Line Up To Eat Me

MOVED!@

2008-04-28T01:50:00.001-07:00

I have moved due to the fact that Wordpress is better than Blogger.

http://lineuptoeatme.wordpress.com is the place to line up!

By Jove, I Think I've Got It!

2008-04-26T23:38:00.000-07:00

I think I have Battlestar Galactica all figured out. All you have to do is strip away the premises that everyone seems to accept for no reason, and the clues are there. There's just a lot of extra noise and hilarious invisble sex to distract you.

I really hope I'm right-it's the only logical way the story can end. I sent an e-mail to a friend telling her the details. When the show's over, I'll post it here.

Calcutta Hookers' Kids Aren't Very Funny. And still...

2008-04-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

I just watched an incredible documentary on a photographer who lives in an Indian brothel in Calcutta, and she befriends the kids and does all she can to try to help them get better lives for themselves. It was absolutely heartbreaking.

And still, the least-funny thing I've seen in the past 10 days is last week's Saturday Night Live.

While I'm at it, "Across the Universe" BLOWS as a movie. However, the soundtrack is more than stunning. Dana Fuchs...where did she come from, and why haven't I heard of her before? Oh, and I must of course give credit where it's due. Bono was absolutely hilarious as The Walrus, and Eddie Izzard was surreal as always. I LOVE that high-heel wearing Englishman! I love to speculate on what his home looks like.

But yeah. Buy the soundtrack to "Across the Universe." It's worth it.

Eat Shit, Disney. Eat shit and die.

2008-04-18T19:16:00.001-07:00

First, let me say that I am not a man-hater or necessarily a feminist. I'm all for equality, though. I'm not a troll, either. I'm not trying to be inflammatory. And no, I am not a hippy all stinky with patchouli and wet wool, and I am NOT voting for Hillary Clinton.

I just finished watching the movie "Enchanted," which is one of Disney's new, modern, feel-good romances, starring Amy Adams and that guy who was cute in the 80s, then got plastic surgery and is now on Grey's Anatomy.

The movie started great. The princess, a total moron, falls for a prince, who is also a total moron, simply because they heard each other singing in the forest. It was a great setup. Then they all become "real," and are suddenly in Manhattan.

The Grey's Anatomy Yutz (let's just call him G.A.Y.), of course, falls instantly for the vacuous princess, and his fiance, who is an intelligent woman with (GASP)a career, sort of figures it out, but is okay with the whole thing.

Career women don't mind being tossed aside, and in the name of Disney-brand "true love," she ends up falling for the stupid, effeminate prince. Because surely, she must secretly want to be "the man" in the relationship.

In the finale, the queen, played by Susan Sarandon, turns into a dragon and is portrayed as an evil uber-bitch as she wants to keep her crown rather than leave it to her Forrest-Gumpy stepson, the effeminate prince. So she gets killed (to great cheers from the imagined audience), G.A.Y. of course ends up with the moron Amy Adams princess, and the effeminate prince gets the "smart," but oddly emotionless former G.A.Y. fiance by default. Everybody's happy, and the credits roll.

Am I the only one who was actually REALLY upset by this ending? I am actually still in a messy, slobbery rage over yet another misogynist-disguised-as-moralistic movie in which being a woman completely dependent on some man swooping in to SAVE her is the best thing to be?

That "true-love's kiss" is the most powerful thing in the world?

ARE YOU KIDDING ME???

It's 2008, and yet everyone in the world (even outside Taliban-controlled areas of the world) seems to think it's the middle ages as far as women are concerned.

According to Disney, these are the rules:
-If we women are meek, stupid, frail and pretty, we are in GREAT shape. We will get a man, who will make our lives complete.
-If we have brains in our heads, have a job, and rational perspectives on things, it's perfectly okay to just toss us aside in favor of someone who needs to be saved.

Just because I don't know how to make my own clothes, and I know how to form a thought in my brain, and actually, gods forbid EXPRESS my thoughts and opinions, I may as well be a dragon to be pushed off the top of a freaking building.

Susan Sarandon, who has always chosen her roles well in the past, should be ashamed of herself. Same with Amy Adams, who was BRILLIANT in "Junebug." Same with every single person who does anything for Disney. And shame on me for watching this film.

If you are a woman or know a woman who is even SLIGHTLY above average intelligence, don't bother putting yourself in the path of this movie.

This movie makes me feel completely worthless. If this is an expression of what the world is like, I don't want to live in it. I am ashamed to be a human. I wish there was some sort of magic laser that could transform me into some other creature than human. I wish I had an ice pick. If I did, I swear to all that is holy that I would lobotomize this demoralizing movie out of my head. If it failed and I died, it would still be worth it.

If anyone mentions "Disney" to me in anything other than a derogatory manor, I will smack them across their face.

Dear Seattle TV Stations,

2008-04-10T20:57:00.000-07:00

Let me start by telling you flat out that not everyone in Seattle is retarded. Let me proceed by telling you some other things. For instance, when you say, "Thank you for inviting us into your homes," you are deluding yourself, and you aren't impressing anyone. You are not in our homes. Nor would I, or anyone NOT caught up in your sense of self-importance, invite you over. You are talking heads, nothing else. When you make quips back and forth to each other during the news, all you are doing is showboating.

Since when did the delivery of the news require self-congratulatory, egoistic bullshit? How many times during a newscast do you really need to repeat your name, or have one of your "co-anchors" say your name?

"I'm Jeff Renner. And now, back to Lori Matsukawa with her story on handmade teddy bear garments. Jeff Renner, over and out. Lori?"

"Thanks for the weather report, Jeff Renner. Nice sweater. Let's hope for sunshine [polite, yet uncomfortable laughter echoes throughout Seattle]! Hi, I'm Lori Matsukawa, standing under a street light where earlier today, a bicyclist dropped her backpack. Sadly, that backpack contained handmade teddy bear garments for students of Oprah's Academy of Information Technology and Arts in the Zambezi region of darkest Africa, where apparently, many non-American African-Americans are still awaiting reparations for slavery. I'm Lori Matsukawa. Back to you, Jeff Renner. "

You get the picture.

Beyond the hot tub party indiscretions of Kathi Goertzen at WSU or Jean Enerson's plastic surgeries (her skin has to be the size of a postal stamp, stretched to near breaking) and reported shoplifting sprees years ago at Nordstrom's, nobody gives a flying shit about you, or anything you might have to say that isn't of relevance to the news you are supposed to report.

All the public requires and wants are pleasing voices and (unless you are a man, or an unfortunate field reporter forced to stand knee-deep in frozen cow shit) well-groomed faces telling us what is going on in the world.

Do we notice when you're feeding us your opinion, or that occasionally you are clearly on the take from certain businesses or other interest groups? Of course we do. Just tonight, right before "My Name Is Earl," a highly-rated NBC syndicated show, a KING-5 "news" reporter came on to tease the 11 o'clock news. The producer strung together clips showing our state's governor bitching about the NBA trying to move our asshole basketball team to another state, some other local fluff stories, and then a flat-out plug for McDonald's. The reporter said, and this is a direct quote, "More free java, and when you can get it under the Golden Arches! At 11 on KING-5 news."

*edit: it was Dennis Bounds, and it also aired at the :15 break during "Earl." I double-checked the veracity of the above quote on my Tivo.

I repeat: WE ARE NOT ALL RETARDED.

Stop treating us like we are.

Stop treating us like you are friends of ours. You are not. I don't trust you in even the loosest sense of the word. You have never given cause for your audience to feel anything other than annoyance, anger at your lax attitudes toward what constitutes "news," and pity at newbie reporters who are doing things akin to hanging from a toenail into Mt. St. Helens' crater as it releases a little steam.

And a personal note to Jeff Renner: the sweater thing does not work as a trademark. It worked for Bill Cosby 30 years ago. It does not work for a middle-aged, plump, hypertensive white man who spends 14 or so minutes out of every hour of news to tell us it might rain and it might not.

Kudos to Rich Marriott for telling us the weather without forcing yourself onto us like a used-car salesman with a tired, sorry pitch. A little less information on the birds on the building's "roof garden" would be appreciated. An aside: reporting from the building's rooftop may be "on-the-scene" reporting, but it doesn't exactly pack a punch when you're out there and it's dark.

As a rule, any reporter who is not sitting behind a desk (other than a weatherman standing in front of the green screen) is a tool. There are no exceptions to this rule, and that includes "on-the-scene" reporters who add nothing to a story by standing on the site where "news happened" 12 hours ago, or standing in the middle of a blizzard to report on traffic at the pass.

Let's talk about man-on-the-street interviews. It won't be a long conversation. All that needs to be said is: NOBODY CARES WHAT SOME JACKASS ON THE STREET THINKS ABOUT ANYTHING. Nobody. About anything. So stop. Do YOU care what celebrities think about politics? No? You're starting to get it.

To all reporters, and I cannot emphasize this enough: You_are_not_celebrities. Your presence is not needed or helpful at any event other than maybe charity events like breast cancer walks. Nobody is coming to see YOU. They are going to the car dealership to buy a car. If you get paid to be at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new Bulk Foods For Fatties store, more power to you. But please, don't let it go to your head. Carlene Johnson? You should ask for better lighting when you're doing those car commercials. Better yet, get your ass back on the radio and off the television. It's enough that I have to hear your ceaseless prattling on the radio. I don't want to have to look at you too. Your kids? Nobody cares.

Your names do not lend credibility to anything.

Unless you are out there actually talking to the newsmakers during the day and bringing home and editing your own news footage (like reporters from the not-so-distant past who actually worked for their credibility), you are not a reliable or creditable source. You have interns gather stories from the wire, and sift through piles and piles of press releases to decide what is news. Then you read what they've written, fix the typos and figure out pronunciations, and put your name on it. That is the product you are selling. A lot of people buy it, but that doesn't make it good. A good salesman can sell a ton of shit sandwiches, but the pitch doesn't make them taste better.

You are given blocks of time by producers, who are often nothing more than glorified interns, in order to provide ample time for traffic and weather and sports scores. Because, let's be honest, those are the segments that draw in the ratings. And things that draw the ratings draw advertisers, and that's what SHOULD matter to you. YOU are responsible for making your newscasts interesting. Not your interns, not your producers. YOU. You are the product, and you need to make an effort instead of relying on your minions to make you interesting or relevant. That doesn't mean stray from the topic and make unfunny, politically-correct and totally safe quips to your coworkers on the air.

What I'm trying to say is, you are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the material you present during every broadcast. It wouldn't kill you to go out and find a story more relevant to more people than the standard, "John Doe's shirt got stuck in a fence, and now, sadly, he's shirtless." And then go to a reporter live on the scene. Nobody cares. If you're going to report fluff, find some INTERESTING fluff. Maybe interview some urban explorers, or do a survey. Ask some questions. There are stories out there beyond what you hear on the police scanner.

On the subject of what is news, a daily death tally on the Iraq war is not something you need to be reporting. People can research that on their own. It is depressing, sad, but ultimately it is not news. The death toll remains about the same every day. You don't report every day that the sun comes up, do you? Why is that? Because it's the same data every day? Right. If there's a huge increase in deaths, or a huge decrease, that's news. If it's the same number every day, it loses its significance and loses its emotional impact. It becomes routine. Also, keep in mind that if news reporting during World War Two was like it is now, I guarantee you we'd all be speaking German.

And KOMO radio "personalities" (that's what they call themselves, no shit!): nobody cares about your personality either. Just read the fucking copy they hand you and stop pretending anyone gives a fuck what your name is. We don't. We want to hear what we need to hear, without all the fluff you shove down our throats.

Nobody likes being force-fed. And you ARE force-feeding us. If you are going to treat us like retards, at least feed us banana pudding and give us some fucking bibs and some napkins to wipe off our retarded chins.

There you have it. I hope everyone is well and that the itching behind Jean's ears isn't too bad this week. I hope they let her back into Nordstrom's sometime soon.

What's that, Jeff Renner's Sweater? Oh okay. Grab the shotgun and bring in the cat. It looks like rain.

You each have a standing invitation to eat me. Get in line, shitbags!

Sincerely,
the staff of "Line Up To Eat Me"

The Alan Thicke Voiceover Invasion

2008-04-02T23:18:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed that Alan Thicke's voice is all over the TV? He's voicing Comedy Central, he's voicing a bunch of other stations and commercials too.

Has this been going on for a long time and I didn't notice? Perhaps it's the law of attraction (*cough BULLSHIT!!*), and I'm just noticing Alan Thicke's voice as my Tivo has started recording Growing Pains every day. I watch it when I'm barely awake, and marvel at the acting prowess of religious sociopatch Kirk Cameron, and feel sorry for the kid who played Ben. He started out as a moderately cute little kid, and then had to go through a very awkward puberty on television, with writers who were clearly (and I'm borrowing from "A Christmas Story" here) under the delusion that he was a darling little rascal up to the hijinks of a sweet little 8 year-old. When he was approaching 18.

I'm not even going to talk about poor Tracy Gold, who was never even SLIGHTLY overweight, but those writers wrote fat jokes about her as SHE went through puberty on television, driving her to a life-threatening eating disorder.

If Alan Thicke's career has a comeback, it seems, however illogically, that he's dancing on the corpses of the show's former children's innocences. That sounds harsh, and Alan Thicke didn't write the show or direct it or anything. I still blame the adults on that show for not speaking up and telling the writers and producers to 86 the fat jokes on the sensitive teenage girl who is being judged by an entire country of stupid people, and who had to think about every last white-trash child-molester's opinion of her. Because frankly, those are the types of people who tend to be the squeaky wheels. Those are the types of people who make comments listened to by impressionable girls with bad self-images. Today, I saw Tracey Gold make a "pig" joke about herself on that show. They made her make pig jokes. About herself. And she was skinny.

Way to kill off entire cross-sections of America's youth, my beloved 80s sitcoms! I sat back and watched it all happen, and now, I can't figure out why. That's why my tivo records all the sitcoms I watched and loved and learned from (hell, i had an absent father, a hardworking mother, and an executive for a stepfather. I was home ALL the time, alone). I'd go so far as to say the influx of sitcoms were more parental to me, teaching me the difference between right and wrong, not to read other people's diaries, etc. They were my parents, and it hurts me to deconstruct them.

I suppose I'll stop this ramble and just end by saying, I wish those actors well, and that their sacrificed childhoods ARE still appreciated, and I'd love to take you guys out for a brewsky and not talk about what it was like to grow up making money by having strangers make you do stuff that made you feel bad.

You pooor. poorrr bastards

Look me up and I'll buy. As long as you're in Seattle.

Save the Poisonous Blood-Melting Snake of Borneo!

2008-03-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

The TV keeps telling me that vipers and other incredibly poisonous snakes, alligators and crocodiles, predatory sharks that take over beaches where people swim, and lethal, invasive, and exponentially more populous, nearly-invisible jellyfish are all animals that are beautiful and need to be protected and not hunted and killed.

They've been on the planet, evolving, for millions and millions of years. Smooth-voiced narrators on the Discovery Channel and other channels say this like it gives the toxic bastards some sort of right to slither, swim, roll, and stomp all over the planet; MORE of a right than humans.

If they've been on the plane for millions and millions of years, I say, they've had a good run. It's time to phase the fuckers out so they can't bite us and sting us and rip us and eat us up any more.

I have a pretty smooth voice. Maybe I'll make my OWN documentary, explaining the dynamic of hunter vs. hunted, and how when a species becomes the PREY, it's okay to fight back and kill whatever is trying to EAT you.

Give me a fucking break. Sharks are awesome animals, but if one tries to bite me, you can bet your sweet ass I'm going to cut its fucking head off and mail it to fucking PETA.

Natural Disaster

2008-03-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

Looking at Craigslist and the newspaper today, there were tons and tons of missing animal ads. It appears Seattle is next in line for a big, fat, natural disaster that just might knock us back into the stone age. And would that really be so bad? At least it would put a temporary halt to all the gentrification, and maybe lower the cost of living.

I will never understand why rents are so high in Seattle. It really isn't a good place to live. There is water, and there hare mountains, but unless you work for Microsoft, or are married to someone who works for Microsoft, or started a coffee company a long time ago and now own an empire, you're pretty much fucked.

It rains all the time, the state flower is Mildew, toxic mold is ignored and thus proliferates, and all the serial killers come from here and murder all of our hookers. Our freeways were built for the Boeing economy of the 1960s, and as far as volcanoes go, let's just say if Mt. Rainier or Mt. Hood erupts, bye-bye Boeing. Or at least, bye-bye all the housing for people who can't afford to live in Seattle proper and have to sit in hours of traffic every morning to get INTO Seattle proper (read: Renton and everything south of Renton).

Fault lines? We got 'em. They aren't even lines, really. A map of faults in the Puget Sound region looks like a detailed diagram of Buckwheat's hair.

There are three major north-south freeways in the Seatlte area. One of them, 405, is on the other side of Lake Washington, so we'll ignore it. If you are heading north-south on either side of downtown Seattle, you are either on I-5 or on 99, which is basically being held together by a combination of sheer willpower and state union-workers' bubble gum. If there is a major earthquake (the "BIG ONE" we've all been trying not to think about since we learned about it), I-5 will most likely be buried under the Washington State Convention Center, which is actually built ON TOP of the fucking freeway. Whoever thought that up and got paid for it is certainly running a good racket.

99 will collapse and be swallowed by the Sound, as it is on a fault line, and the natural water line near downtown Seattle is somewhere near 3rd Avenue.

The sports stadiums we all voted against (we voted down the football stadium THREE TIMES) but the governor overrode us and made us pay for them anyway? They're going underwater.

The tallest buildings in Seattle, one of which is where I used to work? They are built on top of "old Seattle," which was never filled-in and stabilized. Rather, they put some posts up, added some concrete, and built on top of it. AFTER most of it had burned to the ground. So we're talking charred remains.

Pioneer Square, Westlake Center, Pike Place Market...all of the landmarks Seattle people are proud of, and expect out-of-town people to know about, will be in the drink, on fire, or swallowed up by the Earth we Seattleites are so fond of saving through bumper-sticker and leaflet campaigns.

Maybe an earthquake will irreparably destroy the new light-rail tracks. The train that goes from the airport to nowhere near downtown Seattle. Useless piece of shit. IT's another way the city is trying to rape us all in the ass for yet MORE of the money some of us would like to save to move the fuck away from this shithole. Once you pay for the trip on the train to the Sodo Station, you get to pay for a bus that will take you to the bottom of the hill, so you can hike up a 35 degree incline for 5 blocks in the rain to get to your office. PLEASE, Seattle, let me give you more money to fuck me over even more!!

Fuck Seattle, and fuck nature. If I could afford it, I'd move the fuck away. But Seattle makes that impossible, as all the money that comes in goes OUT toward rent, taxes (INSANE taxes that pay for things like stadiums and light rail projects that are completely impractical and unnecessary), bus fare, utilities (how can Seattle run out of water? Seems like every year, we have a "drought." This is not possible. Fuck you, Seattle! I'll keep saying it until you give me a reason to stop!), umbrellas, mildew remover, allergy medicine to keep from asphyxiating due to the mold.

Fuck you, Seattle. You, the city, may be first in line to eat me. You've certainly earned it. Asshole idiot hippies. You are idiots. Every last one of you. Even me. Because I live here.

We all deserve whatever the planet can dish out. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Travel Channel Seeks Fat Fuck Mouth-Breather For Another "Fat Fuck Eating Things" Show

2008-03-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

As if it wasn't bad enough that the Food Network exists. There's nothing worse to me than seeing food of any kind on tv. Or in movies. All I can think when people on film are eating food is, "My God, that food must be completely turned to dust by now, and how moldy it must have been no less than a couple of days after filming." There's not a lot grosser than that.

But there is one thing: people who chew with their mouth opens, and people who make loud smacking noises when they eat. It's just bad manners to make a big show out of eating. I'm not saying to eat like an anal-retentive jerk, all prim and proper. I'm must saying have some fucking consideration for people who have to watch and hear you eat. Here's a hint: NOBODY wants to see and/or hear you eating. Any more than they want to see you pooping or barfing. It's just something you should keep to yourself.

Then the Food Network comes along, and brings cooking and eating into popular culture. Every time I see a show on someone cooking, and then some people eating them, I wonder why they don't go the extra step and film the digestion, and ultimately the excretion of their creation. Why not sift through the crap left behind by the diners we just watched cook and eat, and figure out what nutrients are absorbed and actually used by the body, and what nutrients are there just for "show," or for "taste."

Sure, if you want to enjoy yourself cooking, that's fine. If you want to enjoy eating, more power to you. But it is absolutely SICK to consider the act of watching people cook and eat something you can't touch or smell yourself entertainment. It's like pornography, but there's more poop involved, unless you're into THAT kind of porn.

So, to me, the Food Network is absolutely horrid. What's worse than the Food Network?

I'll tell you what's worse. The fact that a perfectly good cable network, the Travel Channel, has hopped on the bandwagon, but instead of just traveling around the world and showing us what people eat, they have hired this fat, bald, midwestern jerkoff who chews with his mouth open to not just taste various foods from around the world, but to offer his opinion on them.

I don't even know where to begin with this one. Let's start with cultural relativism, and how it is absolutely trampled by this show. Cultural relativism, as any person who has taken anthropology EVER , can tell you, is trying to understand a culture on its own terms so that it becomes meaningful and relevant.

What cultural relativism is NOT is trying to compare value systems and make judgments. If you want to understand a culture on its own terms, there is no better way to get off on the wrong foot than to jump head-first into a culture, armed with your cultural biases and values and opinions.

Example: A fat, bald asshole from Minnesota heads to darkest Africa (already, we're making judgments), where he's presented with a basket of some sort of dried worm, covered in spices. Because he is a fat, bald asshole from Minnesota, he makes a snarky comment about how disgusting the worms look, but he'll be brave, and for the sake of his viewers, take a bite. Very delicately, he nibbles a piece of the worm, makes a face, and then, as if he's in the final round of a brat-eating contest, tosses the rest of the worm in his mouth, chews it, his face as brave and proud as if he had just ended terrorism. He rubs his fat fucking tummy, and moves on.

His producers then throw together (if it's a show short on actual footage of said fat fuck chewing things with his mouth open and making snarky comments about the food eaten by people in other parts of the world than the midwest of the USA), a 30 second montage discussing how in this part of Africa, desert has taken over. There are few plants left, and the only source of protein left is the Nasty Worm, which is harvested once a year by the entire village, then dried and salted, and used as the staple of the Nasty Worm Tribe's diet.

How did that make anything meaningful and reldvant to anyone? It didn't. And of course, that is not the purpose of the Fat American Fuck Show on the Travel Channel. The purpose of the Fat American Fuck Show on the Travel Channel is to capture the fleeting attention of the average fat American fuck at home on his leather sofa, watching HD programming on his giant plasma tv, and therefore garner ratings which will attract advertisers to pay exorbitant prices to put their "caveman" ads on the Travel Channel.

It's sick, sick, SICK, and nobody, including me, will do anything to stop it. I will, however, complain about it. I'm glad this blog has no readers, it's liberating. I can say whatever I want, and ain't nothing anyone can do about it. Kind of like how if the Travel Channel, which does a great job of making the world seem a little smaller to people who can't pay their rent, support their children, pay their bills, but gladly pay satellite tv companies to bring them HD programming onto their giant plasma tvs.

Great job, Travel Channel! U-S-A! U-S-A!

God I hate humans, and I hate being one. If there is a God, I certainly hope we were not made in his image. There has to be something out there better than us. There just has to be. Because we suck pretty fucking bad. It makes more sense to just go with the idea that we are muck monsters. With many fundamentalists, you can see the distinct family resemblance.

Solution to Apple Mail Woes

2008-03-18T23:30:00.000-07:00

My crappy little Mac decided to eat itself for a while today, crashing my Apple Mail, etc. I was about to throw the thing out the window, but I just couldn't. Everything was moving at a snail's pace, and even the massive amounts of pain and sinus medication I'm on right now didn't quell the frustration.

For some reason, Apple Mail won't import its own crappy file extensioned files. If you use Tiger, you know about the ".emlx" extension and its complete lack of compatibility with any program, including itself.

So if you find yourself in a situation in which your files appear in your Finder, but not in your actual mail program, you have a pretty nasty situation on your hands. Here's what to do:

1. Create a new folder on your desktop and call it "EMLX files".
2. Drag all of your .emlx files into that folder.
3. Create another folder on your desktop and call it "CONVERTED files."
4. Download this fantastic application: www.cosmicsoft.net/emlxconvert.html
5. Open the program.
6. Open your "EMLX files" folder, and drag all the .emlx files into the converter program's window.
7. Click "save mbox." When it asks you where to save the converted files, point it to your brand new "CONVERTED files" folder.
8. DONATE TO THE CREATOR OF THE CONVERTER by clicking on the button. Seriously, it's the handiest little app and it's saving your ass, right? So show the love. Give what you can, he's not asking for anything at all (and no, I am not the creator, nor do I know him at all, I just think it's polite to share what you can when someone does you a favor).
9. Open your mail program.
10. Click on "File," then "Import Mailboxes."
11. It will ask you what kind of mailbox, just click "other."
12. Navigate to your "CONVERTED files" folder, which now has an "mbox" extension.
13. Let Mail do the rest. It will create a folder for it and everything, and your messages will appear.

Should Mail continue to crash on you every other second, don't come crying to me. I'm still about to throw this shitbox out the window. Mail STILL crashes constantly on me and I've been working on it all day.

Anyone want to buy a Mac?

Your Assertions Will Be Ignored

2008-03-16T01:21:00.000-07:00

Imagine for a moment that the human race accepted everything we knew of medicine 70 years after Galen lived as gospel truth, and never developed medicine as a science, because surely, in 70 years, we knew all we ever needed to know. We wouldn't even have gotten to the glorious "leeches" phase! And where would we be had the barbers of olde hadn't cured our demonic possessions or imbalanced humors or excesses of bile with a good bloodletting?

In 2009, it will have been (nice English, LUTEM) 70 years since the death of Sigmund Freud, who formed the basis of psychiatry by gathering data on the shit-eating, mother-fucking tendencies of residents of insane asylums, and then telling the world that every personality is formed around our defecation schedules, and our sexual feelings about our parents.

Because, if it's true for that guy who draws on the walls with poop and decorates the floor by pissing rune-shapes into caked-up vomit, it's true for the most repressed Elizabethan school-marm, or the baseball player who has his world records revoked because all his bat-swinging was based on roid rage, or your average Joe or Jane, living his or her life shaded by the Elm Streets of suburban anonymity!

That's right. Next year, we set sail on another 70-year journey during which we just might find out if a cigar can ever be JUST a cigar. Here's hopin'!

What I'm trying to say is, it is entirely too common, and is entirely too disturbing that people, especially in Anglicized countries like England (ha!) and the US and Canada, are all too willing to accept the word of psychologists and psychiatrists as gospel truth. Yes, there are myriad differences between psychologists and psychiatrists. For the sake of this blog-posting, though, they will be ignored, as they are irrelevant. They both claim to be experts in their field, and what I'm trying to say is, there is no such thing as an expert on the human mind. There are people who have studied the human mind longer than other people have, but that is a far cry from "expertise," or even "a tip of the iceberg." To mix yet another metaphor, the science of psychiatry has yet to merely scratch the surface of the subject.

Anyone can conduct a study and publish it. Polish the frame and hang it high, boys! It's as simple as this: if you don't understand the beast you are studying, you are not an expert, and whatever you have to say about the subject is entirely irrelevant.

Example:
I could travel to Egypt and give a rectal examination to a camel. I could write my findings in beautiful penmanship. I could maybe even make some graphs and diagrams and label them. I could submit my findings to the leading journal on Dromedary Proctology, and they might very well publish. I could crown myself the Queen of Camel Constipation Relief and maybe get Bono to play an awareness-raising concert under the gaze off the Great Sphynx. I could put my face and name all over television advertising for laxatives, citing my recent studies.

That sounds pretty neat, doesn't it? There are a LOT of problems with that scenario, not the least of which is I don't know the first thing about camels, other than the basics, and that their toes are not good fashion role models. I make myself look like an expert, and since I have had my hands up the asses of so many camels, people are willing to believe me.

People who practice and believe in things like psychoanalysis and talk therapy are experts on the human brain as much as I am an expert on the asses of camels. I can look at the ass of a camel from all different angles and think about camel's asses from all different perspectives. Hell, I can even reach in and pull out a big fat turd every once in a while. But that doesn't necessarily help the camel.

Any assertions made by psychologists or psychiatrists or even unlicensed "counselors" are just as ludicrous. They can listen to you talk, inform you about tough love, send you to AA meetings, try to get you to think in a goal-oriented manner. Sure, those things might be beneficial, but you can get that same advice from talk radio hosts. They will charge you up one end and out the other, and maybe eve pull up a real turd from your past every once in a while, but talking about it doesn't necessarily help the camel, if you catch my drift.

I'm sick and tired of mental health workers thinking they are experts, and that everything they say is fact. If that were true, wouldn't the world be a nice place to live? There would be no blindness, no scizophrenia, no Alzheimer's, no neurological decay, no strokes, no neuro-vascular disorders of any kind. There would be no learning disabilities, no cerebro-spinal degradation, no multiple sclerosis, no cerebral palsy...hell, no palsy of ANY kind!

But no. We just don't know enough about the human mind yet. The science is only in its infancy, and nobody has any right to make claims of having even SOME of the answers. Because nobody does. There has been some progress, but not nearly enough to get excited about.

Some doctors still prescribe electro-shock therapy. And some patients still GET electro-shock therapy.

When it comes to psychology and psychiatry, we are not even into the stone age. We're more at the "water good, fire bad" stage. I'm pretty sure we don't know that meat is better for us when it's cooked.

The quacks in the mental health profession haven't affected me personally, but I could cite several cases (anecdotal evidence, which is why I don't present it here-I understand that anecdotal evidence is not a logical or effective way to make an argument) in which trust in them has been fatal. And if I, being only one person in a small corner of the world, know that many people who have died as a direct result of advice from these "experts," there have to be some numbers out there to support this argument. I just haven't found them yet.

Here are some numbers about suicide (the 11th leading cause of death in the USA, and THE MOST preventable cause of death anywhere):
According to the Centers for Disease Control, as recently as 2005, there were 32,000 deaths by suicide in the US. To break it down, that's a person deciding to fucking DIE rather than live another day on this planet every 16 minutes. That's less than the length of the average sitcom, minus commercials. So just about the time Homer realizes MAYBE he was wrong, your sister could have strung herself up in her garage for her 9 year-old daughter to discover when she gets back from trick-or-treating.

The military is doing a stellar job taking care of their own. In 2007, suicides among veterans increased by 20%. In one year, that's 2,200 people, or two suburban Seattle high schools FULL of young men and women who couldn't make it another day.

Why aren't there standardized treatments in place for suicides? It isn't because the government or the medical community have decided suicides shouldn't have the right to live. It's because each and every case is different, and as of yet, there are no means in place to evaluate each and every situation.

As of yet.

Because while mental health workers and social workers don't have the tools to deal with this situation. Why not? It's simple. There is just so little known about the human mind, nobody has a clue what those tools would be.

EDIT
***Although this article uses very little usable statistics, it's on the right track, and backs up what I'm saying about talk therapy. I didn't know it existed, but I found it on a blog I read regularly. How very fortuitous!
When talk therapy hurts.
***

Let's not forget the injection site infection on my right buttcheek!

2008-03-10T23:11:00.000-07:00

Ever have a cut on the tip of your tongue, get no sleep for 48 hours, get no housework done because of pain, fall asleep for 2 hours, dream in detail that you have already done said housework, wake up, spend most of your time trying to appease a very noisy cat who has recently relocated his favorite piece of plastic and demands that you toss it for him for hours on end, stay awake to watch a specific tv program, but that program sucks, try to rip some more damaged old cds onto your computer, still not find one of the two tracks you'd been looking for, your eyes heavy like slabs of cement, but so heavy that when you close them it actually hurts your head really badly, your fever rages so you're off and on too hot or in a cold sweat with frozen toes, your cat jumps up on your bed with a turd stuck in his tail floofs, barfs on two separate little rugs, then insists on wrapping himself around your arm and sleeping with his head in your hand and if you move, he yells until you put your arm back, wakes you up if you roll over or move your arm in any way, you run out of popsicles you've been using to ice your bloody stump of a tongue, it's your best friend's birthday and her mother is insane and really pissed at her and making her cry all day and you just want to smack her the fuck up but she's in Hawaii for the winter, nobody answers your one-sentence e-mails asking simple questions, you find a big stack of even MORE scratched up CDs to fix, you can't contemplate the amount of housework necessary to make the place even remotely habitable, you can't get "Pannis Angelicus" out of your head, you realize that you're becoming more and more of a waste of breath with every passing inhale/exhale because you're 32 but can't take care of yourself and you are just so sick of dealing with a body that feels like it's being stabbed over and over and over again all day and all night, and pain medication doesn't do anything more than take the edge off and make you goofy and semi-retarded?

Why, in sci-fi movies and tv shows set in space, do they always show space battles as if they were set on a 2-dimensional plane? The only one that's gotten it even close to representing the 4 dimensions is the new Battlestar Galactica. And they only use the full 3d axis occasionally. I guess to make it simple. More tv writers should be forced to read Orson Scott Card.

And now there's nothing but the rain.

So. Grab your gun and bring in the cat.

What About Tomorrow?

2008-03-09T20:16:00.000-07:00

It has to be a long, tedious process, standing in line just to eat me. So let me fill you in on the recent reasons for delay.

Yesterday I was in a lot of pain, out of pain pills, and then at my best friend's first birthday party since she was 16 and her mother invited HER friends over for dinner. It was obviously important to be there and be supportive. Plus, it's not every day this foxy femme fatale gets out of the house. We had dinner with just a few people at our favorite Greek restaurant in town and my best friend's two very young sons. When asked if he'd like to lick the candle that came in the birthday baclava, her oldest boy misunderstood and gave it a thorough tongueing a-la cow with a salt lick. Hilarity.

Last night I couldn't sleep because of the pain and lack of pain killers. I had pretty much pushed the limits of how many aspirin/ibuprofen tabs one can take and still survive in one day to make it to dinner, so night time wasn't all that great. Did a little reading, did a little soaking in the tub to lower a pesky fever that finally broke sometime around 7 this morning.

Today I managed to buck up enough to get to the pharmacy, fill my prescription, and buy some auto wax.

I can't really explain the compulsion I had to buy auto wax. Sure, it was a great price. But as my car has been in the garage, and seen extremely little use in the past year and a half thanks to the fact that it feels like I'm being stretched on a rack when depressing the clutch, it's really not in need of any special cleaning or care. My shopping list for the drug store was short:

drugs
bandaids
sinus tabs
cough medicine

It was entirely surprising to me that I came home with a bottle of car wax. I brought everything upstairs, put away the drugs, took a couple of pain pills, and stowed bandaids strategically around the house, closest to the areas I tend to fall over/bump things/have little accidents with scissors or knives. I hopped into bed, hoping for the pain killers to kick in.

Then, it hit me. It was time to simonize a bunch of old scratched CDs. Over the past few months, I've been in the process of finding the perfect, cheapest method to repair the poor things that used to take so much abuse in the back seat of my car. I've tried boiling them, scrubbing them with abrasive soap (from the inner ring to the outer ring), then rubbing them with vaseline to fill in the crevices. I've had minor luck with some of those methods.

You may wonder why not just either 1) replace the CDs 2) buy one of those little machines that buffs them for you or 3) go to the library or video store and ask to use their CD/DVD repair machines. Well, you're not the only one, Smarty Pants. I offer no excuse than...well, fuck it, I have no excuse, and I have no reason. This is just the way I do things.

As I type this, there are about 50 CDs on a towel on my bedroom floor, completely covered with simonizing wax, hopefully drying quickly and not very toxically. Soon, I will be scrubbing them. I hope the CDs will play at least once so I can load their contents onto my computer.

The sad things about all this is that there are only two tracks I care about recovering. One is a mix I mastered on an old computer of Leonard Cohen reading the lyrics to the song "A Thousand Kisses Deep" with an on-stage improvisation of him on the guitar. The other is a dance mix someone made of Tori Amos' "Leather." It's a mix I have not been able to find since.

Neither of them is fantastic, and I'm pretty sure I won't listen to them more than once, ever, but at least it keeps me off the streets, and at least, for the relatively short time it will take me to recover these two tracks, I don't feel like I'd rather be dead than alive.

Let's hear it for the subconscious mind's desire to survive! Hooray!

So stick around. There may be some very shiny, very damaged CDs in your future too. IF you're as lucky and hopped up on opioids as I am. Psych.

Drag Show Misogyny

2008-03-06T20:51:00.000-08:00

Let me be clear here. In no way is this notice direced at homosexuals, or transgender males or females. I'm talking about "drag queens," you know the ones I'm talking about. The men who put on a bunch of sequins and clown makeup, complete with giant high heels and lipstick outside the lines of their lips, who prance around on a stage, usually lipsyncing. The men who do this and refer to themselves as "divas." The men who are actually trying to convince themselves that doing these things is "lady-like." I'm also talking in very general terms. I know there are exceptions to the rule. There are people in drag out there who perform, and it's their personal statement about overcoming often overwhelming obstacles to survive, let alone maintain a sense of humor.

The drag queens I am talking about are the ones who deeply, completely abhor everything about women, and prove it by dressing up as caricature of "glamour" and "feminity."

Well they can all suck my ass.

Is that what drag queens think actual women are like? What a fucking insult. Who the fuck do they think they are?

Go act like a tyrannical cunt of your OWN gender, douchebag. Don't bring me into it, and don't bring every woman who has ever lived into your petty fucking hard-times reactionary brand of asshole-ism. And don't you fucking DARE call it entertainment. It's akin to getting dressed up in black-face and doing "Mammy" jokes. One could argue that it's worse. America has abolished slavery, but Americans are still permitted to be openly hateful toward members of their own species. Being sexist is actually considered FUNNY. Really. You can pay to go see a drag show. Is drag-based misogyny legal because being a drag queen is mostly a hobby confined to homosexuals? Of course not. The government is openly against homosexuality. That means we have to face the question: is it legal because it's okay to marginalize and generalize and completely demoralize women? Apparently, it is (see: Family Guy, Beavis and Butthead, The Simpsons, every fashion magazine that exists, et al.).

Yes, dressing up like a gittery, viperous psycho and calling yourself a "lady" is THAT offensive. It's as bad as the "N-word." But nobody else wants to say anything lest they be duped a "gay-basher." Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have nothing against anyone for what he or she does with his or her genitals, or whatever gender anyone feels they are. I feel deeply for people who were born in the wrong body, and I think that corrective surgery and hormone therapy for those people is necessary and wonderful. But if you think you're doing anyone any good when all you're going to do is dress up like a clown and lipsync, then go give blowjobs in the bathroom, don't you DARE call yourself a woman. That is not what women do. It is not how women act. Maybe it's how your mom acts, but that is not my problem, and I am not your mother.

Neither is anyone else on the planet, so stop acting like we are the reason you grew up to be a miserable fuck. You need to stop hating all women because your mommy jerked you off and you never got over it. Nobody cares about what happened to turn you into a hateful beast. Nobody. And no amount of back-alley ass-rapes is going to make you any happier, or make anyone glad that you're on the planet. If you want to be a woman, do some research before you go running for the sequins and yelling, "FAAABULOUS" every time you see something shiny.

There's nothing funny about your ignorant, obnoxious, hateful send-ups of women. Unless, somewhere in your act, you perform an actual gender reassignment surgery on yourself, and make it so you menstruate. Go through just ONE painful period, and tell me how funny it is to be a woman. Try to button your pants when you're retaining water. Afterwards, you can call me "honey" and give me unsolicited fashion advice, then glare at me when I tell you, "Thanks, but I'm perfectly happy how I am."

You get up on that stage and personify hate. You make me wish I was dead, even more than I usually do. You haven't earned the right. Go wave your hideous, manly Lee press-on nailed talon in somebody else's face. If you thought of women as human at all, you'd take the time to understand that even being in the audience of such a show is to feel completely persecuted and hated for something we had no say in.

Sound familiar? Not being able to control what gender one is born is universal, and none of us have the right to mock someone for being born one way or another.

Let it sink in that a straight woman just said that. It goes both way, shit-bag. Got it?

You are not a woman, and when you do your little act, your are hurting women everywhere, sending civil rights (yes, you are discriminating) back to the iron age. You aren't dressing up and acting like an actual WOMAN. You are dressing up and acting like an ASSHOLE. Not all women are the bitchy, shrill psychopathic whores, or innocent little school girls you seem to think we are. Most of us in no way deserve the kind of spiteful treatment you give us on stage. Any woman in the audience can tell you how it feels to be the target of such complete and total active hatred that you are sending her way.

If you want to see what it's like to be a woman, do it realistically. Otherwise, you're just another stone on the path to back-alley abortions and no votes for women. Women STILL don't get paid as much as men in the same jobs. We're not out of the woods as far as equal rights go, and you are doing your part in making sure that equality never happens.

Try having just ONE painful period, and then maybe you will have earned the right to make a joke about "being on the rag." Or feeling disgust when someone mentions the word "tampon."

Attending a drag show as a straight woman is similar to being the only Asian person at a White Supremacist rally.

So shut up. You don't have any idea what you're talking about.

You miserable, ignorant, misogynist fuck.

The Earth Moved

2008-03-03T01:46:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid (post banana-seat bike, pre-10-speed bike), we had a pretty good sized earthquake. I was standing in the family room, my mother was sitting on a sofa just under a window and beside a bookcase with a 40-gallon fish tank on top. She had a plate of rice on her lap, and she was holding a fork.

It all happened in a matter of seconds, but like most major events, time appeared to slow down substantially. First, the ground moved in a gentle side-to-side motion. The fish tank water was sloshing a little. I didn't know what was going on. Next, it felt like a series of waves rolling through the family room. A clock fell off the wall. It felt like an amusement park ride.

"Cool!" I yelled. And it was. It was like getting a ride for free, and I have always been a big fan of roller coasters, speedboats, and other devices that shake up your insides. And this one didn't even require tickets!

Then I saw my mother's face.

She was green. Her hand, wrapped around her fork, was clenched tighter than I thought anything could clench. She leaned forward, away from the big window, pushed me away from the glass sliding door, looked up at me, straight in the eye, burped slightly as if she was stifling a wave of nausea, and said, "No. NOT cool."

She dropped her fork and set down her plate, and got to the serious business of getting us away from all the windows and other hazards, like hanging cupboards in the kitchen, and any walls covered with large framed art.

I had never be fore, and have not seen since, the level of absolute fear I saw on her face. Pure and vulnerable, absolutely terrified, she could barely move.

In order to understand how bizarre it was to see her so scared, you have to know the basics about her. My mother was born in the lower 48, and raised in Alaska. When she was in high school, she started hanging out at the municipal airport in Anchorage. She had her pilot's license by the time she was I think 16. She was one of only two female pilots rated for twin-engine planes in all of Alaska in the 1960s.

She was a bush pilot in possibly the most hazardous terrain and atmospheric conditions in the world, and she had more fun doing it than she's ever had doing anything else. Whereas a lot of young people who grow up in relatively rustic areas turn to drink and partying, my mother took her friends on puddle-jumping jaunts all over her home state on the weekends.

The day after her 20th birthday, March 27th, 1964, her brother was driving her home along a strip of road just beside the municipal airport where she spent so much of her time. The car started lurching, and they both thought the car had a flat tire.

Then, the road started opening and closing like cracks in dry cookie dough. Everything was moving, and the city of Anchorage was quite literally destroyed. Flattened to the ground in just minutes. Since that earthquake, my grandmother has never and will never take a room higher than the 3rd floor.

My mother, who was a nursing student at the time, volunteered to fly supplies and assist with any medical needs to Inuit villages and other towns with no other access to help.

She never talked about it much. I managed to get her to talk about it once, and luckily I had a voice recorder. She said that she had never seen anything as destructive and horrible until lower Manhattan just after 9/11. Flying aid after the earthquake was how she met my father. People really do form fast bonds in the face of extreme trauma.

When I stood in that family room and saw my mother's face and heard those three words, "No. NOT cool," I got it for the first time. I understood the concept that it was absolutely important to stop and think before saying anything.

That was the first time I completely grasped the concept of perspective. It wasn't an epiphany, it was the understanding that in order to fully appreciate the people around me, I need to try to see events through their eyes. I need to look at someone's face before opening my big, fat mouth.

Not many people think that way, I have found. It's more important to most people to make sure everyone around them knows THEIR perspective, so they talk and talk and talk about themselves until their faces turn blue. But to them, they're doing you a favor. They're doing the work FOR you.

Instead of trusting you to make an effort to read them, they're telling you exactly how they feel. And what do you do? In all likelihood, you return the favor and tell them all about you, before you even stop for a second to digest what they've told you about themselves.

When I'm having a conversation with someone, I prefer to listen, wait a beat to think a little bit, and then proceed. A lot of people can't deal with even the briefest of pauses, and a lot of people tell me that I'm "quiet," and things like, "You don't say much, but it's clear you have a lot going on upstairs."

If you knew me at all, you'd know that I'm anything but quiet, and that I'm really not that bright (Hell, you can tell that by just reading this blog, or even by the fact that I have a blog at all!). I'd just rather simplify things. Instead of explaining everything, I will give the simplest answer I can, and try to actively listen to what people are saying, and think about why they are saying it.

Clearly, this doesn't apply to every conversation I have. Often, for the sake of efficiency, things have to be said quickly. That's fine. I'm talking more about conversations with people I care about. I try to appreciate the people I call friends. That's all.

I sometimes feel bad when I think that there are people out there who have never actually had anyone genuinely try to understand where they're coming from.

But hey, it took a fucking earthquake to make me figure it out. Actually, it took two.

Take Your Cell Phone, But Leave the Goat!

2008-03-02T02:26:00.000-08:00

When I heard that Oprah was working to educate poor African children by setting up state of the art schools, complete with technology, staff, and uniforms, my immediate reaction was, "Good for Oprah! Way to help the less fortunate." That reaction quickly morphed into the question Oprah apparently did not consider: Why? How is that going to help poor African villagers? What does a millet farmer do with his daughter's new spreadsheet skills?

Frankly, the entire idea is a cruel tease. Wave the United States flag in the faces of the world's poor, hug a few kids, and you're loved. But think about the consequences. Here in the Land of Plenty, we're fond of our slogans. We're so fond of them, in fact, that we usually end up in the rut of believing they are true. One slogan in particular comes to mind: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.

Sure, here in the states, people with more education are likely to get better-paying, less labor-intensive jobs than those with little education. By "education," of course, I'm talking about what we refer to as the basics: reading, writing, and math. In our country, those skills are absolutely necessary to make a living, keep your home, and live a healthy life, full of food, friends, family, and fun. However, in 3rd world countries, knowing how to read, write a letter to the government, or balance a checkbook isn't going to harvest the millet, stop the spread of disease and famine, put a halt to the genital mutilation of girls, or keep your animals alive and fed so you can eat.

Here's a metaphor. You go to the hospital to visit your friend's 13 year-old son, who has had both his legs amputated. You work with his doctors to install a flat-screen television and kick-ass sound system in his hospital room. The catch is, the only thing he is allowed to watch is a video entitled, "See what you could do if you had your legs? Wouldn't it be great if you had legs?" The content of the video is comprised of a series of in-depth lessons of how to do the sweetest tricks on a skateboard, how to stand up on a surf board and ride through the green room, which is when you're riding in the tube of a monster wave. Other lessons include upbeat lessons on how to perform magic tricks using only your toes.

You can teach these kids the basic skills, and show them what life could be like if only they hadn't had the misfortune of being born into an extremely poor area of the world. You hand them the keys to succeeding in a Western economy. But if you don't give them a way to use this knowledge, you're just sort of jerking off.

Some might respond and say, "But what if they just changed the way their village works? Let's open a 7-11 and a McDonald's and see if we can't give these people jobs.

Really? Is that why Oprah opened schools for poor African children? So they'd be able to work a cash machine? Wouldn't it be better to set up villages with viable irrigation, healthy livestock, nutrient-rich soil to grow food to feed themselves and their animals? Doesn't that sound like something the extremely poor could really enjoy and appreciate?

Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat forever.
Give a town a school with computers, they learn how to live. SOMEWHERE ELSE!!! Teach a town to farm and support itself, and they will eat forever.

It just makes more sense to re-think our "generocity" than to completely colonize people who have lived with famine, disease, political persecution, prejudice, genocide, and all sorts of good stuff.

It is arrogant, ignorant, and entirely inappropriate to head into a place you can't begin to understand, impose your values, and call yourself charitable. True charity isn't done out of a person's need to feel better about themselves by doing something they think is a really, really nice gesture.

True charity is seeing a genuine need and fulfilling it.

If you see a need, want to help, for crying out loud, ask the person or people if they want the kind of help you want to give. Think it through to the next step. Ask yourself, "If I do this thing for these people, how will their lives improve? Will they, in fact, improve, or am I imposing my social mores and institutions on people who live in a way I don't understand?"

Again, ignorance expressed as so-called "generocity," is still ignorance. And in this case, it is also cruel, racist (I'm not talking about skin color. I'm talking about society and nationality and geopolitical and religious differences).

It may take a village to raise a child, but it only takes a couple of goats to feed an entire village and everyone in it for weeks at a time.

If I was a student at one of those schools, as soon as I learned to write, I'd send a letter to Oprah and say, "Take your iMacs, send goats and goat food. I'd like to eat some time this month!"

Beware the Jub-Jub Bird

2008-03-01T01:17:00.000-08:00

Late in high school, I was actually certified as an aerobics instructor, and one of my high school jobs was teaching 1 and 3 meter-high diving. We had a trampoline with a harness...jumping is a lot of fun, especially when you have a harness and you don't have to land.

All through school, I played a bunch of sports that I sucked at, at my mother's insistence. I was in gymnastics for 9 years. That 9th year, I had a growth spurt and broke my wrist, sprained my ankle, etc. That year, I started basketball instead. I was horrible at that too, but ended up playing varsity from 9th grade on. Really, that isn't an impressive feat. My entire school, 5th-12th grades, was comprised of 211 girls. The odds were in my favor, and I was pretty good at 3-pointers from the top of the key.

In college, I planned to keep up with diving and swimming. My first college had a pool and everything. My first college also had boys, and beer, and freedom I had no idea how to handle. If you're reading closely, you'll notice that I said "first college." I'm not going to tell you how many colleges I attended, or how many degrees I have, because it all indicates a vast amount of book-learning, which viscerally implies actual intelligence. There is a vast gap dividing book-learning and intelligence. An intelligent person would take a $120,000 college education as the gift that it is. An intelligent person wouldn't sign up to take French, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything I will ever do in my life. Sure, it was helpful when I drove from the south of France to Paris right after graduation, but since then, no. It has had no bearing on my life whatsoever. I can easily understand that the French verse of Blondie's "Sunday Girl" is actually the same as the second (I think) English verse. Just in French. An intelligent person would take classes that would actually prepare her for a career, or any other aspect of life that would contribute to her OVERALL intelligence.

There is no excuse for taking a class about the specifics of property law, and the moral implications of claiming things as personal property. I swear, even one of the professors would sleep through class, which was conducted as a salon-style discussion. There was an asshole guy in the class who proclaimed himself to be a communist anarchist. To piss him off, I wrote an explicatory argument against the practicality of Marx and Engels, then read it in class. He actually picked up my backpack and hit me with it.

That got him kicked out of that school.

There is no excuse for colleges, which are responsible for young people, to not require some sort of life skills class. Teach young adults to balance their bank books, preserve their credit, protect their identities, learn to type, learn to budget time, apply for jobs, and strategize their course work to function with entertainment and the socialization that only college can provide.

Teach all students, especially girls, some sort of self-defense. Require it. Teach everyone about grief and all its stages.

What I'm saying is, SMART people go to college. It is the responsibility of the college, in my opinion, to graduate INTELLIGENT people.

When I was teaching a few years back, I was amazed at the utter lack of desire to learn. Kids go to college to get their degrees, not to actually acquire skills and knowledge they might actually use practically.

There were tons of kids who knew what the periodic table of elements was, and could memorize all of the elments and their atomic weights, but couldn't tell you a thing about why it's structured the way it is, or the elegant simplicity of its design. The saddest part is, most of them didn't care to learn about it. They were in my classes because they needed it to graduate. Nothing else mattered. I could throw all of my excitement and passion for the subject, wrapped in a nice burrito of helpful facts at them, but nobody would go for it.

It was probably good that I was "heartily encouraged" to participate in sports. It was a great way to learn teamwork, budget time, and take care of hte body. But it was more than that. So many people walk around with their heads up their asses, wondering why their lives aren't better than they are. They won't do anything unless it only requires the least amount of effort on their part. The sense of entitlement most Americans have is encouraged in schools. Hell, it's even rewarded! It's so easy to drift through an entire college education with almost no effort at all, and learn nothing. Yet, on graduation day, you wear that cap and that gown. You get up on that stage and shake the Dean's hand and smile for the camera. Because you've EARNED it.

When you're out in the world, doing something not everyone does, like going to gymnastics every Wednesday night, or even going to the movies or walking around your neighborhood, you're contributing to your overall intelligence. You're doing more than just the minimum required for survival. You're actually living your life. And you're not very likely to get clobbered with a backpack.

Realizing that there's a world outside of your normal routine, and ultimately exploring and taking part in something extra is the best kind of education you can get. It doesn't pay, but maybe you can find something you like. Stepping outside yourself isn't a skill most kids have going into college. And it isn't a skill most kids have when they graduate.

Stepping outside yourself is absolutely teachable, and should absolutely be part of a required course in life skills.

Egg Salad

2008-02-28T22:07:00.000-08:00

When I make or order a sandwich, it's always pretty plain. I'm perfectly happy with just mayo, mustard (or no mustard), turkey, and bread. I'm also happy with turkey and cream cheese and bread. you get the picture. Not a lot of extra junk to fuck up a perfectly good sandwich. Same goes for salads, lettuce or otherwise. Tuna is good with just mayo, or with mayo and sweet pickles. I cannot stress enough that tuna salad is NEVER good with extra crap like celery or dill or some other bullshit thing people throw into a bowl to fuck things up and call it "fancy."

The same goes for egg salad and potato salad. Add celery or dill, and I will kick you as hard as I can. There's just no excuse for that sort of desecration of something that is perfectly good without your old family recipe. It should have been buried along with whoever came up with it.

That said, a few years ago, a coworker brought in the most delicious egg salad I have ever tried. There was an extra ingredient in it that I can't remember. I can remember most of the phone numbers of my friends in elementary school, but I can't remember a simple addition to egg salad a couple of years ago. That coworker was even nice enough to bring in an extra bowl of the egg salad just for me the next day. It wasn't ham. It might have been bacon bits, olives, or even pickles or potato chunks. The other day I e-mailed that coworker to ask about the egg salad. She doesn't remember it at all, and even doubted that it was HER egg salad I enjoyed so much. I know it was her, as her roommate and sister Martha was the one who made it.

It's going to take a lot of experimentation to figure this out. I won't rest easy until I re-create the best egg salad in the universe.

The fucked up thing is, I , like everyone else, am sick with this horrible flu thing that requires much vomiting for days on end. Egg salad is about the last thing I should be obsessing about. But there you are. And here I am, obsessing about egg salad, and cautiously looking at my glass of water, wondering if I can keep down a few sips of it.

In other news, I spilled a bunch of water this evening. I put a big towel down to mop it up, and my cat must think it's his mother. He immediately started rolling over on it and purring. Now, he's sleeping on it, completely upside down.

I suppose, when you're a cat, you make your own fun.

Hero? Like hell.

2008-02-27T22:55:00.000-08:00

Today I saw a program on Star Wars, and how it epitomizes what's known as "The Hero's Journey." Sure it does, if you're a firm believer that mythology is a good descriptor for humanity. If, however, you are more interested in looking at reality based on things that are actually REAL, then mythological constructs Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter will all fall seriously short of even that loose affiliation between unlike things known as metaphor.

The fact is, in order for something to have an epitome, it has to exist. And heroes, male, female, human, or animal, do not exist. They exist in myth, but so does Intelligent Design, and we all know that's a load of crap. They do not exist on this plane of existence. I can't speak for black holes and baby universes (neither can Stephen Hawking, but that doesn't stop him from "writing" about them, does it?), but I've been on this planet 32 years, during which I've garnered a pretty good sense of reality. More precisely, I have garnered a pretty good sense of reality in the tiny little slice of this space-time I inhabit, read about, hear about, smell, touch...yeah, those are the 5 senses. I did have to stop and count them. That's just one teeny little example of how obsessed I am with detail, and why loose definitions of terms such as "the hero's journey" really chap my ass.

While on the topic of things that really , really chap my ass, let's take a quick look at a term that's tossed around the media constantly. Example: "A driver on the freeway pulled over to help the lady with a flat tire. What a Good Samaritan!" No. That is NOT what a Good Samaritan is. The reason the Samaritan was so "good," was that he stopped to help his enemy. Not that he delayed his trip to the Apple store by 10 minutes by making a call to the Highway patrol. That he stopped to help someone he was raised to hate. In 20th century terms, that would be like a Bergen-Belsen concentration camp survivor digging into Hitler's bunker and secreting him to safety. It's THAT kind of complete blind-eye'dness that the story is talking about. Applying the term "Good Samaritan" to someone who helps a fellow driver in distress isn't just wrong. It's patting some guy on the shoulder and praising him for doing the only thing a decent person with decent brakes is actually obligated to do.

Someone who calls to report a traffic accident or a stalled vehicle, or another human in distress is not doing something extraordinary. That person is simply doing what's right. If they need a piece of candy, or some other form of instantaneous praise, that's their problem, not mine, and I don't want to hear about it on the 11:00 news. And the only way to avoid that is to not watch or read local news. Ever. Unless it's someone's blog, and that someone has an aversion or a lack of interest in highway traffic. If I never hear another shit-for-brains traffic-reporting fuck-tard talk about a "good Samaritan" without knowing what the hell he/she is talking about, I won't die happy. But I'll die with one less person to take with me when I die.

Back to heroes. There is no such thing as a hero. There are just men and women. There are men who are mostly just ambling around looking for mother or whores, or just soft, safe places to put their penises, and there are women who are mostly just ambling around looking for a man to impregnate, protect, and fill every last one of their vast emotional empty places. There are people of both sexes so completely surrounded by the shroud of loneliness we're all born with that they will do just about anything to try to make themselves feel less alone. They will strike up friendships with people they don't really like, idealize people they don't know, or suspect people they think they know, and will delude themselves to think that anything they do, say, or think actually matters to anyone other than themselves. Some very sane people even think the government gives a flying fuck what they write in e-mails or say on the phone to their friends, and that giant corporations are surveilling their every move. While the part about corporations may be true, the part about the government is absolutely ridiculous, self-important delusion.

The journey toward happiness, or what the person thinks will bring them happiness (ie. success, fame, infamy, family, a cult, support groups, sobriety), can involve many Star Wars or Biblical themes, such as sins of the father being visited upon the son, mentors, loss of parents and mentors, trying to force romantic love on someone else and being rejected and ultimately fighting for the "bad guys," or going the other way and deluding themselves into thinking that they are happy. In reality, most people will end up just acting like another douchebag in an SUV, or another stinky hippy who drives a Jetta carrying a sign that says something about how SUVs are or Bush sucks or some other message they think anyone wants to read.

Because the government doesn't care what stinky hippies have to say. And neither does anyone who is not a stinky hippy. Pass the peace pipe and dance naked by the river. Burn some patchouli and stay home. Nobody cares what ANYONE else has to say. Sure, we all get curious. That's why there are blogs, and people read them. It's interesting. But ultimately, nothing anyone says, ANYWHERE is going to change anything.

The point to all the stories seems to be that it's the journey that's important, not where you end up.

My question is, why? If the journey is all that matters, aren't we all just trading on some giant cosmic hamster wheel? Yes. We are. And when we step off for a second and smell the fucking roses or whatever, we all feel entitled to a cookie, don't we? And when that cookie never comes, we get back on. Have another kid, start a new business, blow up some more infidels, whatever, and we expect those thinsg to make a difference. Well, you know what? It doesn't make a difference. Not to anyone but you. And if you stop and help someone who needs it, here's a fucking cookie. You're a big, fat hero.

And if you think there's a heaven, certainly that's where you're going when you die. If you think there's a hell, that's more likely where you're going when you die. And if, like me, you think think this is all there is, then do something to make life a little more bearable for someone else. See a sleeping hobo? Cover him with your jacket and leave a $20 bill in his pocket. See your mom's number on call waiting? Answer it instead of letting it go to voice mail.

There's nothing you can do or say that is going to change who or what you are. The only thing you can change is how you act to people around you. So, as Joss Whedon wrote, "Whatever's bugging you, get over it. Spank your inner moppet or do whatever you have to do," [sic] but get over yourself. I have completely accepted the fact that nothing I say or do will ever matter to anyone but me. And if it does, it's not because what I said was important. It's that whoever listened or read anything I had to say found a way to make it apply to him or herself, or the way he or she sees the world.

None of this makes me better than anyone else. It just makes me cranky and irritable.