One of the four horsemen.

We were at the St. Louis Galleria the other day, and noticed this gaggle of preteen girls with their hair weirdly clipped and with all kinds of makeup and glittery crap all over their faces. WTF? we wondered.

Turns out they'd been at a party at Club Libby Lu, some sort of frightening store for future streetwalkers. I'm sorry to offend you if you love this store or, perhaps, own this company. But is a makeup store for 11-year-olds truly a necessity? Britney did just fine without it. The first thing I said to Lisa is that, if we have kids, I almost wish for boys. Girls are so hard to "get," bouncing from 6 to 16 and back again. I'll bet under other circumstances (i.e. no peers around) these same girls would be just as excited for mom to take them to the Build-A-Bear Workshop. Girls can be so, so cruel, too. And I'm not bitter--I actually had great friends and experienced very little of this, but boys seem so much more up-front about their aggressions.

And boys--most boys, anyway--don't wear makeup.

I'm starting to agree with Tom.

Cruise, that is. About all medicines being toxins you put into your body, I mean.

I'm just kidding of course. Tom's completely off his rocker, I fear, but at least if there were no drugs, there would be no drug commercials. I rue the day our government decided to allow prescription medications to be advertised on television. First off, as the writer Bill Bryson pointed out (in a much funnier fashion, of course; I'm paraphrasing), even over-the-counter medications are advertised much differently in our country than they are in, say, Britain. Here, he says, a cold medicine commercial will make it seem as if you'll be rock climbing 3 hours post-dose, even if you never climbed rocks before you got sick. In Britain, though, commercials seem to indicate that you may still be feeling puny and lying around in your pajamas, but at least you'll be able to drag yourself to the couch to watch television.

Now, in addition to that, we have to see ads for every prescription drug ever invented. I don't know which ads are worse, though: the ubiquitous penis-problem ads, or the commercials that are so vague that you have no idea what the hell the medication even does. It simply says, "Ask your doctor about Placebocol today." And when I ask my doctor, how hard will she laugh before telling me that it's for erectile dysfunction or prostate cancer or something that I have no chance of experiencing? Why the HELL would I ask her about a medication if I don't even know what it treats? Well, I wouldn't. I do enjoy how all of the ads, though, pretty much have to list this long litany of possible side effects, and how there is always one that could occur with no warning and, basically, kill you. And I can't think of a single one of these medicines that doesn't have the potential to cause diarrhea, which leads me to believe that people just have diarrhea from time to time and want to think it has something to do with every medicine known to man.

My new favorite is the ad for Prilosec OTC, in which "country music star" Phil Vassar (is he a star? I've never, ever heard of him, but what do I know from country music?) tells us that jumping around on stage was giving him some digestive problems, but then..."My mom turned me on to Prilosec." Turned you on to Prilosec? Oh. My. God. The fact that we now casually use '60s illegal-drug metaphors to sell perfectly legal drugs best suited to middle-aged people...well, it means something. I have no idea what, but I know it does mean something.

P.S. Finished ready Harry Potter 6. Willing to discuss with anyone. This page includes some interesting theories and links, but of course is full of spoilers, so stay away if you're not done reading.

Just goes to show...

I guess money and fame aren't everything, if the travails of Mindy McCready are any indication. I don't follow country music, really, but I've heard of her so she must be pretty famous. Isn't there some old saying about how being famous won't fix the part of you that's broken? I can't imagine having to deal with such personal stuff in such a public way, the fact that I blog my darkest thoughts for 4 friends notwithstanding.

He bangs.

Ricky Martin, gay or not gay? Discuss.

On a lighter note...

I know I complain A LOT about the spelling and grammar mistakes of others. Admittedly, I'm far from perfect in that regard myself, but I try very hard to get it right. So, if you run a food-service business, shouldn't you know how to spell a la carte? Which isn't, in fact, "ala cart." Though if you sold Islamic artifacts from a streetcorner, it might be an "Allah Cart."

Sheesh, people are dumb.

Perusing USA Today (McPaper under my hotel door each morning is one of the few perks of traveling for work, especially when the hot tub/pool in this hotel seem to be perpetually non-functional, and the door from the parking lot cannot be opened from outdoors with the keycard, which I suspect may be related to the sign on the lobby window, in which the local sheriff warns hotel guests of the signs that a fellow lodger may be using his or her room to cook up some crystal meth-whew! That aside took on a life of its own.), I come across a letter from Harold Daigle, Jr., of the fair city of Baton Rouge. (Or "Red Stick," as I like to think of it.) Mr. Daigle says, in part, "When liberals want to use the courts for creative legislation, the Constitution is viewed as a living document, for example, creating the right to abortion...The real purpose of a Supreme Court justice is to protect the Constitution, not interpret it and shape it to fit the current whim of modern pop culture."

Oh, really, you backwoods Bubba? Well, let's just see what the founding fathers had to say about the internet, then. If we can't interpret the Constitution, then I guess we simply can't allow the Court to rule on any case if the issue at hand isn't explicitly covered in the Constitution. Which, by the way, also doesn't explicitly ban abortion, either. Unless you consider the fetus a living being from the moment of conception, in which case I think all fetuses should be named in utero, should be claimed on taxes...hell, you could even take out a life insurance policy the moment you discoverd the pregnancy, and collect on it in the sad event that you're not able to carry it to term. Oh, wait, now I'm just being crazy.

A hobby of mine is to try to suss out an e-mail address for those whose opinions irritate me, and then let them know about it. Unfortunately, there are 3 Harold Daigles listed in BR, and none with an e-mail address that I could locate.

Oh, well, guess it's back to my preferred Letters reading: People Magazine.

P.S. The spellchecker tried to turn "fetuses" into "fetishes." Hmm...

Questioning everything I thought I knew.

I'm wondering, again, if I still want a baby. Not so much because of the hard work involved, though it is mind-blowingly difficult. (And something, I think, that very few people who have not had day-to-day care of a baby will know, even if they've spent lots of time with kids. I thought I knew. I was wrong. I'm sure, in fact, that even knowing what I know now, I would have no idea how physically exchausted I would be if I had a tiny baby instead of a near-toddler.)

No, my doubts stem from, once again, my tender little heart. Having a baby is, like loving anyone, giving hostages to fortune. So much more of yourself is exposed, so much more sadness and tragedy can touch you. I know, there's more happiness, too, but I'm such a cynic. Plus, they become teenagers. The campus where I work was overrun with a Lutheran teen group last week, and it was like high school, really, with the cliques of cool kids, dorks, jocks and so on. And these kids seemed pretty pious! I can't imagine what a real cross-section of the teen population must be like.

Then, one of my co-workers shows me the book Diary of a Baby, in which a noted psychiatrist does his best to tell parents what thoughts their child might be having. Fucking depressing, really, as most of them revolve around how your child can be utterly undone by your even-momentary absence. And I park this loaner-kid at daycare 8+ hours per day and am getting ready to take her to her grandparents for a WHOLE WEEK! Daycare's the other issue. I firmly believe nearly every two-parent family could, with sacrifices, arrange for one parent to stay home. But what if you don't want to? Because I sure as hell would go insane if I did. And then, even if you are ok with daycare, it makes sense for one child but once you get to two you might as well stay home, because you're probably giving the greater chunk of the second salary to the caregivers anyway, and on top of it you're buying work clothes, transportation, etc. for both wage-earners. How do people do it? Why do people do it?

Do I still want to do it?

Maybe. She is pretty great. But I think there will be more therapy involved.

War, terror and the ACLU.

In light of the terrorist attacks experience in our own country 4 years ago, and those affecting London and Egypt right now, I'm torn in my thinking on the matter. When I heard of the shooting on the London tube, my very first thought was, Good God, I hope this isn't some mentally ill person who simply had the misfortune to wear a heavy coat on a warm day, and to be too afraid of police to stop when they said to. Turns out, there's some debate about whether the police even told the man to stop, or freeze, or whatever.

So why am I torn? Well, immediately after the second (unsuccessful) bombing, the NYC transit department began random bag checks. The only penalty for refusing to be checked was that you were not allowed to ride the subway. The ACLU began threatening lawsuits immediately, of course. And the NY authorities said, "This will be systematically random, with no racial profiling." I don't know what to make of this. Part of me, I must ashamedly confess, thinks, "Why aren't you using racial profiling to search bags? It sucks, I admit, but no-one's grandma from Italy or 8-year-old cousin from Germany or 32-year-old sister from Des Moines is trying to bomb any trains lately." The ACLU, I think, is protesting the invasion of privacy and violation of civil rights, but what would they do instead? They seem to be upset by the randomness of it, but were it racially or ethnically based, I'm sure that would occasion an entirely different protest. I realize many people protest the way airline searches are conducted, but certainly it's not a common position to protest the searches themselves. And I'm not saying they're right or wrong, mind you. The whole thing just confuses me. If I were a police commissioner, or in some similar position of power charged with protecting innocent people in an open society, what would I do? Especially when a major part of what I'm protecting is the very idea of the open society itself, and the freedom to move around without being searched?

This might be the most Republican thing I'll ever say, and it's easy for me to say--being a 34-year-old white American woman, I fall outside of most demographics that would be racially profiled anyway--search my bag. If you don't care that I carry some very stupid shit in my purse, search it. It's worth it to me to not get blown up on the subway. But stay the HELL out of my library records. They're books, not bombs.

A conversation with the blogger's brother, in Iraq.

Sounds like the name of an 1837 poem, doesn't it? Oh, that it were.

Here it is, as best as I can recall:

Brother: I'm going to re-enlist. I want to finish my 20 years in the Guard so I can collect my retirement.
Me: You're going to WHAT?
B: Re-enlist. If I re-sign in-country, I get a $15,000 bonus, tax free. Plus all the money I make is tax free.
M: Not to be an asshole, but $15,000 won't mean a lot to your kids if you're dead.
[I'm omitting, here, a lot of back-and-forth wherein he kept insisting, "You don't understand," and me explaining that I was fully and completely familiar with the concept of tax-free. I even understand how it differs from "tax-deferred," its good-but-not-as-great brother.]
B: My $500,000 insurance policy will.
M: Uh, no, really, I think they'd rather have their dad.
B: I don't have to stay here, just complete my re-enlistment before I leave here.
M: They'll send you right back there, as soon as they can, you know.
B: I've been in for eight years and this is the first time I've been deployed.
M: It's the first time we've been at war.
B: No, this country carries out 500 combat missions a day around the world, aside from Iraq and Afghanistan. [If you didn't know my brother, you would believe this, sounding as authoritative as it did. Knowing him, I'm certain it was a number pulled out of his ass, completely at random.]
M: Whatever. [What I always say to his made-up arguments...what else CAN you say?] The point is, about half the soldiers there are Guard and Reserves.
B: Try 90%. [I checked this factoid later. It's a bit less than half, even according to Fox News. Again, pulled right out of his ass.]
M: Whatever. You're proving my point. I want you and others like you--who've done your part, by the way, to quit, come home, and let Bush start the draft if he needs more soldiers. Maybe when rich kids start facing the possibility of a draft, this will end a bit sooner.
B: I want to stand for something. I don't know many people I can look at and know they've stood for something.

It continued, mostly with me saying that I think being a teacher is standing for something, that being a parent is standing for something, that simply being a good person is standing for something. What I didn't say--and what he already KNOWS I think--is that voting against George Bush is standing for something.

I cautioned him, also, in the manner of all annoying, overbearing elder siblings everywhere, to make use of any and all transition help the Army provides him as he begins to prepare to come home. He indicated, unsurprisingly, that there is very little, but also that he doesn't think anything will ever stress him out again. If one of his daughters tells him she's pregnant at 17, he said his response will be, "Is anyone shooting at you, or firing mortars at the house? No? Fine, let's go to sleep and it'll all work out."

Two things here that worry me:
1. I don't think it'll be the big things that will bother him when he comes home. I think it'll be the difficulty in coming down from that level of adrenaline and excitement and fear to deal with everyday shit like a broken-down car or backed-up toilet or bounced check, and
2. I already know this will be a license for him to trivialize everyone else's experience. I'm sure in war, as in cancer or any other life-threatening situation, your priorities come into focus. But it shouldn't mean that nothing else will ever matter, and that nothing anyone else experiences is really important because it isn't THE WAR.

In all fairness, my brother's been nothing but appreciative of our contribution to his service, and he's in a very stressful situation. But he can get on my last nerve, truly. Found out on a phone call with my mother that apparently he and his wife harbor some fear that we will keep their child. I'm insulted by this because I would NEVER do that to someone unless they were abusing or neglecting their child, which they aren't. He told my mom that if I kept the baby, he'd kill me to get her back if he had to, and he'd spend the rest of his life in prison but his wife would have her baby. Well, the irony here is, it's only when he says stupid shit like that, that I'd ever even consider keeping her, just so she won't have to put up with Mr. Absolute. But no, you can have your baby back, even if she is too cool for you.

P.S. If you've made it this far, and want to be truly depressed, go to the Department of Defense website and sign up for their e-mailed press releases. I received them for a few weeks, with a special release for each casualty. That's a real downer. I finally had to unsubscribe.

Another Potter theory blown to bits.

Ok, as I read through the Harry Potter books, I form wild theories of what's to come, while I wait (and wait and wait) for the next volume to appear. Now that book 6 is in my hot little hands, and I've begun reading, I have to say that one long-cherished theory appears to have been way off-base. I won't mention it, in case you're not quite there yet. But I hate being wrong, I hate being in suspense, and I mostly hate knowing that it'll likely be at least 18 months until the final volume appears and all the questions are answered.

I read the following Reuters headline today:

SOME BOOKSELLERS WEARY OF HARRY POTTER CRAZE

I would like to add, SOME BOOKSELLERS APPARENTLY TIRED OF HAVING LOTS OF CUSTOMERS AND MAKING LOTS OF MONEY.

People will complain about anything.

Miss Understanding.

So, the other day, we're over at Lisa's brother's house for a visit. Our six-year-old niece asks us to come hang out in her room, which--being good aunts--we do. Her birthday is just four days before my own, so when I noticed a little purse with the archer and the word "Sagittarius" stitched onto it, I picked it up and said, "Hey, we're both Sagittarius!" Lisa, sitting nearby, then correctly remarked, "Actually, we're all Sagittarius."

Hannah looked at me, put her hand on her hip, rolled her eyes, and said, "Uh, no, we're NOT. Because I EAT meat."

I stand corrected.

The Internet...good or evil? Discuss.

I'm torn about whether or not the internet is more good than bad, or vice versa. On the one hand, it brings people together from all over the world and allows them to share their experiences, their knowledge, their lives. It allows an agoraphobic woman in Tulsa to interact with the world in ways she never could have dreamed a few years ago. It allows a gay teenager in small-town America to learn that he is not alone in this world. We were discussing this very thing during our city's Pride Parade, when we saw the gay bikers who fit every stereotype of "biker," and not one stereotype of "gay." Imagine, growing up, if you feel like a biker, but know you're gay, and think, "Well, this'll never work for me. Something's gotta give." Then you find out, it doesn't. There are people JUST LIKE YOU, and you can find them and commisserate, become friends, belong. How freaking exciting is that moment? The internet has undoubtedly made it easier for those in any niche to find like-minded folks.

Of course, it also allows rapists and other criminals to find one another, and their victims. (I almost said "perverts," but as long as there are no victims, I'm all in favor of perverts finding one another. Let your freak flag fly, honey.)

It also allows hypochondriacs like me to be relatively sure they're developing osteoarthritis in both left knee and left big toe--and to be glad it isn't rheumatoid arthritis, which my cousin has, which sucks, and which symmetrically affects joints, rather than gettingsimply the left or right side. It also allows me to wonder if my recent dizzy spells and tingling sensations (not in a good way), coupled with the fact that my ongoing instant and hideous bruising indicating a potassium deficiency, might join up with the occasional fluttering I feel in my chest to send me to the doctor for an EKG or something yucky like that. Ah, isn't WebMD great? I did notice that the National Institutes of Health listed this lovely information about arrythmia:

Complications Return to top

• Angina (chest pain caused by imbalance of supply and demand for oxygen in the heart muscle)
• Heart attack
• Heart failure
• Stroke
• Sudden death

Well, yeah, I suppose "sudden death" would be a complication, now wouldn't it? I notice there's no hotlink from "sudden death." Hmm....

Don't mind me, I'll just be sitting over here cataloguing and cross-referencing every symptom I've EVER had. Oh, yeah, that's right. The internet lets me whine to at least twice as many people as I could in my "real" life. I guess all in all, it's not so bad.

Sharp.ie

Can someone you've never met, be your soulmate? Just kidding, but Jen has posted gleefully about her new baby Sharpie keychain, and all I can say is, I HAD MINE FIRST, copycat! ;-)


From the Sharpie website, here's the lowdown:

Sharpie® Mini
	Features & Benefits
	Go Anywhere with Sharpie!
	Portability: Take it anywhere to complete tasks on the go. Cap clip: Conveniently carry this marker on a key chain, golf bag, backpack, etc. Permanent on most hard-to-mark surfaces Quick drying, AP certified Non-toxic

My favorite part is that you can carry it on a golf bag....but why? Anyway, these things are awesome...join the club and get one! Or a dozen.

But, Jen, do you have the self-stick repositionable index cards? They're so cool, I couldn't even find a link to post.

Brain freeze.

Am I the only person who has to think--I mean, REALLY think--before pressing either of the two buttons that open or close the elevator doors?

There's this one, which I think closes the doors:

>|<

And this one, which I eventually realize will open the doors:

<|>

What the hell? Just put the words OPEN and CLOSED on there, too, for idiots like me. Though, truth be told, I seriously doubt either of those buttons does a damn thing, anyway.

Needed: Armor.

I am not made for life in this world, with my tender heart. I protect myself with jokes and sarcasm (which my former boss pointed out is simply the verbalization of hostility and anger; I disagreed, until my therapist said, "She's right, you know." Damn.). I saw a woman today, sitting in a wheelchair while holding a cane, waiting for someone--I wasn't immediately sure who--to pay the cashier for parking so they could proceed from the garage lobby to their car to exit. She was crying, and I almost cried with her, right there in the lobby, and I have NO idea why she was crying. Maybe she's dying, or her child or parent (we were at the medical center, after all). Maybe she can't pay her medical bills, or those of someone she loves. Maybe she simply had a horrible headache--I've cried over those before, too--but the point is simply that I ache when I see things like that. I want to cry when I see older people working their asses off at Wal-Mart or McDonald's or anywhere really. I don't have anything against hard work, or any work, and for all I know those people are as happy as clams. A friend once said I look down on those people and I don't think that's true; I fully realize that others might find my job horrible and mundane and pitiable, so I do recognize that my personal biases come into play. But any hint of struggle or sadness just makes me come undone.

I looked up "tender" in the thesaurus, and found the following:

Main Entry:	vulnerable
Part of Speech:	adjective
Definition:	attackable
Synonyms:	accessible, assailable, defenseless, exposed, liable, naked, pigeon, ready, sensitive, sitting duck, sucker, susceptible, tender, thin-skinned, unguarded, unprotected, unsafe, weak, wide open
Antonyms:	guarded, protected, safe, secure

That's me, most definitely exposed, sensitive, unguarded and wide open. You'd never know it, though, if you knew me. I'm not sure even my closest friends would guess how often I am paralyzed by the good in others, and by the bad in all of us.

We ARE a family, a-hole.

That moronic senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, (the link goes to his website...send him a note, why don't ya?), has written a book. I don't know if it's new, or if I'm just slow on the uptake, but it's called It Takes a Family, and its title is a direct response to Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village. Santorum, you ass, I am in a family. You may not LIKE my family, but I don't really care. I don't much like you (and I doubt I would like your wife, either, since she willingly puts up with you).

Lisa and I were talking today, wishing against all reasonable hope that Santorum be caught up in some very public, very hideous scandal. I don't wish for him to be found to have a gay lover because, although that would expose him as an undeniable hypocrite, it would force the gay community to either champion him or ignore the whole thing completely. To condemn him in that circumstance would put us in the position of seeming to condemn homosexuality, unless we turn that age-old saying on its head: "Love the sin, hate the sinner?" No, it needs to be something that is unequivocally heinous....sex with goats, maybe? Oh, it'll never happen, but I can dream.

And for my callous joke of the day, I'll repeat what I said when I saw the bumper sticker reading "Abortion Stops a Beating Heart."

It better, or else you deserve a refund.

I'm going to hell, I know. I don't even know if I could personally ever choose abortion, but pro-lifers just piss me off. Judging people, and stating the obvious, doesn't help anyone.

Praise the lord.

When I was ready to go to college, I was a very naive person who knew NOTHING, really, about college. My parents had each gone for a little over a year, but neither had graduated at that point and were so out of touch that my mom still thought--in 1988--that I would have an enforced curfew and a "dorm mother." Imagine her surprise when she found that the adult who was responsible for me was a 19-year-old sophomore who lived down the hall.

Anyway, I went to school for a year in Kirksville, Missouri, at Northeast Missouri State University (now known as Truman State University; previously known as Kirksville State Teachers' College.) They offered me a full-ride scholarship, and as my parents hadn't saved a dime toward my education, that was certainly an issue of some concern. In addition, as I reasoned, this town was slightly larger than my hometown, plus it had some 6,000 college students in it, so it would be just fine, right?

Wrong.

It was a hideous place, I didn't have a job that year and so in some sort of reverse bit of logic, my grades were horrible because I had TOO MUCH free time. I did enjoy my time with some of the people I met there, though in retrospect we had little in common except our shared misery (four of the five people in my closest social circle transferred after freshman year), and I haven't kept in touch with any of them past the first couple of years after we left there. Near the end of my year, I called my friend B. (a good friend from high school who lived in the same dorm, way at the other end of the fifth floor) and asked her where she was living next year. "Columbia," she replied. Well, that's 100 miles away, it's going to be a hell of a commute, isn't it? "No, dummy, I'm transferring to Mizzou. I'm leaving this hellhole, and I advise you to do the same. Hold on, I'll get you the number to the admissions office." WTF? I swear to you, I didn't even know you could transfer. I thought I was stuck in that armpit forever.

And so, that was it. I did transfer to Mizzou, where I had pretty decent grades, found a job that ended up being my career, made a lot of friends, a few of whom I am close with today, and will likely be forever. And I met Lisa.

I swore I'd never go back to Kirksville, but life is funny. I was sent up there for work this past week, to help the new-ish manager who is now running the University bookstore there. So I had to take a few photos of my favorite places. Burt Bacharach once wrote that "there's always something there to remind me," but I somehow don't think he had in mind either the Kum-N-Go or the House of Jesus.

P.S. I don't know if the Kum-N-Go is part of a chain, but I do know that it was commonly referred to by its alternate names: Shoot-N-Scoot, or Ejaculate-N-Evacuate. Nice, huh?

Ah, I didn't know you cared...

Just kidding. I knew you CARED, I just didn't know anyone noticed that my blogging was sporadic at best. Anyway, yes, the being out of town was a huge boost to my free time, but a lot of the problem has also been the moving, settling in, reorganizing the household budget, bills, etc, so now that we're mostly really living in our new home instead of just moving into it, I hope to have time to fill my little corner of the internet with useless rants and rhetorical questions!

Hot girl-on-girl action.

Wait, don't get too excited. I'm talking about Hillary Clinton. David Remnick has a very funny piece in the New Yorker about Edward Klein's book, The Truth About Hillary, and with Klein's seeming obsession with the fact that Hillary (gasp!) knows actual lesbians. He concludes, of course, that she might even BE a lesbo, masquerading as a straight married woman. Well, who cares, Ed? George Bush, to use but one example, is a moron masquerading as the president.

I'm thinking I'll stop blogging (not that I blog very frequently, anyway) and simply start posting a link to the New Yorker every week. Why do I have time to read not one, but two, issues of this text-heavy weekly magazine? I'm out of town, of course, for work, so while Lisa is taking care of the baby niece, I am reading instead of changing diapers and playing with blocks. I do miss the little snot-nosed peanut, though.

Give me liberty...or give me death.

I wonder how Patrick Henry would feel about sharing his name with a college whose mission it is to train home-schooled evangelical conservatives to be right-wing political operatives. I read about this is the New Yorker and I don't know what frightened me most: the whole idea of it, or the fact that one of the young couples featured in the story hugged when they became engaged because "they wanted their first kiss to be at their wedding." Can you imagine marrying someone you've never kissed?

"Michael Farris...founded the school after getting requests from two constituencies: homeschooling parents and conservative congressmen. The parents would ask him where they could find a Christian college with a 'courtship' atmosphere, meaning one where dating is regulated and subject to parental approval." (The emphases are all mine.) I can't imagine, as the parent of a college-age child, wanting to have approval over dating. If you've raised your child with the values and morals that are important to you, I don't think you should need to be "approving" your 21-year-old's choice of dates. I can't imagine that hundreds of young men and women put up with, even embrace, this weirdness.

Ooh, this kind of Stepford Wives/Manchurian Candidate/Oral Roberts stuff just sends shivers down my spine.

An Army of One, my ass.

I'm so sick of the recent commercials for the Army & Army Reserve, in which some young kid is trying to convince his or her parents that they really, really need to join the army to become a better person. And hey, Mom & Dad, they'll give me money for college and great training! One boy even says to his dad, "hey, it's the Reserves. They'll train me around here until they need me."

Well, fella, that'll be about 5 or 6 minutes after you graduate from boot camp.

I think it's a real indicator of how seriously the Bu(ll)sh(it) administration has screwed up, that kids are having to convince parents to let them in the Army, instead of the other way around.

Life is simply. Not. Fair.

A friend of mine became a grandmother today. At the age of 34.

For the record, she's precisely 3 months younger than I am. And she's a grandmother because her oldest child--aged 15, or perhaps not quite 15--has fathered his own child, a child whose mother is 13 years old, neglected by her own family and is abused in one or more ways by this baby's father. (I'm not speculating here; I've heard his own mother say he pushed and shoved her around during the pregnancy.)

They have named this baby Abcd. Yes, Abcd, as in the first four letters of the alphabet, but pronounced "Ab-so-dee," rhyming with rhapsody, I suppose. (When I heard they were considering this, I was so sure it was a joke that I suggested Lmnop--"ellamenopee"--as a middle name.) When she is older, she will shoot them while they sleep for naming her that, I think.

Why in the fuck do these people have a baby and I don't? Why did we lose our much-wanted little embryo so early that we had only just started to feel like it was real, and these little moronic shits have a baby they probably don't even want, and are absolutely not equipped to care for? I am soaking up every second of caring for my brother's baby because I know I may never have this opportunity again, and while I'll be happy when she is joyfully reunited with her parents, I'm already trying to figure out if tape or glue or liquor will be the thing that holds me together when she goes home. And some stupid teenagers have had a baby and named her Abcd. I hate feeling like this, and I hate that in my mind, some people deserve to have a baby before me, after me, whenever they happen to have one, but others should get the hell in line behind me in case scientists announce a discovery that there is a finite number of babies. I hate being a selfish, bitter person. Life sucks.

(Don't get me wrong. I'm still excited about the Jodie Foster movie, but even that isn't making me totally happy right now, and that, my friends, is a true reflection of just how pissed off, sad and angry I am at the universe in general.)

My celebrity crush.

I admit it. I have a celebrity crush. Just one, though. (Ok, if you don't count Pierce Brosnan, Prince William or Annette Bening. Or Sela Ward. Or Susan Sarandon. Or Mariska Hargitay. Or Hugh Grant. Or...well, you get the picture. I'm a liar and I read way too much People Magazine.)

Anyway, I have a little thing for Jodie Foster. Not a John Hinckley thing, mind you...even though I don't care for the current Republican administration, I don't own a firearm and I know it wouldn't impress Jodie much anyway. But it seems Miss Jodie is becoming quite the action hero, first with Panic Room and now with her upcoming movie, Flightplan. It looks like Die Hard as directed by Hitchcock, or that movie The Forgotten, without Julianne Moore, who has her moments but has already proven to be a pale imitation of Jodie as Clarice Starling.

Why am I even posting this? Who knows. Who cares. It's Action Star Jodie, and I'm counting down days until September 23rd.