pretzel)
10:00 this morning, I am awakened from a sound and well-earned sleep by the warbling of my cell phone. The number looks vaguely familiar, so that I am tempted not to answer it, but at the same time I sleepily think "well, it could be important."
"Gladys? Gladys, this is Rick Schnorfenborfer--from Schnorfenborfer Used Auto?"
Uh-oh.
"Oh, hi," I mumble--keep in mind, I don't wake up well.
"You know, you were supposed to start making those payments on the balance of what you owe on the car back in July, and we never heard from you...."
A word of explanation may be in order. The car salesman worked out a deal with us--we couldn't come up with what they wanted for a down payment, but they agreed to let us make payments every week til we'd paid off the difference. Of course, we started having issues with the car immediately, and they were fine with us not paying til everything was fixed...Well, everything (from OUR perspective!) still isn't fixed.
"Um...yeah, sure, I understand," I told him... "It's just that right at the moment it's in the shop for a new rear differential."
Whereupon he uttered what is now, in my opinion, the Ultimate Used-Car Salesman Line Of All Time:
"Yeah...that's the problem when you buy used--you never know what's gonna happen."
Um, HELLO??? We bought it from YOU!!! jackass... "Yeah...well...Lemme talk to my guy about it, and we'll take care of it." Someday. Maybe. But don't hold your breath, okay?
What makes it even WORSE:
When they did the repairs, I specifically put on the list the noise it was making--the one that turned out to be the rear diff. The mechanic even SAID, when LJ mentioned it to him, "yeah, that sounds like it's probably the rear differential." But Rick--the guy who called--specifically crossed that off the list of things for the mechanic to check out--along with the front brakes, which we ALSO ended up having to replace.
Needless to say, LJ was NOT amused when I told him this story.
We're supposedly getting the truck back Wednesday or so; I can't wait. Right now it's disrupting our home life--LJ's spent three or four nights at his parents' house, simply because he can't get a ride home--and I'm having to walk all over creation and back because apparently the Pepsi truck doesn't stop in the 'hood. (Seriously. The woman at the liquor store told me the Pepsi truck hasn't been through in weeks, and nobody in the neighborhood has Pepsi to speak of. I finally found a 2-liter in a little hole-in-the-wall store populated by SERIOUS thugs, but as I told the woman at the liquor store, "When everyone at my job and in my family told me I was crazy to move into this neighborhood, I certainly didn't think the main hardship was gonna be that I couldn't get my Pepsi!!!")
So what's the moral of the story today, boys and girls?
"When you buy used, you never know what's gonna happen."
10:00 this morning, I am awakened from a sound and well-earned sleep by the warbling of my cell phone. The number looks vaguely familiar, so that I am tempted not to answer it, but at the same time I sleepily think "well, it could be important."
"Gladys? Gladys, this is Rick Schnorfenborfer--from Schnorfenborfer Used Auto?"
Uh-oh.
"Oh, hi," I mumble--keep in mind, I don't wake up well.
"You know, you were supposed to start making those payments on the balance of what you owe on the car back in July, and we never heard from you...."
A word of explanation may be in order. The car salesman worked out a deal with us--we couldn't come up with what they wanted for a down payment, but they agreed to let us make payments every week til we'd paid off the difference. Of course, we started having issues with the car immediately, and they were fine with us not paying til everything was fixed...Well, everything (from OUR perspective!) still isn't fixed.
"Um...yeah, sure, I understand," I told him... "It's just that right at the moment it's in the shop for a new rear differential."
Whereupon he uttered what is now, in my opinion, the Ultimate Used-Car Salesman Line Of All Time:
"Yeah...that's the problem when you buy used--you never know what's gonna happen."
Um, HELLO??? We bought it from YOU!!! jackass... "Yeah...well...Lemme talk to my guy about it, and we'll take care of it." Someday. Maybe. But don't hold your breath, okay?
What makes it even WORSE:
When they did the repairs, I specifically put on the list the noise it was making--the one that turned out to be the rear diff. The mechanic even SAID, when LJ mentioned it to him, "yeah, that sounds like it's probably the rear differential." But Rick--the guy who called--specifically crossed that off the list of things for the mechanic to check out--along with the front brakes, which we ALSO ended up having to replace.
Needless to say, LJ was NOT amused when I told him this story.
We're supposedly getting the truck back Wednesday or so; I can't wait. Right now it's disrupting our home life--LJ's spent three or four nights at his parents' house, simply because he can't get a ride home--and I'm having to walk all over creation and back because apparently the Pepsi truck doesn't stop in the 'hood. (Seriously. The woman at the liquor store told me the Pepsi truck hasn't been through in weeks, and nobody in the neighborhood has Pepsi to speak of. I finally found a 2-liter in a little hole-in-the-wall store populated by SERIOUS thugs, but as I told the woman at the liquor store, "When everyone at my job and in my family told me I was crazy to move into this neighborhood, I certainly didn't think the main hardship was gonna be that I couldn't get my Pepsi!!!")
So what's the moral of the story today, boys and girls?
"When you buy used, you never know what's gonna happen."
Friday, September 24, 2004
Oh, Damn.
Okay, okay--I gotta be nice. I've gotta swallow my pissed-offed-ness and be the bigger person and say it....
"Thanks, Zorn."
"Thanks, Zorn."
What Out a WHAT, Now?
Gays and Lesbians Protest Capleton at House of Blues
People, you know me pretty well by now.
You know that there is absolutely not a racist bone in my body--at least, I HOPE you know that by now....
But I gotta say this.
It would be much, much, MUCH easier for me to get worked up about the anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-woman lyrics of these Jamaican reggae dancehall songs....
....if I had the SLIGHTEST, EVERFUCKING IDEA of what they were actually SAYING.
I have very good hearing. From childhood, I have been able to decipher lyrics that no one else has been able to get. Friends come up to me and ask "What did they just say?" and I can tell them. It's a gift borne of long hours of listening to loud guitars, men with big hair, and lyrics like "BLLLARRARRRRRRGGHHHHH@!!!!!" Hip-hop? Same thing. I can pick out lyrics from almost anything....okay, I have a little problem hearing Twista once in a while, but shit, who doesn't? the man's in Guinness, for god's sake.
But starting with Max-i-millian back in '95 or so, and moving on through Beenie Man, Sean Paul, all those guys who are so popular now....If I can pick one sentence out of thirty, I'm calling it a good day. They could be saying "feed all the hungry children, vote for John Kerry"--or they could be saying "eat a basket of dead babies, we are all good Republicans". I would not have the slightest inkling either way.
LJ (or maybe it's one of his friends) has this movie on DVD, about Jamaican drug gangs--"Shottaz", I think it's called--and the damn thing has SUBTITLES. (Of all the people who I would have expected to catch watching a subtitled movie, I gotta tell you, LJ and the guys were NOT on the list. Not at ALL.) So clearly I'm not the only one who has a problem with Jamaican patois.
So to me, this protest against Capleton and his lyrics is a little bit like protesting a book that advocates terrorism--written in Esperanto. I mean, yeah, sure, the content's there--at least, I THINK it's there--but how many people can understand it enough to absorb the ideas that cause you such offense???
People, you know me pretty well by now.
You know that there is absolutely not a racist bone in my body--at least, I HOPE you know that by now....
But I gotta say this.
It would be much, much, MUCH easier for me to get worked up about the anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-woman lyrics of these Jamaican reggae dancehall songs....
....if I had the SLIGHTEST, EVERFUCKING IDEA of what they were actually SAYING.
I have very good hearing. From childhood, I have been able to decipher lyrics that no one else has been able to get. Friends come up to me and ask "What did they just say?" and I can tell them. It's a gift borne of long hours of listening to loud guitars, men with big hair, and lyrics like "BLLLARRARRRRRRGGHHHHH@!!!!!" Hip-hop? Same thing. I can pick out lyrics from almost anything....okay, I have a little problem hearing Twista once in a while, but shit, who doesn't? the man's in Guinness, for god's sake.
But starting with Max-i-millian back in '95 or so, and moving on through Beenie Man, Sean Paul, all those guys who are so popular now....If I can pick one sentence out of thirty, I'm calling it a good day. They could be saying "feed all the hungry children, vote for John Kerry"--or they could be saying "eat a basket of dead babies, we are all good Republicans". I would not have the slightest inkling either way.
LJ (or maybe it's one of his friends) has this movie on DVD, about Jamaican drug gangs--"Shottaz", I think it's called--and the damn thing has SUBTITLES. (Of all the people who I would have expected to catch watching a subtitled movie, I gotta tell you, LJ and the guys were NOT on the list. Not at ALL.) So clearly I'm not the only one who has a problem with Jamaican patois.
So to me, this protest against Capleton and his lyrics is a little bit like protesting a book that advocates terrorism--written in Esperanto. I mean, yeah, sure, the content's there--at least, I THINK it's there--but how many people can understand it enough to absorb the ideas that cause you such offense???
I'm Sorry--WHERE Did You Come From Again???
R Kelly and Jay-Z on bootlegs....
Now, I can see why some band like, say, Metallica or U2 or Linkin Park might have a problem with bootleg merchandise. I mean, it's wrong. it's bad, it's this, it's that--and it takes money out of their pockets, not that their pockets NEED much further lining.
But for R. Kelly, who allegedly grew up on the West Side of Chicago--Bootleg Capital of the City!--to bitch about having his stuff bootlegged....
You can't walk down Madison Street without being accosted by half-a-dozen guys trying to sell you bootleg DVD's of movies that just opened two days before!!! You want to try to tell me that little Kells never bought himself a bootleg of "Nightmare on Elm Street 4" or "Ghostbusters" on VHS??? C'mon, now.
Hypocrisy in the hood...:::sigh::::
Now, I can see why some band like, say, Metallica or U2 or Linkin Park might have a problem with bootleg merchandise. I mean, it's wrong. it's bad, it's this, it's that--and it takes money out of their pockets, not that their pockets NEED much further lining.
But for R. Kelly, who allegedly grew up on the West Side of Chicago--Bootleg Capital of the City!--to bitch about having his stuff bootlegged....
You can't walk down Madison Street without being accosted by half-a-dozen guys trying to sell you bootleg DVD's of movies that just opened two days before!!! You want to try to tell me that little Kells never bought himself a bootleg of "Nightmare on Elm Street 4" or "Ghostbusters" on VHS??? C'mon, now.
Hypocrisy in the hood...:::sigh::::
Thursday, September 23, 2004
DAMN You, UPN!!!
Last night, the new season of _America's Next Top Model_ started. I love that show--but that's not what I'm all worked up about.
Dear, dear UPN.
Let me explain something to you--and I believe I will be speaking for many, many impressionable females.
This new show, _Kevin Hill_, which you are so-relentlessly promoting?
It's a bad thing, guys.
The one thing that will be more irresistible than Taye Diggs--and let me tell you, as far as I'm concerned, that's PRET-ty GOD-damn irresistible--will be Taye Diggs with a cute little baby.
Christ, people. Why don't you write a basket of kittens into the story line, so he can be cute with THOSE?? Or make them live on a farm with cuddly baby ducklings??? Maybe he could be a flowers-and-candy salesman, while we're at it. Or a masseuse.
:::making the Homer-Simpson gargle-of-ecstasy noise::::
Mmmmm.....masseuse....
:::shakes it off:::
Have you no SHAME, UPN? Have you no MERCY???????
If anyone needs me, I'll have my face pressed against the TV screen--drooling.
Dear, dear UPN.
Let me explain something to you--and I believe I will be speaking for many, many impressionable females.
This new show, _Kevin Hill_, which you are so-relentlessly promoting?
It's a bad thing, guys.
The one thing that will be more irresistible than Taye Diggs--and let me tell you, as far as I'm concerned, that's PRET-ty GOD-damn irresistible--will be Taye Diggs with a cute little baby.
Christ, people. Why don't you write a basket of kittens into the story line, so he can be cute with THOSE?? Or make them live on a farm with cuddly baby ducklings??? Maybe he could be a flowers-and-candy salesman, while we're at it. Or a masseuse.
:::making the Homer-Simpson gargle-of-ecstasy noise::::
Mmmmm.....masseuse....
:::shakes it off:::
Have you no SHAME, UPN? Have you no MERCY???????
If anyone needs me, I'll have my face pressed against the TV screen--drooling.
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Does Anyone Know Where I Can Find A Cheaper Ho?
I think I realized why, exactly, I don't take days off like this too often.
I'm brooding. And unfortunately, things being what they are around here, I've got plenty to brood about.
It's the 22nd of the month--8 more days til payday.
I have $27 in the checking account.
The 'ho is still in the shop; although the worst of the problem is apparently covered by the warranty (the rear differential, at $1300 installed) we still need a new battery, a new taillight assembly, and new front brakes. Along with the deductible on the warranty, this all comes to $350.
The car note is due the first of the month. Between that and the repairs, LJ is now officially broke. Because the car is in the shop, it's hard for him to do what he does to make money.
That leaves next months' bills, and all the bills that didn't get paid THIS month because we didn't have the money.
The fridge is empty-ish, aiming towards empty. We are out of potatoes and out of onions. (2 major staple-foods around here.)
This is NOT good.
I'm brooding. And unfortunately, things being what they are around here, I've got plenty to brood about.
It's the 22nd of the month--8 more days til payday.
I have $27 in the checking account.
The 'ho is still in the shop; although the worst of the problem is apparently covered by the warranty (the rear differential, at $1300 installed) we still need a new battery, a new taillight assembly, and new front brakes. Along with the deductible on the warranty, this all comes to $350.
The car note is due the first of the month. Between that and the repairs, LJ is now officially broke. Because the car is in the shop, it's hard for him to do what he does to make money.
That leaves next months' bills, and all the bills that didn't get paid THIS month because we didn't have the money.
The fridge is empty-ish, aiming towards empty. We are out of potatoes and out of onions. (2 major staple-foods around here.)
This is NOT good.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
I'm A Rebel, I Tell You
I will be taking a mental-health day tomorrow. I am not sick; I'm just not going to work.
Because I don't want to.
I don't want to get up early, and I don't want to take the bus and the train, and I don't want to get the same ol' bagel for breakfast, and I don't want to put in eight hours. I don't want to deal with cranky people's misconceptions about computers and what they do. I don't want to deal with people who do things every day by rote, and have no idea how to recover when they encounter even the slightest deviation from their usual path.
So I am sleeping in. And for breakfast, I believe I shall have pancakes.
Because I don't want to.
I don't want to get up early, and I don't want to take the bus and the train, and I don't want to get the same ol' bagel for breakfast, and I don't want to put in eight hours. I don't want to deal with cranky people's misconceptions about computers and what they do. I don't want to deal with people who do things every day by rote, and have no idea how to recover when they encounter even the slightest deviation from their usual path.
So I am sleeping in. And for breakfast, I believe I shall have pancakes.
Who The Hell's Bright Idea Was THAT?
My schedule has been fucked-with.
Used to be that the Fox affiliate in Chicago had a nice, peaceful progression of reruns to lull me to sleep at night. It was the _Simpsons_, then _That 70's Show_, _Seinfeld_, _Frasier_, and then _3rd Rock From the Sun_, if I was being a particularly bad stay-up-late girl.
That was tolerable. I could maybe watch the 10:00 news, if I'd missed the 9:00 for some reason, without feeling deprived--after all, I've memorized most of the Simpsons episodes anyway. And I always felt like I had a good excuse to stay up, because there was always something to watch.
Well, now they've gone and screwed it up. They moved _That 70's Show_ over to UPN, and they replaced it with--of all things--_Malcolm in the Middle_. I can't STAND that show. And they replaced _3rd Rock_ with _Cheers_--which was played-out after the three-hundred-ninety-fourth cycle on Nick at Nite.
I'm just lucky Cartoon Network shows _Futurama_ at 10:30...otherwise, I'd have to go to bed. And that would be a shame.
Used to be that the Fox affiliate in Chicago had a nice, peaceful progression of reruns to lull me to sleep at night. It was the _Simpsons_, then _That 70's Show_, _Seinfeld_, _Frasier_, and then _3rd Rock From the Sun_, if I was being a particularly bad stay-up-late girl.
That was tolerable. I could maybe watch the 10:00 news, if I'd missed the 9:00 for some reason, without feeling deprived--after all, I've memorized most of the Simpsons episodes anyway. And I always felt like I had a good excuse to stay up, because there was always something to watch.
Well, now they've gone and screwed it up. They moved _That 70's Show_ over to UPN, and they replaced it with--of all things--_Malcolm in the Middle_. I can't STAND that show. And they replaced _3rd Rock_ with _Cheers_--which was played-out after the three-hundred-ninety-fourth cycle on Nick at Nite.
I'm just lucky Cartoon Network shows _Futurama_ at 10:30...otherwise, I'd have to go to bed. And that would be a shame.
More Small Words
To my many, many searchers:
The K@rshner triplets, to the best of my or anyone else's knowledge...
...ARE...
...NOT...
...GAY.
So--when you click on this website, you will NOT be fulfilling any of your fantasies for "K@rshner triplets gay sex", or "K@rshner triplets nude" or any of the other things that so many of you seem to want to do with these little cuties.
Think about it, people. Cingular Wireless is a hyuuuuuuuge corporation. Do you think they'd involve themselves with _any_ spokesperson, if there was even the SLIGHTEST chance that the person's private conduct would make 99% of Middle America crap themselves with dismay? (I'm not defending Middle America, mind you--but seriously--you're just not taking the realities of the situation into account, none of you.)
But I'll promise this much, to my poor disillusioned searchers:
If there ever turns up any K@rshner kink, I'll link to it here. Promise.
Now--go play outside in the sun for a while, willya? Jeez.
The K@rshner triplets, to the best of my or anyone else's knowledge...
...ARE...
...NOT...
...GAY.
So--when you click on this website, you will NOT be fulfilling any of your fantasies for "K@rshner triplets gay sex", or "K@rshner triplets nude" or any of the other things that so many of you seem to want to do with these little cuties.
Think about it, people. Cingular Wireless is a hyuuuuuuuge corporation. Do you think they'd involve themselves with _any_ spokesperson, if there was even the SLIGHTEST chance that the person's private conduct would make 99% of Middle America crap themselves with dismay? (I'm not defending Middle America, mind you--but seriously--you're just not taking the realities of the situation into account, none of you.)
But I'll promise this much, to my poor disillusioned searchers:
If there ever turns up any K@rshner kink, I'll link to it here. Promise.
Now--go play outside in the sun for a while, willya? Jeez.
Hypothesis: Fathers Have A Slight Sadistic Streak
So this post started off because (again) I was reading Katie's blog, particularly this post right here.
In which she refers to Dooce, particularly this post right here.
And as I read the second one, having read the first one already, I was moved to ask myself the question:
Does EVERY SINGLE FREAKIN' DAD in the WORLD try something like that at least ONCE??? (Okay, yeah, I know the one in Katie's story was a stray Mormon, not a father. But you just KNOW he became someone's father SOMEDAY--so the hypothesis holds.)
With my dad, it went a little somethin' like this:
My mom is a (now recovering) alcoholic. And around the time I was 5 or so, she decided she was going to quit drinking. So she switched from her martinis to various other non-alcoholic concoctions--sparkling cider, for one; and the year I was 9, it was a combination of quinine water and grape juice. (We referred to it as "squid" because of the way the grape-juice spread at the bottom of the glass, like ink.)
Anyway, the nightly routine was pretty carved-in-stone; Dad would come home from work around 6:30, and Mom would be working on dinner, so Dad would fix drinks--his Manhattan, her quinine-and-grape, and a big glass of 7-up for me.
One night, Dad got distracted in the middle of his bartending duties--phone call or something. So when I walked into the kitchen, Dad was standing there in his little corner space where he always perched, telling Mom about the phone call--and sitting on the counter was Dad's Manhattan, and a tall, iced frosty glass of 7-up....which I, being 9 years old and very thirsty, grabbed immediately. I took a big gulp...
...and my face imploded.
Of course, it was Mom's quinine water I'd chugged. (For those of you not familiar with quinine water, imagine the taste of eleven aspirin dissolved in a glass, with a hint of vinegar added. How this particular beverage ever came into the realm of human consumption, I cannot explain. But it did, to my eternal chagrin.)
I glared at my dad, full of an indignation peculiar to the nine-year-old with a face-full of quinine. "Why didn't you TELL me?" I spluttered.
"Because I wanted to see the look on your face!" he said.
Can't argue with that, I guess. But add another item to the "Things I'd Never Do To MY Kids, If I Had Any" list....
In which she refers to Dooce, particularly this post right here.
And as I read the second one, having read the first one already, I was moved to ask myself the question:
Does EVERY SINGLE FREAKIN' DAD in the WORLD try something like that at least ONCE??? (Okay, yeah, I know the one in Katie's story was a stray Mormon, not a father. But you just KNOW he became someone's father SOMEDAY--so the hypothesis holds.)
With my dad, it went a little somethin' like this:
My mom is a (now recovering) alcoholic. And around the time I was 5 or so, she decided she was going to quit drinking. So she switched from her martinis to various other non-alcoholic concoctions--sparkling cider, for one; and the year I was 9, it was a combination of quinine water and grape juice. (We referred to it as "squid" because of the way the grape-juice spread at the bottom of the glass, like ink.)
Anyway, the nightly routine was pretty carved-in-stone; Dad would come home from work around 6:30, and Mom would be working on dinner, so Dad would fix drinks--his Manhattan, her quinine-and-grape, and a big glass of 7-up for me.
One night, Dad got distracted in the middle of his bartending duties--phone call or something. So when I walked into the kitchen, Dad was standing there in his little corner space where he always perched, telling Mom about the phone call--and sitting on the counter was Dad's Manhattan, and a tall, iced frosty glass of 7-up....which I, being 9 years old and very thirsty, grabbed immediately. I took a big gulp...
...and my face imploded.
Of course, it was Mom's quinine water I'd chugged. (For those of you not familiar with quinine water, imagine the taste of eleven aspirin dissolved in a glass, with a hint of vinegar added. How this particular beverage ever came into the realm of human consumption, I cannot explain. But it did, to my eternal chagrin.)
I glared at my dad, full of an indignation peculiar to the nine-year-old with a face-full of quinine. "Why didn't you TELL me?" I spluttered.
"Because I wanted to see the look on your face!" he said.
Can't argue with that, I guess. But add another item to the "Things I'd Never Do To MY Kids, If I Had Any" list....
Monday, September 20, 2004
Saturday, September 18, 2004
I'm a WOMAN, Fer Chrissake!!!
Sheep that I am, I follow any and all shiny-looking links on other people's blogs. Today's shiny-thing-danglers were first (the awesome) Katie, and then the person who writes Seriously Random. And the particular shiny thing that was dangled was this:
The Gender Genie
I tried ten times, with ten of my longest blog posts.
You know how many times it thought I was a man?
NINE. NINE times it said I was a man. And when I clicked on the button that said "this was written by a female"--you know what it said?
"That is one REALLY butch chick." (Yeah, well, this really butch chick could fuck up your scrawny little geek-ass scientist self, I can tell you THAT much...)
Now: check THIS shit out, though. They use some algorithm based on keywords viewed as "masculine" or "feminine"
Feminine Keywords:
with,if,not,where,be,when,your,her,we,should,she,and,me,myself,hers,was
Masculine Keywords:
around,what,more,are,as,who,below,is,these,the,a,at,it,many,said,above
Now are you seriously gonna try to tell me that "the" is a "masculine" word? Because I use "the" a lot, that points to some masculine trend in my writing??? And what about all the "me" and "myself" and pronouns in the "feminine" list--are they implying that women write about humans, whereas men write about objects? What about introverted women or extroverted men??
Methinks this crock, it smellest of shite.
(Call THAT "masculine", muthafucka.)
The Gender Genie
I tried ten times, with ten of my longest blog posts.
You know how many times it thought I was a man?
NINE. NINE times it said I was a man. And when I clicked on the button that said "this was written by a female"--you know what it said?
"That is one REALLY butch chick." (Yeah, well, this really butch chick could fuck up your scrawny little geek-ass scientist self, I can tell you THAT much...)
Now: check THIS shit out, though. They use some algorithm based on keywords viewed as "masculine" or "feminine"
Feminine Keywords:
with,if,not,where,be,when,your,her,we,should,she,and,me,myself,hers,was
Masculine Keywords:
around,what,more,are,as,who,below,is,these,the,a,at,it,many,said,above
Now are you seriously gonna try to tell me that "the" is a "masculine" word? Because I use "the" a lot, that points to some masculine trend in my writing??? And what about all the "me" and "myself" and pronouns in the "feminine" list--are they implying that women write about humans, whereas men write about objects? What about introverted women or extroverted men??
Methinks this crock, it smellest of shite.
(Call THAT "masculine", muthafucka.)
Blogaversary
Reluctantly--because hipsters scare me--I offer you this link.
Normally I would run like hell from something like this; I discovered it entirely by accident, as a link in House in Progress, where I go when I start thinking what the hell have I gotten myself into? But there's a reason I link:
Six Oh Six is published, if its masthead is even remotely correct, near the place JP and I used to share--in fact, about five feet from a sidewalk that JP and I walked down almost every single day we lived there.
Our building is gone now. I drove down that street last year, on one of my house-hunting trips before I bought this place, and I discovered that they'd torn off the little storefront apartment we'd shared, and put up a two-story cinderblock condo--ugly as sin, poorly constructed, and no doubt selling for three or four times what I paid for this place.
Yeah, I cried. Wouldn't you?
I was lucky enough, a few days later, to find a website with pictures of EVERY SINGLE BUILDING in Chicago--something for tax-assessment purposes--and the site had a picture of the OLD 1460--not the new, ugly 1460. So I have a picture--in fact, I made that the touchstone of a project, in which I printed out the pictures of every Chicago home I'd ever had--but a picture ain't the real thing, boys.
Things change, I know. That's fine. I'd hate a static world. But SOME things shouldn't disappear like that. There are some things, mundane things, that should be made holy in hindsight--sacred by virtue of what happened AFTER. I'm sure everyone has at least one or two of those things, and I suppose it's not feasible to protect everyone's most treasured memories--there are so many people, so many things, that it would result in gridlock, and my dreaded static world.
So needless to say, I have a soft spot in my heart for things and places whose addresses I recognize that way....like Six Oh Six, which I would normally dismiss as being too-hip for me.
It was a year ago today that I started this blog. It's been one hell of a year; I wouldn't change any of it. (Well, except Bob the Plumber....) But today I was remembering what it felt like to be waiting to move into this house--the pride and joy of having DONE something like this. I need to remember that emotion more often, I think.
Happy blogaversary!
Normally I would run like hell from something like this; I discovered it entirely by accident, as a link in House in Progress, where I go when I start thinking what the hell have I gotten myself into? But there's a reason I link:
Six Oh Six is published, if its masthead is even remotely correct, near the place JP and I used to share--in fact, about five feet from a sidewalk that JP and I walked down almost every single day we lived there.
Our building is gone now. I drove down that street last year, on one of my house-hunting trips before I bought this place, and I discovered that they'd torn off the little storefront apartment we'd shared, and put up a two-story cinderblock condo--ugly as sin, poorly constructed, and no doubt selling for three or four times what I paid for this place.
Yeah, I cried. Wouldn't you?
I was lucky enough, a few days later, to find a website with pictures of EVERY SINGLE BUILDING in Chicago--something for tax-assessment purposes--and the site had a picture of the OLD 1460--not the new, ugly 1460. So I have a picture--in fact, I made that the touchstone of a project, in which I printed out the pictures of every Chicago home I'd ever had--but a picture ain't the real thing, boys.
Things change, I know. That's fine. I'd hate a static world. But SOME things shouldn't disappear like that. There are some things, mundane things, that should be made holy in hindsight--sacred by virtue of what happened AFTER. I'm sure everyone has at least one or two of those things, and I suppose it's not feasible to protect everyone's most treasured memories--there are so many people, so many things, that it would result in gridlock, and my dreaded static world.
So needless to say, I have a soft spot in my heart for things and places whose addresses I recognize that way....like Six Oh Six, which I would normally dismiss as being too-hip for me.
It was a year ago today that I started this blog. It's been one hell of a year; I wouldn't change any of it. (Well, except Bob the Plumber....) But today I was remembering what it felt like to be waiting to move into this house--the pride and joy of having DONE something like this. I need to remember that emotion more often, I think.
Happy blogaversary!
My 'Ho Is Broken
(title with thanks to Colin from the Amazing Race 5, who made my favorite declaration of any reality series EVER when he whined the immortal words: "My ox is broken!!!")
3 AM: I am awakened from a sound and grateful sleep by a ringing phone.
LJ: "Yeah--the muthafuckin' car just broke down again!"
We had made plans to take it to the shop over in Maywood tomorrow morning. No joke--tomorrow morning. The alarm clock is set for 8:00, for just that purpose. But the damn thing couldn't wait, and from what LJ describes, it may have just spat out its transmission. Thank god for warranties (of course, that assumes that these will be covered repairs. If not, I'll be selling a broken-down truck on which we owe thousands).
And regardless of WHAT they find:
--thank god for "roadside assistance" clauses that can invoke a tow-truck in the middle of the night;
--thank god for cell phones, which in this case prevented my man from having to climb the exit ramp of the Eisenhower to try and find an open, working pay phone at 3 in the morning;
--thank god for even-tempered men who realize: the girlfriend is not the problem; the inanimate object is the problem. The girlfriend is an ally who is trying to help. (CR would not have been perceptive enough to realize this simple fact--with CR, this would have been a howling, raging, whining, bitching, tantrummy nightmare. With LJ, it's just an annoyance--which leaves me free to terrify myself with worst-case scenarios involving our finances.)
I didn't have a car for five years--what on earth made me think I needed one NOW?
3 AM: I am awakened from a sound and grateful sleep by a ringing phone.
LJ: "Yeah--the muthafuckin' car just broke down again!"
We had made plans to take it to the shop over in Maywood tomorrow morning. No joke--tomorrow morning. The alarm clock is set for 8:00, for just that purpose. But the damn thing couldn't wait, and from what LJ describes, it may have just spat out its transmission. Thank god for warranties (of course, that assumes that these will be covered repairs. If not, I'll be selling a broken-down truck on which we owe thousands).
And regardless of WHAT they find:
--thank god for "roadside assistance" clauses that can invoke a tow-truck in the middle of the night;
--thank god for cell phones, which in this case prevented my man from having to climb the exit ramp of the Eisenhower to try and find an open, working pay phone at 3 in the morning;
--thank god for even-tempered men who realize: the girlfriend is not the problem; the inanimate object is the problem. The girlfriend is an ally who is trying to help. (CR would not have been perceptive enough to realize this simple fact--with CR, this would have been a howling, raging, whining, bitching, tantrummy nightmare. With LJ, it's just an annoyance--which leaves me free to terrify myself with worst-case scenarios involving our finances.)
I didn't have a car for five years--what on earth made me think I needed one NOW?
Friday, September 17, 2004
Woo Hoo! I'm In The Paper!!!
Here's the column....
I'm the last story--the one attributed to "Rachel"--and that's the story, in a nutshell, of What Happened With Me and CR.
(Actually, this is the third time one of my letters has shown up in this column...kinda renews my belief in myself as a writer.)
I'm the last story--the one attributed to "Rachel"--and that's the story, in a nutshell, of What Happened With Me and CR.
(Actually, this is the third time one of my letters has shown up in this column...kinda renews my belief in myself as a writer.)
I Just Wasn't Meant For These Times
This is a long article, about the guy who founded Maxim and how he's now decided he's a poet.
Here's the article.
Some questions popped into my mind as I read this.
1. When, exactly, did our society come to the point where we celebrate bad behavior, chauvinism, drunkenness, and horniness?
2. Why? Why are these things to celebrate?
3. Why is "intelligent" becoming a pejorative--like "liberal"?
4. Why is "stupid" becoming a GOOD thing?
5. Does anyone else understand the difference between "poetry" and "locker-room limerick"? Does this man also consider " There once was a man from Nantucket..." to be "poetry"?
If I had a choice--if someone handed me a copy of Maxim and a three-foot stack of hardcore porno magazines and videotapes, and they said to me "You have a choice. You HAVE TO give your man one of these two items--this one copy of Maxim, or this stack of pornos. Which are you going to give him?"
Given that choice, I wouldn't even think twice--the stack of hardcore would win every time.
Porno doesn't pretend to be anything but what it is--there's no agenda here. There are those who say it degrades women, and in many cases I agree with them--but it never pretends NOT to be degrading them. The ones that degrade women are open about that fact, and they play on it as a way for men to deal with fantasy without having to ACTUALLY degrade real women.
Maxim, on the other hand, says it's "humor". And that's where the trouble comes in....because much of this "humor" has an undertone that exposes the attitudes that lie beneath it. The ads, the pictures of scantily-clad females--there's an agenda underneath all this stuff, and it's very decidedly NOT pro-woman. Or even pro-understanding between the sexes. Like a lot of women's magazines, there's a quiet repetition of the themes that the opposite sex is out to get you, is out to burn you, screw you over, take your money, whatever. And I just don't believe in shit like that.
And even putting the best possible face on it: Okay, suppose all this talk of anti-woman agendas is just my own little paranoid fantasy world. Suppose Maxim IS intended as humor.
Fine. BUT--like Mancow, the biggest anus on the radio, who piously claims "I'm not like this in real life--this is a CHARACTER, a PERSONA,"--no matter what might be the INTENT....
...there are inevitably people who are going to AGREE with your most-outrageous proclamations. There are inevitably people who won't see that the intent IS "humor". What the people who create this stuff don't realize, or choose to ignore, is this:
No matter what THEY, personally, might think, the fact remains: they tailor their messages to the lowest common denominator. And when members of their target demographic, hearing this Maxim guy talk about how great it was to have 14 mistresses at once, or Mancow holding forth about how women are only good for one thing, stand there pumping their fists and yelling "YEAH!!! WOOHOO!!! SLAP DEM BITCHES!!" --then these same guys get all innocent-eyed and claim "But we were only JOKING..."
I'm not saying that life should be a humorless wasteland, or that all humor should be safe and inoffensive. Nor am I saying we should worship intellectuals...many of them, I've found, are too busy glorying in their own superiority to actually interact with the other 95% of the human race. And then, too, some of them are boring. But I would rather spend time in the company of someone who looks at the world and wonders what makes it go; someone who looks at people and wonders about what makes them who they are. Not somebody who thinks they already KNOW--but definitely not someone who looks at people as either "something to fuck" or "something to fight"; not someone who looks at the world and thinks: Man, my ass-crack itches.
When you celebrate the Cult of the Dumbass, you FEED the Dumbass. And eventually, you BECOME the Dumbass.
Here's the article.
Some questions popped into my mind as I read this.
1. When, exactly, did our society come to the point where we celebrate bad behavior, chauvinism, drunkenness, and horniness?
2. Why? Why are these things to celebrate?
3. Why is "intelligent" becoming a pejorative--like "liberal"?
4. Why is "stupid" becoming a GOOD thing?
5. Does anyone else understand the difference between "poetry" and "locker-room limerick"? Does this man also consider " There once was a man from Nantucket..." to be "poetry"?
If I had a choice--if someone handed me a copy of Maxim and a three-foot stack of hardcore porno magazines and videotapes, and they said to me "You have a choice. You HAVE TO give your man one of these two items--this one copy of Maxim, or this stack of pornos. Which are you going to give him?"
Given that choice, I wouldn't even think twice--the stack of hardcore would win every time.
Porno doesn't pretend to be anything but what it is--there's no agenda here. There are those who say it degrades women, and in many cases I agree with them--but it never pretends NOT to be degrading them. The ones that degrade women are open about that fact, and they play on it as a way for men to deal with fantasy without having to ACTUALLY degrade real women.
Maxim, on the other hand, says it's "humor". And that's where the trouble comes in....because much of this "humor" has an undertone that exposes the attitudes that lie beneath it. The ads, the pictures of scantily-clad females--there's an agenda underneath all this stuff, and it's very decidedly NOT pro-woman. Or even pro-understanding between the sexes. Like a lot of women's magazines, there's a quiet repetition of the themes that the opposite sex is out to get you, is out to burn you, screw you over, take your money, whatever. And I just don't believe in shit like that.
And even putting the best possible face on it: Okay, suppose all this talk of anti-woman agendas is just my own little paranoid fantasy world. Suppose Maxim IS intended as humor.
Fine. BUT--like Mancow, the biggest anus on the radio, who piously claims "I'm not like this in real life--this is a CHARACTER, a PERSONA,"--no matter what might be the INTENT....
...there are inevitably people who are going to AGREE with your most-outrageous proclamations. There are inevitably people who won't see that the intent IS "humor". What the people who create this stuff don't realize, or choose to ignore, is this:
No matter what THEY, personally, might think, the fact remains: they tailor their messages to the lowest common denominator. And when members of their target demographic, hearing this Maxim guy talk about how great it was to have 14 mistresses at once, or Mancow holding forth about how women are only good for one thing, stand there pumping their fists and yelling "YEAH!!! WOOHOO!!! SLAP DEM BITCHES!!" --then these same guys get all innocent-eyed and claim "But we were only JOKING..."
I'm not saying that life should be a humorless wasteland, or that all humor should be safe and inoffensive. Nor am I saying we should worship intellectuals...many of them, I've found, are too busy glorying in their own superiority to actually interact with the other 95% of the human race. And then, too, some of them are boring. But I would rather spend time in the company of someone who looks at the world and wonders what makes it go; someone who looks at people and wonders about what makes them who they are. Not somebody who thinks they already KNOW--but definitely not someone who looks at people as either "something to fuck" or "something to fight"; not someone who looks at the world and thinks: Man, my ass-crack itches.
When you celebrate the Cult of the Dumbass, you FEED the Dumbass. And eventually, you BECOME the Dumbass.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Thanks Katie!
You will swallow some tacks. You are a little
weird, maybe not so much in a good way. Buy a
yellow tie and wear it on your head.
What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
brought to you by Quizilla
Wait a Minute.
Okay. So wait--I need some help with this one.
A national news organization releases documents which purportedly attack the truthfulness of a sitting president. Analysis seems to suggest these documents may, in fact, be falsified.
Those on the side of the president's ideologies claim that this is the fault of the "bias" of the media, and that it somehow "proves" a media conspiracy.
Meanwhile, a huge number of media outlets--again, run by those who share the president's ideologies--have spent enormous amounts of time slandering the president's opponent, often with little or no documentation or coroborration and often in direct OPPOSITION to the available facts.
The number of people reached by the media outlets _supporting_ the president's ideologies and slamming his opponent vastly outnumbers the number of people reached by the media outlets _questioning_ the president's past.
Doesn't that void the claims of "media bias" from that side? If there is a bias here, isn't it in the OTHER direction?? Isn't it possible that someone just didn't check their facts? (An inexcusable lapse, if true--but not an impossible one.)
And why, when WE suggest a possible "bias" in the media, are we told to shut up and smile and be conciliatory--whereas, when THEY cry "bias", it's taken as an article of faith?
A national news organization releases documents which purportedly attack the truthfulness of a sitting president. Analysis seems to suggest these documents may, in fact, be falsified.
Those on the side of the president's ideologies claim that this is the fault of the "bias" of the media, and that it somehow "proves" a media conspiracy.
Meanwhile, a huge number of media outlets--again, run by those who share the president's ideologies--have spent enormous amounts of time slandering the president's opponent, often with little or no documentation or coroborration and often in direct OPPOSITION to the available facts.
The number of people reached by the media outlets _supporting_ the president's ideologies and slamming his opponent vastly outnumbers the number of people reached by the media outlets _questioning_ the president's past.
Doesn't that void the claims of "media bias" from that side? If there is a bias here, isn't it in the OTHER direction?? Isn't it possible that someone just didn't check their facts? (An inexcusable lapse, if true--but not an impossible one.)
And why, when WE suggest a possible "bias" in the media, are we told to shut up and smile and be conciliatory--whereas, when THEY cry "bias", it's taken as an article of faith?
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Midweek Update
I'm here.
Honestly.
I haven't given up on my blog.
I haven't done anything cataclysmically stupid.
Nothing is wrong.
Nothing is even particularly NOTICEABLE.
I'm just....busy.
But.
If you happen to be watching some news feed from Chicago some day soon...
And if you were to see something there, about a tech support coordinator who just spontaneously snapped one day, and who consequently beat the holy, living, self-satisfied, complacent FUCK out of one of her co-workers, and who subsequently went home, where she was found sitting in front of the TV, eating a bowl of Breyer's Heath Bar ice cream, and when asked "why did you do it?" proceeded to list a litany of personal and professional affronts ranging back for four and a half years and ending with the seemingly-innocent question "Do you remember what you were supposed to do this morning?"...
Well, peeps, that will be me. The blood-soaked lump of incoherent protoplasm--that will be Noreen.
Yes, I know it's sick and horrible to imagine such things. I'll never do it. But that fantasy represents one of my few sources of comfort in the workplace.
And I swear, if she asks me ONE MORE question to imply that I'm not doing my job..... The above-mentioned query, for example, which she asked instead of asking "What happened to that computer you were going to set up?"--because phrasing it THAT way would have given me the chance to answer "I was working on OTHER things for your program, which were more urgent because the consultant who needed them done was coming in at 8, and the computer I was going to set up would take ten minutes and that person wouldn't even be HERE til 9..." Whereas HER phrasing only allowed me to answer "um, not at the moment." (You tell me--how much do YOU remember at 8 AM, five minutes after walking in the door? Don't you need a few minutes to put down your bag, close out of "LIFE" mode and get yourself back into "WORK" mode?)
And then, later, as I'm setting up the computer, she's HOVERING over me--asking me fifteen-hundred questions. "Do we need that wire? Why are there two plugs over here? Whose computer is plugged into THAT port? Why aren't they plugged in over THERE? Why does this computer look different?"
Finally I said "Noreen? I can take it from here. But I appreciate your help."
(Hey, only HALF of it was a lie.)
I am seriously, sincerely beginning to despise my job.
And then I came home, and LJ and I had what was probably the closest thing to an "argument" we've ever had.
See, my car days are Mondays and Fridays. That's how we worked it out. Well, he told me Monday that he actually needs the car Friday, and said if he could have it Friday, I could take it Thursday. Unfortunately, we ran out of Pepsi last night, and I know him well enough to know that he'll never remember to stop at the store if I ask him; and we needed a few other things besides. So last night, before I went to bed, I stuck a note on the alarm panel--our household mailbox!--asking him if I could have the car. (Please note the syntax there: I asked. I did not tell. This will become important.)
He leaves the keys on the table, and I leave him sleeping. But then he calls me at work today--very curt, very obviously unhappy. "Call me when you get home." Pulling out of the Home Depot lot, I call him to see if he needs anything at the store. Half an hour later, as I'm walking out of the store (Western and Belmont)--guess who wants to know how long before I get home? I tell him 20 minutes. I get to Jackson and Central Park, fifteen minutes later--phone rings, guess who??
I finally get home, get the groceries in--he did help, to give him credit--but then the first words out of his mouth: "I'm gone..."
"You know," I said, as he walked out the door, "it's perfectly all right for you to TELL me if it's gonna fuck up your plans when I take the car..."
"Yeah, but you KNOW that already!" he replies. "I shouldn't even have to say nothin'." And leaves, with me mumbling after him.
Five minutes later, he calls. It's a half-apology, or maybe a two-thirds apology...and very telling. "I mean, it ain't like I can just tell you 'no, I need the car'--what am I supposed to do??"
"Well actually," I told him, "you really CAN say exactly that! I mean, I'm not tryin' to fuck up your plans...I just don't know from day to day how bad you need the car. So if you really DO need it, just SAY that."
What this tells me: he's not accustomed to women ASKING for something--he expects that we're TELLING him, even if there's a question mark at the end of the sentence. He's accustomed to manipulative women who expect him to read their minds and get pissed if they don't get what they want, 100% of the time.
If I can manage to convince him that I'm not one of those women--always ready to pounce and be angry over every little thing he does or says--and if he can convince me that he's not a lying, cheating, backstabbing user like CR was, I think we might actually be happy.
I wish I could say the same for my job. I really think I need to get the hell up out of there....there's really no way it can improve. The hierarchy is so solidified, so set in its ways, and it refuses to accept any meaningful effort at reform. And no one will force it to change its ways--too many people high-up who are friends with those above them.
Nepotism just sucks--especially from the outside.
Honestly.
I haven't given up on my blog.
I haven't done anything cataclysmically stupid.
Nothing is wrong.
Nothing is even particularly NOTICEABLE.
I'm just....busy.
But.
If you happen to be watching some news feed from Chicago some day soon...
And if you were to see something there, about a tech support coordinator who just spontaneously snapped one day, and who consequently beat the holy, living, self-satisfied, complacent FUCK out of one of her co-workers, and who subsequently went home, where she was found sitting in front of the TV, eating a bowl of Breyer's Heath Bar ice cream, and when asked "why did you do it?" proceeded to list a litany of personal and professional affronts ranging back for four and a half years and ending with the seemingly-innocent question "Do you remember what you were supposed to do this morning?"...
Well, peeps, that will be me. The blood-soaked lump of incoherent protoplasm--that will be Noreen.
Yes, I know it's sick and horrible to imagine such things. I'll never do it. But that fantasy represents one of my few sources of comfort in the workplace.
And I swear, if she asks me ONE MORE question to imply that I'm not doing my job..... The above-mentioned query, for example, which she asked instead of asking "What happened to that computer you were going to set up?"--because phrasing it THAT way would have given me the chance to answer "I was working on OTHER things for your program, which were more urgent because the consultant who needed them done was coming in at 8, and the computer I was going to set up would take ten minutes and that person wouldn't even be HERE til 9..." Whereas HER phrasing only allowed me to answer "um, not at the moment." (You tell me--how much do YOU remember at 8 AM, five minutes after walking in the door? Don't you need a few minutes to put down your bag, close out of "LIFE" mode and get yourself back into "WORK" mode?)
And then, later, as I'm setting up the computer, she's HOVERING over me--asking me fifteen-hundred questions. "Do we need that wire? Why are there two plugs over here? Whose computer is plugged into THAT port? Why aren't they plugged in over THERE? Why does this computer look different?"
Finally I said "Noreen? I can take it from here. But I appreciate your help."
(Hey, only HALF of it was a lie.)
I am seriously, sincerely beginning to despise my job.
And then I came home, and LJ and I had what was probably the closest thing to an "argument" we've ever had.
See, my car days are Mondays and Fridays. That's how we worked it out. Well, he told me Monday that he actually needs the car Friday, and said if he could have it Friday, I could take it Thursday. Unfortunately, we ran out of Pepsi last night, and I know him well enough to know that he'll never remember to stop at the store if I ask him; and we needed a few other things besides. So last night, before I went to bed, I stuck a note on the alarm panel--our household mailbox!--asking him if I could have the car. (Please note the syntax there: I asked. I did not tell. This will become important.)
He leaves the keys on the table, and I leave him sleeping. But then he calls me at work today--very curt, very obviously unhappy. "Call me when you get home." Pulling out of the Home Depot lot, I call him to see if he needs anything at the store. Half an hour later, as I'm walking out of the store (Western and Belmont)--guess who wants to know how long before I get home? I tell him 20 minutes. I get to Jackson and Central Park, fifteen minutes later--phone rings, guess who??
I finally get home, get the groceries in--he did help, to give him credit--but then the first words out of his mouth: "I'm gone..."
"You know," I said, as he walked out the door, "it's perfectly all right for you to TELL me if it's gonna fuck up your plans when I take the car..."
"Yeah, but you KNOW that already!" he replies. "I shouldn't even have to say nothin'." And leaves, with me mumbling after him.
Five minutes later, he calls. It's a half-apology, or maybe a two-thirds apology...and very telling. "I mean, it ain't like I can just tell you 'no, I need the car'--what am I supposed to do??"
"Well actually," I told him, "you really CAN say exactly that! I mean, I'm not tryin' to fuck up your plans...I just don't know from day to day how bad you need the car. So if you really DO need it, just SAY that."
What this tells me: he's not accustomed to women ASKING for something--he expects that we're TELLING him, even if there's a question mark at the end of the sentence. He's accustomed to manipulative women who expect him to read their minds and get pissed if they don't get what they want, 100% of the time.
If I can manage to convince him that I'm not one of those women--always ready to pounce and be angry over every little thing he does or says--and if he can convince me that he's not a lying, cheating, backstabbing user like CR was, I think we might actually be happy.
I wish I could say the same for my job. I really think I need to get the hell up out of there....there's really no way it can improve. The hierarchy is so solidified, so set in its ways, and it refuses to accept any meaningful effort at reform. And no one will force it to change its ways--too many people high-up who are friends with those above them.
Nepotism just sucks--especially from the outside.
Monday, September 13, 2004
Willpower--You Know, That Thing I Don't Have
As angry as I get at Eric Zorn and his blog from time to time--and incidentally, I've been informed that I WAS added to his blogroll, though I'm not sure when (and the anonymous individual who informed me was the first time I've seen his blogroll as a referrer)--Anyway, as angry as I get at his blog, it has at least one massively redeeming factor:
Links to stuff like THIS.
If anyone can get past level 54, I'd love to know how they did it.
Links to stuff like THIS.
If anyone can get past level 54, I'd love to know how they did it.
Sunday, September 12, 2004
The Caution Is Out
(God, I've really GOT to quit watching so much damn NASCAR--it's creeping into my vocabulary too.)
Anyway. Over to the right, in my Blogroll, is one of my favorite sites: Reality News Online.
In the background, as I write this, my computer is scanning itself for adware after I was attacked by a trojan--for the third time this week. Finally I pinned it down: whatever happens, happens within seconds of clicking on Reality News Online. Three times now I've spent hours offline while my computer runs its virus scans; then three times I've run my adware-remover programs and followed all their recommendations.
I e-mailed them--they're good guys--and they said "yeah, we've had a couple reports of this, but we only use 2 ad companies, and they're both reputable and have no history of problems like this. We're working on figuring it out...."
In the meantime, I'll be getting my recaps from nice, safe, Television Without Pity. (Unless I'm on my nice, safe, work Mac...but with my task load this week I don't see myself having time to surf.)
Be forewarned, gang--and it pains me to say this--but click on the RNO link at your own risk.
There's a special place in hell for these adware-producing balls of monkey-spunk...
Anyway. Over to the right, in my Blogroll, is one of my favorite sites: Reality News Online.
In the background, as I write this, my computer is scanning itself for adware after I was attacked by a trojan--for the third time this week. Finally I pinned it down: whatever happens, happens within seconds of clicking on Reality News Online. Three times now I've spent hours offline while my computer runs its virus scans; then three times I've run my adware-remover programs and followed all their recommendations.
I e-mailed them--they're good guys--and they said "yeah, we've had a couple reports of this, but we only use 2 ad companies, and they're both reputable and have no history of problems like this. We're working on figuring it out...."
In the meantime, I'll be getting my recaps from nice, safe, Television Without Pity. (Unless I'm on my nice, safe, work Mac...but with my task load this week I don't see myself having time to surf.)
Be forewarned, gang--and it pains me to say this--but click on the RNO link at your own risk.
There's a special place in hell for these adware-producing balls of monkey-spunk...
Query Term of the Weekend
"narcan at oxycontin party"
I think I'm gonna incorporate this one into my vocabulary of similes:
"I felt about as welcome as Narcan at an Oxycontin party."
I think I'm gonna incorporate this one into my vocabulary of similes:
"I felt about as welcome as Narcan at an Oxycontin party."
Spam Title Of The Weekend
Found in my Spam box:
"keep up with life sidewinder"
To which I reply:
Right back atcha, varmint.
"keep up with life sidewinder"
To which I reply:
Right back atcha, varmint.
Saturday, September 11, 2004
More of What Happens When You Click On "Next Blog"
Okay: is this in English? If it isn't--what is it?
I asked this person to marry me. Even if he or she--can't quite tell, don't exactly care--isn't interested, I already adore this blog.
The number-one reason why weird little girls should never be taught Javascripting. (Annoying, ain't it? I warned you.)
I'm starting to think that Asian youth may be singlehandedly responsible for the downfall of the written English language once and for all.
Because, see, all their blogs are written like this one...or this one...or this one...or...okay, you get the point.
Um...okay...eeeeeyeah. (Pretty pictures....of, welllllll.....)
Why I Stopped Being A Poet, Part 2: because when you're a poet, you talk like this.
Sometimes I think I'm a cranky, unpleasant sort of person. After reading this, I believe I will legally change my name to Happy C. Sunshine.
Finally, someone who understands the healing power of a yarn binge.
I asked this person to marry me. Even if he or she--can't quite tell, don't exactly care--isn't interested, I already adore this blog.
The number-one reason why weird little girls should never be taught Javascripting. (Annoying, ain't it? I warned you.)
I'm starting to think that Asian youth may be singlehandedly responsible for the downfall of the written English language once and for all.
Because, see, all their blogs are written like this one...or this one...or this one...or...okay, you get the point.
Um...okay...eeeeeyeah. (Pretty pictures....of, welllllll.....)
Why I Stopped Being A Poet, Part 2: because when you're a poet, you talk like this.
Sometimes I think I'm a cranky, unpleasant sort of person. After reading this, I believe I will legally change my name to Happy C. Sunshine.
Finally, someone who understands the healing power of a yarn binge.
Dale Jr Earns My Eternal Loathing Until The End of Time
Well, the race is over. And Kasey didn't make it--he finished 12th in points, losing 3 spots just in the course of this race.
He finished 24th tonight--after having the fastest car in practice yesterday.
If I didn't have reason enough to loathe and despise Dale Everfucking Earnhardt Junior, I do now. He spun Kasey for what appeared to be absolutely no reason at all--got under his back bumper and lifted him so he spun around and lost 2 laps. He got one of them back, but he finished a lap down.
A pox on Dale Junior. A pox on him and all his children and their children's children until the end of the human race. I intend to flip him off each time I see his smug, despicable visage on my TV screen.
And oh, another thing--Dale Junior? Get a fuckin' haircut, dumbass.
He finished 24th tonight--after having the fastest car in practice yesterday.
If I didn't have reason enough to loathe and despise Dale Everfucking Earnhardt Junior, I do now. He spun Kasey for what appeared to be absolutely no reason at all--got under his back bumper and lifted him so he spun around and lost 2 laps. He got one of them back, but he finished a lap down.
A pox on Dale Junior. A pox on him and all his children and their children's children until the end of the human race. I intend to flip him off each time I see his smug, despicable visage on my TV screen.
And oh, another thing--Dale Junior? Get a fuckin' haircut, dumbass.
The Story Of Why Presents: Home Repair And Improvement
I decided that Bob the Plumber--need I even say it?--will not set foot into my house ever again, unless it is to deposit a large sack of money just inside the front door, whereupon he can take his leave and go fuck himself. And since I have no money to pay a plumber, or any other home-repair professional, I've taken it upon myself to fix as many of his gross mistakes as possible.
Today's task: the "furnace-vent pipe" that he cut, the one whose other end just happened to be connected to the drain end of our first-floor bathroom sink.
It took a while, but I got it right. I've learned several things today.
1. Purple primer is nasty stuff. Not only is it profoundly caustic, it's also very runny, and if you drip, it etches a spot and then stains that spot an irredeemable violet. My washer lid now has three purple droplets on it, and from everything I've read they'll be there til Judgement Trump.
2. It also really, really smells.
3. So does pipe cement.
4. The measurement of pipes is a most-exacting science.
I started out--cocky woman!--with only the two couplers I thought I'd need. I cut off the cap Bob had added on the soil-pipe end; I deburred the cut, sanded the other end, primed the pipes, primed the couplers, added cement and twisted the couplers onto the pipes. Pleased with myself, I measured and cut the pipe, deburred and sanded, primed and cemented, and when I pushed the length of pipe into the first coupler....
...I realized it was about half-an-inch too short to reach into the second coupler.
I said some bad words. In fact, I said many bad words. Then I walked up to the hardware store on Madison and Kostner, where they charged me, for four couplers, less than half of what I'd paid for the original two couplers at Home Depot. (Moral: support local business.)
I walked home. (Okay, I got some wings at Uncle Remus. THEN I walked home. I SAID I was gonna support local business, didn't I?) And it was a good thing I'd gotten four more couplers; once I sawed out the too-short pipe, I replaced it with one too long, and when I lost patience trying to cut with the hacksaw as one end of the pipe hung loose, I had to cut out the whole assembly and start over AGAIN. ("But why didn't you dry-fit before you cemented it?" I hear some wiseass asking. Well, I DID--but there's a difference between a dry pipe and one that's slippery with primer and cement. (Keep that in mind, gentlemen--it's something some of you would do well to learn. But--as always--I digress.) The first time it fit, but then when I twisted it, it slid into the pipe about 1/2 inch more than I counted on. The second time, I cut long to compensate for just that problem--and ran into a different problem.)
Finally I got it right.
To the left is the pipe before repair (including a decorative little arc of water, for illustrative purposes). To the right, my repair. It ain't pretty--notice how much purple primer there is on that coupling, by the little red arrow?--but it's functional. Furthermore, it's my first plumbing repair--well, unless you count the time I got the upstairs bath faucet to work by cleaning a full ounce of grit and gunk out of its strainer--and I'm pretty damn proud of myself. (I'm also covered with fine shreds of PVC plastic, owing to the amount of time I spent cutting the pipe with a hacksaw blade.)
Today's task: the "furnace-vent pipe" that he cut, the one whose other end just happened to be connected to the drain end of our first-floor bathroom sink.
It took a while, but I got it right. I've learned several things today.
1. Purple primer is nasty stuff. Not only is it profoundly caustic, it's also very runny, and if you drip, it etches a spot and then stains that spot an irredeemable violet. My washer lid now has three purple droplets on it, and from everything I've read they'll be there til Judgement Trump.
2. It also really, really smells.
3. So does pipe cement.
4. The measurement of pipes is a most-exacting science.
I started out--cocky woman!--with only the two couplers I thought I'd need. I cut off the cap Bob had added on the soil-pipe end; I deburred the cut, sanded the other end, primed the pipes, primed the couplers, added cement and twisted the couplers onto the pipes. Pleased with myself, I measured and cut the pipe, deburred and sanded, primed and cemented, and when I pushed the length of pipe into the first coupler....
...I realized it was about half-an-inch too short to reach into the second coupler.
I said some bad words. In fact, I said many bad words. Then I walked up to the hardware store on Madison and Kostner, where they charged me, for four couplers, less than half of what I'd paid for the original two couplers at Home Depot. (Moral: support local business.)
I walked home. (Okay, I got some wings at Uncle Remus. THEN I walked home. I SAID I was gonna support local business, didn't I?) And it was a good thing I'd gotten four more couplers; once I sawed out the too-short pipe, I replaced it with one too long, and when I lost patience trying to cut with the hacksaw as one end of the pipe hung loose, I had to cut out the whole assembly and start over AGAIN. ("But why didn't you dry-fit before you cemented it?" I hear some wiseass asking. Well, I DID--but there's a difference between a dry pipe and one that's slippery with primer and cement. (Keep that in mind, gentlemen--it's something some of you would do well to learn. But--as always--I digress.) The first time it fit, but then when I twisted it, it slid into the pipe about 1/2 inch more than I counted on. The second time, I cut long to compensate for just that problem--and ran into a different problem.)
Finally I got it right.
To the left is the pipe before repair (including a decorative little arc of water, for illustrative purposes). To the right, my repair. It ain't pretty--notice how much purple primer there is on that coupling, by the little red arrow?--but it's functional. Furthermore, it's my first plumbing repair--well, unless you count the time I got the upstairs bath faucet to work by cleaning a full ounce of grit and gunk out of its strainer--and I'm pretty damn proud of myself. (I'm also covered with fine shreds of PVC plastic, owing to the amount of time I spent cutting the pipe with a hacksaw blade.)
Kasey Kahne Better Win Or Somebody's Ass Will Be Kicked
Yeah, it's another NASCAR post.
Tonight is the last race before the "playoffs"--that's the best comparison I can use to explain the Chase for the Cup format. All the races up til now have been the "regular season"; after tonight, anyone in the top ten in points for the season will be in the Chase, the "playoffs", and out of that group, whoever wins the most points within the next 10 races will be the champ.
Six drivers, as of 7 PM tonight, have clinched spots in the Chase. Eight drivers are in the running for the remaining four spots. "My" driver, Kasey Kahne--every NASCAR fan has "their" driver--is one of them. He started the race tonight in 9th place, so if he doesn't run better than five of the other contending drivers, he's out of the playoffs.
If Kasey doesn't get into the Chase, I'm not gonna be a very happy woman. In fact, I'm gonna be a whiny, cranky, MarkMartin-JeremyMayfield-JamieMcMurray-ElliotSadler-KurtBusch-BobbyLabonte-DaleJr-MattKenseth-KevinHarvick-DaleJarrett-Jimmie Johnson-Jeff Gordon-Ryan Newman-Tony Stewart-hating beeeeeyotch. (Okay, I'm already a Tony Stewart-hating beeeyotch. The rest of them I only hate because they're not my sweet lil' Kasey.)
My fingers are crossed for Mark Martin (a.k.a. Viagra-Boy) to blow an engine.
Tonight is the last race before the "playoffs"--that's the best comparison I can use to explain the Chase for the Cup format. All the races up til now have been the "regular season"; after tonight, anyone in the top ten in points for the season will be in the Chase, the "playoffs", and out of that group, whoever wins the most points within the next 10 races will be the champ.
Six drivers, as of 7 PM tonight, have clinched spots in the Chase. Eight drivers are in the running for the remaining four spots. "My" driver, Kasey Kahne--every NASCAR fan has "their" driver--is one of them. He started the race tonight in 9th place, so if he doesn't run better than five of the other contending drivers, he's out of the playoffs.
If Kasey doesn't get into the Chase, I'm not gonna be a very happy woman. In fact, I'm gonna be a whiny, cranky, MarkMartin-JeremyMayfield-JamieMcMurray-ElliotSadler-KurtBusch-BobbyLabonte-DaleJr-MattKenseth-KevinHarvick-DaleJarrett-Jimmie Johnson-Jeff Gordon-Ryan Newman-Tony Stewart-hating beeeeeyotch. (Okay, I'm already a Tony Stewart-hating beeeyotch. The rest of them I only hate because they're not my sweet lil' Kasey.)
My fingers are crossed for Mark Martin (a.k.a. Viagra-Boy) to blow an engine.
Friday, September 10, 2004
Anger of Angels
I am not--I would like to say this from the beginning--I am not a woman who believes in ghosts.
The afterlife to me, as I think I've said before, is a logical set of possibilities, none of which particularly admits contact between the living and those who aren't. I don't rant against it, or specifically disbelieve--mostly out of respect for Debbi, my oldest friend in the world who I've known since she was 4 and I was 5 and who claims psychic powers and status as a medium. And besides, who am I to say? Who am I to disavow the existence of an afterlife, or the possibility that there are those who can communicate with people outside this realm? I can say for certain that I, myself, have never experienced any such communique from the other side; but that is ALL I can say with any certainty.
This non-belief, non-disbelief, fence-straddler status served me well throughout my teenage years. I didn't piss off my hyper-Catholic, hyper-skeptical family by believing in astrology and Tarot; I didn't piss off Debbi and my more open-to-possibilities friends by absolutely disavowing them. I had no need for belief one way or the other, to be truthful...everything that mattered to me was on this side of the curtain. Even my father's death, when I was 17, didn't make it necessary to believe; he was 58 years old, had lived a fairly-long life, and his death had been very much expected, at least for the nine months we'd known of his lung cancer, of the tumor in his brain. He had lived his life, and then like all of us would do eventually, he had come to the end of that life--sooner, perhaps, than any of us would have wanted, but in a natural and predictable way.
When JP died, of course, the circumstances were a little different.
Actually, they were "a little different" in the same way that Mt. Vesuvius is "a tiny bit warm"; in the same way that a black hole is "kinda dense". JP's death, unlike my father's, was entirely unexpected, had no reasonable explanation at all. The magnitude of coincidence involved in his death was so profound that I couldn't wrap my brain around it in the least.
What would be the odds that on that night, our regular heroin spot would be closed? What would be the odds that we would then choose--out of all the corners on the West Side--the corner we chose? Or that on that particular night--unlike all the other nights we'd bought from that spot with no ill effects--that on THAT particular night the people who'd bagged up the drugs had run out of their usual sedative filler and had to use a substitute? or that instead of any of the thousand powdery white substances they could have used, that in this case and on this night, they would have used flour?
And even with all those coincidences having been fulfilled--what would be the odds that those bags would be purchased by a person who happened to be both asthmatic and deathly allergic to wheat--particularly in the form of flour? Or that the miracle of medical science, documented so damn many times in TV shows and inspirational magazine articles, would just this one time fail? Faced with odds that staggering, wouldn't it be easier to believe in supernatural agencies instead? that the stars had just been aligned wrong, that Mercury was in retrograde, that someone had put a hex on JP--or even just that God was punishing us for our dual sins of adultery and pride??
Those were the kinds of questions I had to contend with in the days after JP died. In my dopesick, grief-sick haze, I tried to wrap some simple covering around the jagged, changing shape of my pain and incomprehension--something that would soothe me, something that would provide me with some answer to the breathless scream of WHY?. That was a voice which never seemed to allow itself to be silenced...but sometimes I could drown it out.
Music had been the center of JP's existence; it was something we'd always known we had in common. Unlike me, though, he had talent for music, and he planned on building that talent into superstardom. Kurt Cobain was his model for the lead-singer ethos; for the band itself, he structured them along the lines of Smashing Pumpkins. He would be the lead singer and guitarist. The original plan had Darius as the drummer, Rachel on second guitar, and Justin on bass; then, as our life evolved into a drowning-pool of heroin and our social circles shifted and constrained, the lineup changed: JP as lead, our roomie Lou on second guitar, me on bass, Artie the teenage neighbor-kid on drums. We spent nights and nights trading band-name suggestions; JP claimed he'd know the perfect name when he heard it.
When he died, the band still had no name.
Not that it mattered, by then. Lou was somewhere in the Southeast, getting clean on the road with another band he knew; Artie's mom had put her foot down about associating with us. JP's guitar, my bass, the four-track recorder, the distortion pedals, and both the amps were strewn across three or four pawn shops around the North Side. All we had left--all I had left, once JP was gone--were the remains of our CD collection. Though we'd sold everything we could, JP would never let us part with any of the Nirvana. "You don't sell the dream," he told me.
Through the weeks and months after JP died, that music was my solace. I remember lighting a red candle every Monday night at 11:10 PM--the day and hour of his death--and playing _Toward the Within_, by Dead Can Dance. I'd bought the CD in a happier time--just after we'd moved in together, but before heroin took over--and every time I played "American Dreaming", I remembered driving up the Dan Ryan, in our '89 Taurus, on the way back home from my second job. That was a hard song to hear once he was gone--but even so, for those moments, it lifted me out of the intolerable present.
I built up my CD library once I started back to work, and more still once I moved to Charlotte. I was very heavy on music that had meant something to us...Catherine Wheel's _Chrome_, for example, in memory of a night in June where we'd stayed up all night, calling a local indie radio station and requesting "Show Me Mary". Bettie Serveert, for a snippet of tape from 1994 where JP had recorded "Tomboy". Everything from Seattle; all our heroin music; hundreds of songs significant to us for our own reasons, reasons no one else had ever known, reasons which were mine alone to carry now.
In some corner of my mind, I think, this was my bargain with the forces that had taken JP away from me. If I collected all the music, if I could assemble some sort of key out of sound and memory, maybe I could unlock the doors and bring him back. And after years and years, when my bargaining had failed, when I couldn't make it all un-happen, the weight of that music and those memories became too much to bear. The new CD's got sold again, in the midst of a relapse; when I got back on my feet, I just never bothered to replace them.
It didn't help that I was with CR by then--CR, who used music as one of the many tools in the grand workshop of his emotional abuse. He would complain for hours about how judgemental people were towards him for his taste in music, for being a black man who loved Genesis, Humble Pie, Southern rock and roll--and in the next breath, he would mock me for listening to "pussy bands" like Smashing Pumpkins. If I dared to defend myself it would precipitate a torrent of hatefulness--against me, against females, against non-violence, against everything I ever was or loved or believed in. Avoiding these tantrums became the central goal of everything I did, and so for two years I let my music gather dust. Music joined sex in my memory as something I'd loved once, something I'd been able to enjoy, but which was now outside my reach...better to never mention it; better not to even think about it.
When CR left, it took a while to accept my freedom again. I started small, after a time; bought myself a Walkman for the train-rides home, started listening to the radio and plucking from it what little bits of solace I could. At work, I discovered iTunes (dangerous, dangerous toy!) and downloaded some songs to burn onto CDs. Old stuff, from the time with JP; older stuff, old-school hip-hop, from my end-of-college days. Some new stuff that just caught my interest, too, and songs from the spring of '03, when LJ and I were just starting out. In short, I made my peace with music again...
Well, most of it.
There are some songs I still can't hear without a stab of pain to the heart. Nirvana, for one; anything I can identify as being from the 1991-1995 era. I live in fear, each time I download something from those days, or hear them on the radio: will this be the one that finally tips me over? Will this song be the one that brings it all back, that brings it all home, the one that's unendurable? Even after nine years, I worry about that possibility--that one day I'll hear something that will sink me to the ground, weeping, and won't let me get up.
And every time I'm just flipping stations on the radio, and I hear one of those songs--especially on bad days, days like yesterday was--I wonder: is someone trying to tell me something? Even if it's just "hello"?
I still don't believe in ghosts; I only wish I did, sometimes.
The afterlife to me, as I think I've said before, is a logical set of possibilities, none of which particularly admits contact between the living and those who aren't. I don't rant against it, or specifically disbelieve--mostly out of respect for Debbi, my oldest friend in the world who I've known since she was 4 and I was 5 and who claims psychic powers and status as a medium. And besides, who am I to say? Who am I to disavow the existence of an afterlife, or the possibility that there are those who can communicate with people outside this realm? I can say for certain that I, myself, have never experienced any such communique from the other side; but that is ALL I can say with any certainty.
This non-belief, non-disbelief, fence-straddler status served me well throughout my teenage years. I didn't piss off my hyper-Catholic, hyper-skeptical family by believing in astrology and Tarot; I didn't piss off Debbi and my more open-to-possibilities friends by absolutely disavowing them. I had no need for belief one way or the other, to be truthful...everything that mattered to me was on this side of the curtain. Even my father's death, when I was 17, didn't make it necessary to believe; he was 58 years old, had lived a fairly-long life, and his death had been very much expected, at least for the nine months we'd known of his lung cancer, of the tumor in his brain. He had lived his life, and then like all of us would do eventually, he had come to the end of that life--sooner, perhaps, than any of us would have wanted, but in a natural and predictable way.
When JP died, of course, the circumstances were a little different.
Actually, they were "a little different" in the same way that Mt. Vesuvius is "a tiny bit warm"; in the same way that a black hole is "kinda dense". JP's death, unlike my father's, was entirely unexpected, had no reasonable explanation at all. The magnitude of coincidence involved in his death was so profound that I couldn't wrap my brain around it in the least.
What would be the odds that on that night, our regular heroin spot would be closed? What would be the odds that we would then choose--out of all the corners on the West Side--the corner we chose? Or that on that particular night--unlike all the other nights we'd bought from that spot with no ill effects--that on THAT particular night the people who'd bagged up the drugs had run out of their usual sedative filler and had to use a substitute? or that instead of any of the thousand powdery white substances they could have used, that in this case and on this night, they would have used flour?
And even with all those coincidences having been fulfilled--what would be the odds that those bags would be purchased by a person who happened to be both asthmatic and deathly allergic to wheat--particularly in the form of flour? Or that the miracle of medical science, documented so damn many times in TV shows and inspirational magazine articles, would just this one time fail? Faced with odds that staggering, wouldn't it be easier to believe in supernatural agencies instead? that the stars had just been aligned wrong, that Mercury was in retrograde, that someone had put a hex on JP--or even just that God was punishing us for our dual sins of adultery and pride??
Those were the kinds of questions I had to contend with in the days after JP died. In my dopesick, grief-sick haze, I tried to wrap some simple covering around the jagged, changing shape of my pain and incomprehension--something that would soothe me, something that would provide me with some answer to the breathless scream of WHY?. That was a voice which never seemed to allow itself to be silenced...but sometimes I could drown it out.
Music had been the center of JP's existence; it was something we'd always known we had in common. Unlike me, though, he had talent for music, and he planned on building that talent into superstardom. Kurt Cobain was his model for the lead-singer ethos; for the band itself, he structured them along the lines of Smashing Pumpkins. He would be the lead singer and guitarist. The original plan had Darius as the drummer, Rachel on second guitar, and Justin on bass; then, as our life evolved into a drowning-pool of heroin and our social circles shifted and constrained, the lineup changed: JP as lead, our roomie Lou on second guitar, me on bass, Artie the teenage neighbor-kid on drums. We spent nights and nights trading band-name suggestions; JP claimed he'd know the perfect name when he heard it.
When he died, the band still had no name.
Not that it mattered, by then. Lou was somewhere in the Southeast, getting clean on the road with another band he knew; Artie's mom had put her foot down about associating with us. JP's guitar, my bass, the four-track recorder, the distortion pedals, and both the amps were strewn across three or four pawn shops around the North Side. All we had left--all I had left, once JP was gone--were the remains of our CD collection. Though we'd sold everything we could, JP would never let us part with any of the Nirvana. "You don't sell the dream," he told me.
Through the weeks and months after JP died, that music was my solace. I remember lighting a red candle every Monday night at 11:10 PM--the day and hour of his death--and playing _Toward the Within_, by Dead Can Dance. I'd bought the CD in a happier time--just after we'd moved in together, but before heroin took over--and every time I played "American Dreaming", I remembered driving up the Dan Ryan, in our '89 Taurus, on the way back home from my second job. That was a hard song to hear once he was gone--but even so, for those moments, it lifted me out of the intolerable present.
I built up my CD library once I started back to work, and more still once I moved to Charlotte. I was very heavy on music that had meant something to us...Catherine Wheel's _Chrome_, for example, in memory of a night in June where we'd stayed up all night, calling a local indie radio station and requesting "Show Me Mary". Bettie Serveert, for a snippet of tape from 1994 where JP had recorded "Tomboy". Everything from Seattle; all our heroin music; hundreds of songs significant to us for our own reasons, reasons no one else had ever known, reasons which were mine alone to carry now.
In some corner of my mind, I think, this was my bargain with the forces that had taken JP away from me. If I collected all the music, if I could assemble some sort of key out of sound and memory, maybe I could unlock the doors and bring him back. And after years and years, when my bargaining had failed, when I couldn't make it all un-happen, the weight of that music and those memories became too much to bear. The new CD's got sold again, in the midst of a relapse; when I got back on my feet, I just never bothered to replace them.
It didn't help that I was with CR by then--CR, who used music as one of the many tools in the grand workshop of his emotional abuse. He would complain for hours about how judgemental people were towards him for his taste in music, for being a black man who loved Genesis, Humble Pie, Southern rock and roll--and in the next breath, he would mock me for listening to "pussy bands" like Smashing Pumpkins. If I dared to defend myself it would precipitate a torrent of hatefulness--against me, against females, against non-violence, against everything I ever was or loved or believed in. Avoiding these tantrums became the central goal of everything I did, and so for two years I let my music gather dust. Music joined sex in my memory as something I'd loved once, something I'd been able to enjoy, but which was now outside my reach...better to never mention it; better not to even think about it.
When CR left, it took a while to accept my freedom again. I started small, after a time; bought myself a Walkman for the train-rides home, started listening to the radio and plucking from it what little bits of solace I could. At work, I discovered iTunes (dangerous, dangerous toy!) and downloaded some songs to burn onto CDs. Old stuff, from the time with JP; older stuff, old-school hip-hop, from my end-of-college days. Some new stuff that just caught my interest, too, and songs from the spring of '03, when LJ and I were just starting out. In short, I made my peace with music again...
Well, most of it.
There are some songs I still can't hear without a stab of pain to the heart. Nirvana, for one; anything I can identify as being from the 1991-1995 era. I live in fear, each time I download something from those days, or hear them on the radio: will this be the one that finally tips me over? Will this song be the one that brings it all back, that brings it all home, the one that's unendurable? Even after nine years, I worry about that possibility--that one day I'll hear something that will sink me to the ground, weeping, and won't let me get up.
And every time I'm just flipping stations on the radio, and I hear one of those songs--especially on bad days, days like yesterday was--I wonder: is someone trying to tell me something? Even if it's just "hello"?
I still don't believe in ghosts; I only wish I did, sometimes.
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Bob The Plumber Flies OVER The Asshole Hall of Fame
For optimum rant-enjoyment, you might want to take a gander at my previous Bob the Plumber posts before returning to read about this delightful development. I mean, I'm not tryin' to tell you what to do or anything, but it just seems like a good idea.
Bob the Plumber Catapults Into The Asshole Hall of Fame
Everybody Out of the Pool
"Bob the Plumber" Watch
(There are several others, but these are the main ones.)
Okay. Now--back to the present.
Shortly before his induction into the Asshole Hall of Fame, Bob the Plumber informed me that he had taken care of one of the most-serious problems in the house. Back in April, when I first contacted Bob and his ex-partner to replace my broken water-heater, they were amazed to discover what they said was the most ridiculous and deadly configuration of a furnace they'd ever seen. According to them, the seller of the house, rather than install a proper chimney liner, had instead chosen to vent the furnace gases through a pipe running through the cold-air return on the furnace. This pipe--this was the part that blew their minds--was connected directly to the sewer stack, in effect allowing sewer gas to circulate throughout the house every time we ran the furnace. (I had noticed a strange smell in the winter, but I assumed it was the catbox--my cats have foul intestines, to say the very least.)
Bob and his partner showed me the configuration and promised that they would deal with it; in fact, they said it was urgent, that it was surprising that LJ and I weren't dead already, if not from the sewer gas then from the carbon monoxide caused by improper venting.
Oddly enough, though, for something that "urgent", it took Bob from April to mid-July to actually take action on the problem--which I assumed was no big deal, inasmuch as we weren't running the furnace at all during the spring and summer months. But in mid-July, Bob informed me that the problem was solved; he'd cut the pipe that ran from the furnace to the sewer stack, and he'd capped off the piece leading from the stack. He hadn't capped the piece that ran through the cold-air return, though, because he didn't have another cap the right size. He promised to deal with that "next time".
Well, "next time" never came, for all the reasons previously explained, and at any rate an uncapped pipe wasn't the end of the world--I figured I could take care of it later.
Jump ahead in time with me, dear reader, to this past Tuesday morning.
On days I take the car to work, I have a few extra minutes before I leave, and I've gotten into the habit of trying to do one minor household task before I leave--soak the dishes, for example, or throw in a load of laundry. So Tuesday morning, after stopping in the downstairs bath to brush my teeth, I went down into the basement with my hamper.
As I stuffed the laundry into the washer, I noticed something odd. The cut end of the pipe--the end Bob hadn't capped--had a drop of water hanging from its edge. Condensation, I thought--then realized: there's nothing to cause condensation, since we haven't been running the furnace. So I stuffed in some more clothes, and I thought a little, and looked at the droplet--which was vaguely cloudy, not clear; almost as though there was soap in the water.
Soap...or perhaps....
Oh, hell no, I thought. After I turned on the washer, I went back upstairs and turned on the water in the bathroom sink, full blast. Then I went back downstairs....
...where I watched a lovely cascade of cold, clear water, sparkling as it arced directly into the laundry tub, right under the cut end of the pipe.
Cutting to the chase: There's no pipe running from the cold-air return into the sewer--though the pipe passes THROUGH the cold-air return, at the other end it's attached to the first-floor bathroom sink drain. And he cut the drainpipe--this man who CLAIMS to be a licensed plumber, who claims to be the best at what he does.
Two decisions made themselves for me at the moment I discovered this latest outrage. First: I am taking off early, either Friday or Monday, to go downtown and take out papers to sue Bob in small claims court. I had thought about doing this, but I was putting it off because I found the idea distasteful--after all, I reasoned, he was trying his best; he just got in over his head and we can work it all out like adults. Well, after this, my opinion has changed markedly--if that's his "best", then he doesn't need to be in business.
The other decision: Before, when I considered taking him to court, I had planned to be as charitable and kind about it as I could. I was going to take the total I had paid him for services rendered, and deduct from that the amount of work he'd actually done--replacing the soil pipe, installing the tub, etc. I was on the fence about whether to count the crappy job of tiling the shower--which was never finished, and which I'm going to have to tear out and redo myself because the workmanship was so sloppy. I was willing to be reasonable, though. Well--again, after this, my plans have changed; I am now going to sue him for every dime I paid him. If I think I can get it, I'm even going to sue for interest on the loan I had to take out to pay him all that money. The amount of decent work he did pales in comparison to the amount of CRAPPY work he did--and then there's the inconvenience, the annoyance, and the financial hardship of having our money tied up in his hands while we lived in a construction zone and listened to his "tomorrow"s and his excuses. He owes us every penny back, and then some.
Meanwhile, this weekend, I'm going to Home Depot, buying a 5-foot length of PVC drainpipe, a hacksaw blade, 2 connectors, and some purple primer and adhesive, and I am going to undertake my very first plumbing repair. God save us all.
Bob the Plumber Catapults Into The Asshole Hall of Fame
Everybody Out of the Pool
"Bob the Plumber" Watch
(There are several others, but these are the main ones.)
Okay. Now--back to the present.
Shortly before his induction into the Asshole Hall of Fame, Bob the Plumber informed me that he had taken care of one of the most-serious problems in the house. Back in April, when I first contacted Bob and his ex-partner to replace my broken water-heater, they were amazed to discover what they said was the most ridiculous and deadly configuration of a furnace they'd ever seen. According to them, the seller of the house, rather than install a proper chimney liner, had instead chosen to vent the furnace gases through a pipe running through the cold-air return on the furnace. This pipe--this was the part that blew their minds--was connected directly to the sewer stack, in effect allowing sewer gas to circulate throughout the house every time we ran the furnace. (I had noticed a strange smell in the winter, but I assumed it was the catbox--my cats have foul intestines, to say the very least.)
Bob and his partner showed me the configuration and promised that they would deal with it; in fact, they said it was urgent, that it was surprising that LJ and I weren't dead already, if not from the sewer gas then from the carbon monoxide caused by improper venting.
Oddly enough, though, for something that "urgent", it took Bob from April to mid-July to actually take action on the problem--which I assumed was no big deal, inasmuch as we weren't running the furnace at all during the spring and summer months. But in mid-July, Bob informed me that the problem was solved; he'd cut the pipe that ran from the furnace to the sewer stack, and he'd capped off the piece leading from the stack. He hadn't capped the piece that ran through the cold-air return, though, because he didn't have another cap the right size. He promised to deal with that "next time".
Well, "next time" never came, for all the reasons previously explained, and at any rate an uncapped pipe wasn't the end of the world--I figured I could take care of it later.
Jump ahead in time with me, dear reader, to this past Tuesday morning.
On days I take the car to work, I have a few extra minutes before I leave, and I've gotten into the habit of trying to do one minor household task before I leave--soak the dishes, for example, or throw in a load of laundry. So Tuesday morning, after stopping in the downstairs bath to brush my teeth, I went down into the basement with my hamper.
As I stuffed the laundry into the washer, I noticed something odd. The cut end of the pipe--the end Bob hadn't capped--had a drop of water hanging from its edge. Condensation, I thought--then realized: there's nothing to cause condensation, since we haven't been running the furnace. So I stuffed in some more clothes, and I thought a little, and looked at the droplet--which was vaguely cloudy, not clear; almost as though there was soap in the water.
Soap...or perhaps....
Oh, hell no, I thought. After I turned on the washer, I went back upstairs and turned on the water in the bathroom sink, full blast. Then I went back downstairs....
...where I watched a lovely cascade of cold, clear water, sparkling as it arced directly into the laundry tub, right under the cut end of the pipe.
Cutting to the chase: There's no pipe running from the cold-air return into the sewer--though the pipe passes THROUGH the cold-air return, at the other end it's attached to the first-floor bathroom sink drain. And he cut the drainpipe--this man who CLAIMS to be a licensed plumber, who claims to be the best at what he does.
Two decisions made themselves for me at the moment I discovered this latest outrage. First: I am taking off early, either Friday or Monday, to go downtown and take out papers to sue Bob in small claims court. I had thought about doing this, but I was putting it off because I found the idea distasteful--after all, I reasoned, he was trying his best; he just got in over his head and we can work it all out like adults. Well, after this, my opinion has changed markedly--if that's his "best", then he doesn't need to be in business.
The other decision: Before, when I considered taking him to court, I had planned to be as charitable and kind about it as I could. I was going to take the total I had paid him for services rendered, and deduct from that the amount of work he'd actually done--replacing the soil pipe, installing the tub, etc. I was on the fence about whether to count the crappy job of tiling the shower--which was never finished, and which I'm going to have to tear out and redo myself because the workmanship was so sloppy. I was willing to be reasonable, though. Well--again, after this, my plans have changed; I am now going to sue him for every dime I paid him. If I think I can get it, I'm even going to sue for interest on the loan I had to take out to pay him all that money. The amount of decent work he did pales in comparison to the amount of CRAPPY work he did--and then there's the inconvenience, the annoyance, and the financial hardship of having our money tied up in his hands while we lived in a construction zone and listened to his "tomorrow"s and his excuses. He owes us every penny back, and then some.
Meanwhile, this weekend, I'm going to Home Depot, buying a 5-foot length of PVC drainpipe, a hacksaw blade, 2 connectors, and some purple primer and adhesive, and I am going to undertake my very first plumbing repair. God save us all.
Repudiation
OK, Zorn. You know what?
I take it back.
I don't WANT to be on your list. I don't like stuffed shirts and I don't like people who speak ill of the dead, and based on what I see in this post in your blog, you're both of the above.
I'd tell you, if I thought it would matter at all, to read this post from CTA Tattler and especially its attached comments--but why ruin a good opinion with the facts? Like the fact that the individual you're complaining about, by all available evidence, wasn't even tagging when he was killed? (Oh, wait--that doesn't change your whole "tagging-is-bad" thesis, does it. But it might give you some further insights into the humanity of this person, upon whom you would have wished "hard time in the obscurity of state prison". Mighty nice of you, though, to qualify your statement with the part about "I don't wish death on (those who create graffiti)." You're a regular ol' softie, ain't you.)
It must be very nice to have an artistic sensibility which conforms so neatly to laws and customs. Of course, it pretty much guarantees that your work will also be acceptable within the mainstream of society...which might be nice from a financial angle, come to think of it--but with the mainstream of society being what it is, I'm not sure it's much of a recommendation.
"Vile, selfish, (and) moronic"?
Graffiti??
Leading a country to a misguided, misrepresented war--sure.
Stealing the pensions of hard-working people to fund one's own lavish lifestyle--hell yeah.
Calling into question the patriotism of a man who actually served his country while the questioner sat in safety and ease--yup.
Painting on a building or a train trestle or a garage door?
Not so much.
Hurling harsh words and indictments against someone who is no longer alive to defend himself, compounding the grief of his family and friends?
I think those adjectives apply, yes.
(PS--any taggers who might be reading this: I've got a nice blank garage door, and (unlike some folks) I respect what you do. E-mail me for directions.)
I take it back.
I don't WANT to be on your list. I don't like stuffed shirts and I don't like people who speak ill of the dead, and based on what I see in this post in your blog, you're both of the above.
I'd tell you, if I thought it would matter at all, to read this post from CTA Tattler and especially its attached comments--but why ruin a good opinion with the facts? Like the fact that the individual you're complaining about, by all available evidence, wasn't even tagging when he was killed? (Oh, wait--that doesn't change your whole "tagging-is-bad" thesis, does it. But it might give you some further insights into the humanity of this person, upon whom you would have wished "hard time in the obscurity of state prison". Mighty nice of you, though, to qualify your statement with the part about "I don't wish death on (those who create graffiti)." You're a regular ol' softie, ain't you.)
It must be very nice to have an artistic sensibility which conforms so neatly to laws and customs. Of course, it pretty much guarantees that your work will also be acceptable within the mainstream of society...which might be nice from a financial angle, come to think of it--but with the mainstream of society being what it is, I'm not sure it's much of a recommendation.
"Vile, selfish, (and) moronic"?
Graffiti??
Leading a country to a misguided, misrepresented war--sure.
Stealing the pensions of hard-working people to fund one's own lavish lifestyle--hell yeah.
Calling into question the patriotism of a man who actually served his country while the questioner sat in safety and ease--yup.
Painting on a building or a train trestle or a garage door?
Not so much.
Hurling harsh words and indictments against someone who is no longer alive to defend himself, compounding the grief of his family and friends?
I think those adjectives apply, yes.
(PS--any taggers who might be reading this: I've got a nice blank garage door, and (unlike some folks) I respect what you do. E-mail me for directions.)
Report From The Trenches
Weirdest and most-poignant combination of filial loyalty and poor parenting I've ever seen...
Last night, per the usual, there was much shouting outside on the sidewalk. The drama of the evening was apparently something like this:
(This, incidentally, is translated from its original American Thug--my "*"-typing finger is too tired to adequately reproduce all the cussing, n-words, and nonprintables involved in their conversation.)
Joe had driven Courtney to the store, and parked in front of Will's to wait for Kisha. Will, evidently, had a past fling with Courtney and deeply resented the fact that Joe was now spending time with her, and since their breakup was rather hostile, it appeared, Will was going into great and emotionally-charged detail regarding why Courtney should leave immediately and not darken his sidewalk again.
Two factors lifted this incident beyond the usual level of weird:
1. Throughout this conversation, Will punctuated every epithet, every pejorative for the female of the species, with an apology to his mother--the nice church lady from next door, the one who sent me a plate the day of the block party--who was sitting on the porch. So Will's end of the argument went something like this: "B***h--sorry, Momma--You better gone out of here--Joe, take this b***h home--I'm sorry, Momma--get this 'ho outta here. I'm SORRY, Momma!"
2. Courtney--herself no slouch in the cussing-and-threatening department--spent most of the time promising to come back to this street EVERY day, just to get on Will's nerves. Needless to say, Will didn't appreciate this at all, and explained--again, in great and passionate detail--the amount of physical damage he planned to inflict on Courtney. At one point, the prospect was raised of who might win a fight between Will and Courtney's brothers, and Will decided to address Courtney's little son--a boy of about six, who had been standing by throughout all the argument. "Go home and tell your uncles I'm gon' kick they asses," he informed the boy. I did not hear his response, but a few moments later--after Courtney had assured Will that her brothers' intervention would not be needed, since she would herself be more than capable of beating the living shit out of him--the little boy nudged his mother. He was holding something in his hand, and when she didn't answer, he nudged her again and profferred the object once more.
"Huh?" she said. "Oh...Naw, I don't need no bottle right now," she said. Whereupon he dropped the weapon on the ground, and left his mother to her own devices.
Shortly afterwards--after it was established that Courtney's butt was too big for the outfit she was wearing, that Will still owed money on the throwback HE was wearing, and that Joe was "a petty n****"--the company parted ways and peace reigned once again on the West Side.
Last night, per the usual, there was much shouting outside on the sidewalk. The drama of the evening was apparently something like this:
(This, incidentally, is translated from its original American Thug--my "*"-typing finger is too tired to adequately reproduce all the cussing, n-words, and nonprintables involved in their conversation.)
Joe had driven Courtney to the store, and parked in front of Will's to wait for Kisha. Will, evidently, had a past fling with Courtney and deeply resented the fact that Joe was now spending time with her, and since their breakup was rather hostile, it appeared, Will was going into great and emotionally-charged detail regarding why Courtney should leave immediately and not darken his sidewalk again.
Two factors lifted this incident beyond the usual level of weird:
1. Throughout this conversation, Will punctuated every epithet, every pejorative for the female of the species, with an apology to his mother--the nice church lady from next door, the one who sent me a plate the day of the block party--who was sitting on the porch. So Will's end of the argument went something like this: "B***h--sorry, Momma--You better gone out of here--Joe, take this b***h home--I'm sorry, Momma--get this 'ho outta here. I'm SORRY, Momma!"
2. Courtney--herself no slouch in the cussing-and-threatening department--spent most of the time promising to come back to this street EVERY day, just to get on Will's nerves. Needless to say, Will didn't appreciate this at all, and explained--again, in great and passionate detail--the amount of physical damage he planned to inflict on Courtney. At one point, the prospect was raised of who might win a fight between Will and Courtney's brothers, and Will decided to address Courtney's little son--a boy of about six, who had been standing by throughout all the argument. "Go home and tell your uncles I'm gon' kick they asses," he informed the boy. I did not hear his response, but a few moments later--after Courtney had assured Will that her brothers' intervention would not be needed, since she would herself be more than capable of beating the living shit out of him--the little boy nudged his mother. He was holding something in his hand, and when she didn't answer, he nudged her again and profferred the object once more.
"Huh?" she said. "Oh...Naw, I don't need no bottle right now," she said. Whereupon he dropped the weapon on the ground, and left his mother to her own devices.
Shortly afterwards--after it was established that Courtney's butt was too big for the outfit she was wearing, that Will still owed money on the throwback HE was wearing, and that Joe was "a petty n****"--the company parted ways and peace reigned once again on the West Side.
Tuesday, September 7, 2004
Dumb-Ass Commercial
Okay. Cable companies advertise; this is a given. Bad trendy alterna-songs are written for advertisements, attempting to appeal to a gen-X demographic that no longer exists; this is also a given.
However, the latest fusion of these two items is stupider-than-most.
Tell me what the following lyrics, sung by a mid-90's sounding Letters-to-Cleo-type band, repeated over and over, have to do with cable or Internet: "Can we do a little?/Can we go again?/Can we do a little?/Can we go again?"
Yeesh. Sounds like a song about drugs and theme parks, or something.
However, the latest fusion of these two items is stupider-than-most.
Tell me what the following lyrics, sung by a mid-90's sounding Letters-to-Cleo-type band, repeated over and over, have to do with cable or Internet: "Can we do a little?/Can we go again?/Can we do a little?/Can we go again?"
Yeesh. Sounds like a song about drugs and theme parks, or something.
Long, Long Weekend
What a waste of three days.
Okay, so I got a metric TON of sleep; I got the basement cleaned; much TV was watched, kilowatts of electricity were consumed by the window A/C in the pursuit of coolness. Other than that, I can think of nothing I did that would contribute to the world in the least, unless you consider "depleting the world's Pepsi supply" to be a contribution.
LJ got the car windows fixed--first thing Saturday morning, as a matter of fact. I was most impressed. Of course, he had to be subjected to Gladys's Just-Talked-To-Terrence-Who-Is-A-Rotten-Male-So-By-Association-All-Males-Are-Suspect Quiz--you know, the one about "so why would they target OUR truck, and NO OTHER vehicles, and not take ANYTHING? Might there be some vengeful female-type involved here?" Of course he said no; of course I have little choice but to believe him. As I said to him later: "Not only would I NOT spy on you, but you've got it set up so that I couldn't even if I WANTED to. Which is probably just how you want it." He laughed, but actually we had a few good conversations over the past few days, and I feel better than I have in a while. (And no matter WHAT happens, I've seen through Terrence once and for all. He showed HIS hand quite completely, and I don't think he even knows it.)
More soon--but since I have to go into work tomorrow early to make up for something that didn't get done because I spent two hours reading McSweeney's, it's now Bedtime for Gladys.
Okay, so I got a metric TON of sleep; I got the basement cleaned; much TV was watched, kilowatts of electricity were consumed by the window A/C in the pursuit of coolness. Other than that, I can think of nothing I did that would contribute to the world in the least, unless you consider "depleting the world's Pepsi supply" to be a contribution.
LJ got the car windows fixed--first thing Saturday morning, as a matter of fact. I was most impressed. Of course, he had to be subjected to Gladys's Just-Talked-To-Terrence-Who-Is-A-Rotten-Male-So-By-Association-All-Males-Are-Suspect Quiz--you know, the one about "so why would they target OUR truck, and NO OTHER vehicles, and not take ANYTHING? Might there be some vengeful female-type involved here?" Of course he said no; of course I have little choice but to believe him. As I said to him later: "Not only would I NOT spy on you, but you've got it set up so that I couldn't even if I WANTED to. Which is probably just how you want it." He laughed, but actually we had a few good conversations over the past few days, and I feel better than I have in a while. (And no matter WHAT happens, I've seen through Terrence once and for all. He showed HIS hand quite completely, and I don't think he even knows it.)
More soon--but since I have to go into work tomorrow early to make up for something that didn't get done because I spent two hours reading McSweeney's, it's now Bedtime for Gladys.
Saturday, September 4, 2004
Big Brother 5 Spoiler--don't read if you care!
Okay, so having read the latest Live Feeds info over at Reality News Online, my day is properly ruined.
Along with my other guilty pleasures, I love a few reality shows. Big Brother ain't one of them, but I've gotten hooked on it this season thanks to its proximity to The Amazing Race, absolutely my all-time fave. And of course, when you get to watching these shows, you develop favorite characters and all....
Well, it was a double-eviction week on BB5, and my favorite gets voted off on tonight's episode.
Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of silence for Marvin.
Along with my other guilty pleasures, I love a few reality shows. Big Brother ain't one of them, but I've gotten hooked on it this season thanks to its proximity to The Amazing Race, absolutely my all-time fave. And of course, when you get to watching these shows, you develop favorite characters and all....
Well, it was a double-eviction week on BB5, and my favorite gets voted off on tonight's episode.
Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of silence for Marvin.
Friday, September 3, 2004
But People Bitch About OUR Neighborhood.
I just got a call from LJ. Apparently someone broke into the truck--busted out the passenger front window and the long window in the back. Didn't take anything--just fucked all holy hell out of our only-had-it-for-two-months truck. Fuckers.
I was aaaalllllmost ready to be mad at LJ, a little--parking in all those shady areas of Maywood, amongst the crack fiends and the drug houses. Then I asked him.
"Where were you parked?"
"Over by Taylor Street, by U of I!!!"
So much for shady-ass Maywood.
Aside from the obvious--how much it'll cost to get the windows replaced, our $1000 deductible, the inconvenience, what the FUCK did they want so goddamn bad anyway, and can I kill the mechanic who disconnected the alarm the last time he worked on the truck--aside from all THAT, my main emotion is annoyance:
Everyone gives me sooooooo much shit about "why do you want to live in THAT neighborhood? It's so scaaaaaary--people STEAL things!" But that truck has been parked out in front of the house from DAY ONE and nothing happened to it--it spends FIFTEEN MINUTES in Tri-Taylor and blammo--two windows gone.
Fuckers.
I was aaaalllllmost ready to be mad at LJ, a little--parking in all those shady areas of Maywood, amongst the crack fiends and the drug houses. Then I asked him.
"Where were you parked?"
"Over by Taylor Street, by U of I!!!"
So much for shady-ass Maywood.
Aside from the obvious--how much it'll cost to get the windows replaced, our $1000 deductible, the inconvenience, what the FUCK did they want so goddamn bad anyway, and can I kill the mechanic who disconnected the alarm the last time he worked on the truck--aside from all THAT, my main emotion is annoyance:
Everyone gives me sooooooo much shit about "why do you want to live in THAT neighborhood? It's so scaaaaaary--people STEAL things!" But that truck has been parked out in front of the house from DAY ONE and nothing happened to it--it spends FIFTEEN MINUTES in Tri-Taylor and blammo--two windows gone.
Fuckers.
Alan Keyes: Friend of the Masturbator
"Keyes objects in principle to 'the mutual pursuit of pleasure through the stimulation of the organs intended for procreation,' as he puts it." (Quote from Eric Zorn's Notebook; italics mine)
Well, personally, I say all masturbators are selfish hedonists. By this statement, Alan Keyes shows himself as the nation's most liberal Senate candidate when it comes to the topic of masturbation. Alan Keyes is the masturbator's best friend. Keyes takes positions on issues--like his willingness to support uncontrolled masturbation--that are totally contrary to the decent conscience to the overwhelming majority of people in the state of Illinois. His behavior suggests he is unfit to be standing there with (other United States) senators.
(All of these statements incorporate portions of quotes by Keyes re: others. Links show the original Keyes-ian quotes.)
Well, personally, I say all masturbators are selfish hedonists. By this statement, Alan Keyes shows himself as the nation's most liberal Senate candidate when it comes to the topic of masturbation. Alan Keyes is the masturbator's best friend. Keyes takes positions on issues--like his willingness to support uncontrolled masturbation--that are totally contrary to the decent conscience to the overwhelming majority of people in the state of Illinois. His behavior suggests he is unfit to be standing there with (other United States) senators.
(All of these statements incorporate portions of quotes by Keyes re: others. Links show the original Keyes-ian quotes.)
Thursday, September 2, 2004
Child Prodigy, 'r SOMEthin'.
When I was ten years old, I was infatuated with the tape recorder. I thought that was the best invention since Schnauzer dogs, caramel, and rock-n-roll combined. (Okay--it has not escaped my notice that the three mentioned items would result in a sticky, deafened hound. Jeez, people, I'm sleep-deprived; cut me some freakin' SLACK!)
ANYWAY.
I just LOVED to tape-record my voice. My best friends, Emma and Emmy (yes really; there were two of them, unrelated, both named Emily and we had to keep them straight SOMEHOW)--anyway, we used to make fake radio broadcasts together, fake newscasts and such, based upon our ten-year-old's perceptions of media. And even after they would go home, I'd still continue my "broadcasts".
There was a certain week in the summer of 1980 when the world did something that, to a ten-year-old, is a great affront: they pre-empted ALL prime-time TV on ALL THREE networks. Keep in mind, this was long before cable came to Chicago, and there was no WB, no UPN, no Fox--just ABC, NBC, and CBS--and ALL of them were showing the EXACT SAME THING: the convention.
Outraged as only a pre-teen geek can be, I took to my room and created my own version:
...the Skepublican Irrational Invention.
I don't remember the content; I'm sure it was fairly-lame--but (having watched P/Resident Mon(k)ey-Boy, his brilliant little hamster-less daughters, and Alan "Selfish Hedonists!" Keyes)...
...would anyone like to join me in a protest movement, towards an official name-change?
ANYWAY.
I just LOVED to tape-record my voice. My best friends, Emma and Emmy (yes really; there were two of them, unrelated, both named Emily and we had to keep them straight SOMEHOW)--anyway, we used to make fake radio broadcasts together, fake newscasts and such, based upon our ten-year-old's perceptions of media. And even after they would go home, I'd still continue my "broadcasts".
There was a certain week in the summer of 1980 when the world did something that, to a ten-year-old, is a great affront: they pre-empted ALL prime-time TV on ALL THREE networks. Keep in mind, this was long before cable came to Chicago, and there was no WB, no UPN, no Fox--just ABC, NBC, and CBS--and ALL of them were showing the EXACT SAME THING: the convention.
Outraged as only a pre-teen geek can be, I took to my room and created my own version:
...the Skepublican Irrational Invention.
I don't remember the content; I'm sure it was fairly-lame--but (having watched P/Resident Mon(k)ey-Boy, his brilliant little hamster-less daughters, and Alan "Selfish Hedonists!" Keyes)...
...would anyone like to join me in a protest movement, towards an official name-change?
One Of The Smartest Things I've Ever Said
"You know, it's really funny when you think about it: We let men abuse our trust, stomp all over our hearts, treat us badly--but let them mess with our MONEY, and honey, we're on the WARPATH!"
--me, to my best friend T, on the occasion of having her credit fucked over royally by an emotionally-abusive boyfriend.
--me, to my best friend T, on the occasion of having her credit fucked over royally by an emotionally-abusive boyfriend.
W Speaks Well When the TV's on Mute
I couldn't do it--I couldn't actually LISTEN to the words proceeding like mangled baby ducks from the mouth of that smirking, Alfred E Neuman pretender--so I put the TV on mute. It worked well, and gave me the chance to formulate two moderately-germane thoughts re: this convention.
1. I sense latent Democratic leanings in the signmakers. The signs waved by so many of the front-row camera shills--the ones that read "4 More Years"--seen from a distance, appear to be missing the "More". Which, when you put aside the nightmare aspect of the wishes being expressed, would be factually more accurate.
2. I wonder: Do the BuSh twins, having namechecked Outkast as a way to impress all us young voters with their impeccable hipster credentials, remember a certain OTHER Outkast song (you know, other than "Hey Ya")--a certain other song with lyrics obliquely critical of dear ol' Granddad's first sortie into Iraq?
"Don't pull the thing out/unless you plan to bang...
(Bombs over Baghdad....)
Don't even bang/unless you plan to hit something....
(Bombs over Baghdad....)"
--"B.O.B", OutKast, 1999
Of course, since "B.O.B" didn't land on the Clear Channel post-9/11 banned list, maybe they've never come across it. (I'm fairly sure "Hey Ya" represents the whole of their OutKast knowledge. After all, there's that scary BLACK man--even if he DOES wear nice outfits.)
1. I sense latent Democratic leanings in the signmakers. The signs waved by so many of the front-row camera shills--the ones that read "4 More Years"--seen from a distance, appear to be missing the "More". Which, when you put aside the nightmare aspect of the wishes being expressed, would be factually more accurate.
2. I wonder: Do the BuSh twins, having namechecked Outkast as a way to impress all us young voters with their impeccable hipster credentials, remember a certain OTHER Outkast song (you know, other than "Hey Ya")--a certain other song with lyrics obliquely critical of dear ol' Granddad's first sortie into Iraq?
"Don't pull the thing out/unless you plan to bang...
(Bombs over Baghdad....)
Don't even bang/unless you plan to hit something....
(Bombs over Baghdad....)"
--"B.O.B", OutKast, 1999
Of course, since "B.O.B" didn't land on the Clear Channel post-9/11 banned list, maybe they've never come across it. (I'm fairly sure "Hey Ya" represents the whole of their OutKast knowledge. After all, there's that scary BLACK man--even if he DOES wear nice outfits.)
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
The Passage of Time
I'm going to sleep early tonight--I promise--but I have to speak on this first.
It was ten years ago tonight that I left David, my first husband.
I remember coming home--"home" at the time being his mom's house, since he was trying to start another of his cockamamie "business ventures". The clusterfuck du jour was an online service which he swore would be the death of AOL.
I'd been out that night, saying my goodbyes to JP. I knew I was going to leave David, but I wanted to make sure I was doing it for the right reasons--not to get away from one man just to be with another, but to make a change in MY life. And so JP had agreed, reluctantly, to a three-month moratorium on our relationship--which we'd been carrying on all summer, with a fury I still can't even think about without incredible grief. To have lost all that....Anyway.
So we had made a pact, JP and I: we would see each other one last time on Sept. 3rd--we had tickets to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Hole--and then we wouldn't see each other again til I was out on my own--contingent on having money to move into a new place. I was 24, jobless, waiting for interviews which didn't come; David had quit his job a few weeks before, without even consulting with me, so he could concentrate on his business. David and I were living at his mom's, in debt to our eyeballs, no health insurance, no anything--and I was in love with someone else.
Unlike most nights that summer, JP and I didn't fool around at all--in fact, I remember going home early because we both knew that moratorium wasn't going to survive unless one or both of us developed a sudden case of willpower. So I drove back to Dave's mom's, and plopped in front of the TV watching "All In The Family".
The phone rang.
"Hey baby," Dave said. "How are you? Whatcha doin'? Hey, listen, I have a question."
"Yeah?"
"Did you use a condom when you fucked him, at least?"
I'd left a disk in the computer. I was working on a novel that summer; along with the novel, I'd been writing tons and tons--poetry, short stories, thinly-fictionalized journal entries. It was these last that he'd found.
To my credit--the only credit I can claim--I stayed there long enough for him to confront me; to yell and scream and spew all the anger I'd earned from him. But at the end of the night I packed up the things that meant the most to me, and I left at 3 AM and went back to my mom's. I remember waking her, how scared she was; I remember telling her the same lie I'd told David: that nothing had happened, that he'd misinterpreted what he'd read, that nothing had happened, nothing had happened, nothing had happened. I had no intention of going back to David but I wasn't going to find myself homeless, cast out of my mother's house for the offense of loving someone of a different race.
I hadn't yet learned how strong I was. I was still 24 and afraid of being wrong, of being bad, of being unloved and alone and at the mercy of the world. The next two years would teach me lessons I'd never expected to need; but that night I was scared...scared, and exhilarated, and thrilled to be free.
And I was 24, and now I'm 34, and I would give almost anything in the world to be that scared, exhilarated 24-year-old again. I would give anything to be zooming down the Dan Ryan in a beat-up blue Hyundai at 3 in the morning, cutting off trucks and listening to "Fantastic Voyage", on my way from one life into another, and I would do anything, anything at all, to have JP somewhere in that new life.
It's been ten years tonight, and how impossible that seems, I just can't tell you.
It was ten years ago tonight that I left David, my first husband.
I remember coming home--"home" at the time being his mom's house, since he was trying to start another of his cockamamie "business ventures". The clusterfuck du jour was an online service which he swore would be the death of AOL.
I'd been out that night, saying my goodbyes to JP. I knew I was going to leave David, but I wanted to make sure I was doing it for the right reasons--not to get away from one man just to be with another, but to make a change in MY life. And so JP had agreed, reluctantly, to a three-month moratorium on our relationship--which we'd been carrying on all summer, with a fury I still can't even think about without incredible grief. To have lost all that....Anyway.
So we had made a pact, JP and I: we would see each other one last time on Sept. 3rd--we had tickets to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Hole--and then we wouldn't see each other again til I was out on my own--contingent on having money to move into a new place. I was 24, jobless, waiting for interviews which didn't come; David had quit his job a few weeks before, without even consulting with me, so he could concentrate on his business. David and I were living at his mom's, in debt to our eyeballs, no health insurance, no anything--and I was in love with someone else.
Unlike most nights that summer, JP and I didn't fool around at all--in fact, I remember going home early because we both knew that moratorium wasn't going to survive unless one or both of us developed a sudden case of willpower. So I drove back to Dave's mom's, and plopped in front of the TV watching "All In The Family".
The phone rang.
"Hey baby," Dave said. "How are you? Whatcha doin'? Hey, listen, I have a question."
"Yeah?"
"Did you use a condom when you fucked him, at least?"
I'd left a disk in the computer. I was working on a novel that summer; along with the novel, I'd been writing tons and tons--poetry, short stories, thinly-fictionalized journal entries. It was these last that he'd found.
To my credit--the only credit I can claim--I stayed there long enough for him to confront me; to yell and scream and spew all the anger I'd earned from him. But at the end of the night I packed up the things that meant the most to me, and I left at 3 AM and went back to my mom's. I remember waking her, how scared she was; I remember telling her the same lie I'd told David: that nothing had happened, that he'd misinterpreted what he'd read, that nothing had happened, nothing had happened, nothing had happened. I had no intention of going back to David but I wasn't going to find myself homeless, cast out of my mother's house for the offense of loving someone of a different race.
I hadn't yet learned how strong I was. I was still 24 and afraid of being wrong, of being bad, of being unloved and alone and at the mercy of the world. The next two years would teach me lessons I'd never expected to need; but that night I was scared...scared, and exhilarated, and thrilled to be free.
And I was 24, and now I'm 34, and I would give almost anything in the world to be that scared, exhilarated 24-year-old again. I would give anything to be zooming down the Dan Ryan in a beat-up blue Hyundai at 3 in the morning, cutting off trucks and listening to "Fantastic Voyage", on my way from one life into another, and I would do anything, anything at all, to have JP somewhere in that new life.
It's been ten years tonight, and how impossible that seems, I just can't tell you.
Yet Again, I Am Failed By Words.
That "Next Blog" button up in the top right corner of the toolbar is dangerously addictive.
After a few "Next"s, I landed here.
We pause for a moment to take in the near-vowel-lessness of this individual's "writing".
The crowning glory, though: at the bottom of this bowl of alphabet soup, we find a link to this interesting site.
WTF, WTF, WTF????? (This site ALSO yields Gladys's Quote Of The Week, which I only WISH could be incorporated into the Space Ghost Quote Generator:
How's THAT for a disclaimer?)
Fortunately, though, in case you're trying to plan a vacation or a wedding, but you're wondering whether the rapture's gonna come and kick your ass on the big day, we have The Rapture Index--which will helpfully explain how every single thing in the whole world of human interactions, governments, and habits are conspiring to make sure that everyone but SUPER-Christians go directly to a screaming, fire-and-brimstone Hell. And dammit, that's useful stuff.
These fundies make me giggle--like, to the point that Pepsi shoots out my nose.
After a few "Next"s, I landed here.
We pause for a moment to take in the near-vowel-lessness of this individual's "writing".
The crowning glory, though: at the bottom of this bowl of alphabet soup, we find a link to this interesting site.
WTF, WTF, WTF????? (This site ALSO yields Gladys's Quote Of The Week, which I only WISH could be incorporated into the Space Ghost Quote Generator:
"If the rapture should take place, resulting in my absence, it will become necessary for tribulation saints to mirror or financially support this site. "
How's THAT for a disclaimer?)
Fortunately, though, in case you're trying to plan a vacation or a wedding, but you're wondering whether the rapture's gonna come and kick your ass on the big day, we have The Rapture Index--which will helpfully explain how every single thing in the whole world of human interactions, governments, and habits are conspiring to make sure that everyone but SUPER-Christians go directly to a screaming, fire-and-brimstone Hell. And dammit, that's useful stuff.
These fundies make me giggle--like, to the point that Pepsi shoots out my nose.
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