On My Home Planet

Cancer PSA

2007-10-22T16:41:00.000-04:00

Enough is enough is enough
I can't go on, I can't go on, no more no
enough is enough is enough

-Donna Summer (actually singing about a dude, but it also applies here).

Far be it for my Catholic ass to speak on matters of science, but can someone please explain to me how email forwards and cute frilly pink merchandise ad nauseum is supposed to cure breast cancer? I think anyone who doesn't live under a rock is "aware" of this horrible disease and (most of) the risk factors.

Has anyone ever done a study on how much of the proceeds of this merchandise actually go to breast cancer research anyway? Am I the only one who finds it ironic that companies that put formaldehyde, parabens, DDT, and God only knows what other carcinogens in their products are now trying to raise money to cure a disease, when their irresponsibility has contributed to its rise? How is my having a pink mixer/scarf/whatever going to act as my personal talisman against cancer?

What's my motive not to just give that $70 directly to the Mayo Clinic or whatever, rather than to Clinique/Lily Pulitzer/Swaworski/Kitchenaid's latest addition to the bandwagon? For heaven's sake, it's a deadly disease not a fashion statement. Get it together ladies - if we think not enough money is going to breast (or any!) cancer research, perhaps we should be lobbying our government, not gossipping amongst ourselves while going shopping.

Obsession

2007-10-22T14:06:00.000-04:00

There has got to be a name for the syndrome by which the scorned wife starts feeling affection toward her husband's mistress. I'm taking an active role in decorating an entire story of our house (the "mancave") in homage to her. I sometimes go to see her with my husband, and have been known to spring for pizza for the occasion. I am even helping him save to buy a ridiculously high-end electronic device so that he can communicate with her more often.

Bonus: by having this device, he will establish once and for all amongst the neighbors that he DOES have the largest penis in the subdivision.

I guess she's not such terrible person. She's very ambitious and makes buttloads of money (not that she shares with us). We have the same favorite color (blue). I only have to compete with her 4 months out of the year, and mostly then just on Saturdays. It's only in her company that my husband and his evil sociopath of a brother could get along before my husband ended the world by marrying me.

And to be fair, my husband's love affair is practically guaranteed never result in my getting an STD, not to mention he will never get her pregnant (largely because they don't have sex... although I'm sure the thought could cross his mind if it were physically possible; she's supposed to have a hottt pussy). Maybe because of her crotchety but notoriously endearing old Brooklyn-Italian father.

She is Penn State football, and he is obsessed.

Why I'm employable

2007-10-11T12:54:00.000-04:00

It never fails to crack me up when someone just assumes I'm this ubergenius because I work in finance.

Finance... is not rocket science. It is glorified algebra. Which when you don't have a bitchy nun throwing chalk at 40 screeching teenagers instructing you, is child's play. The fact is, everyone who works in finance, got there specifically because we are not quite smart enough to become rocket scientists. What finance professionals are paid for, is not our ability to do 7th grade math, but rather, our high personal thresh holds (if not imperviousness) for boredom. That, and borderline or full blown OCD.

But, keep the money coming my way, please.

Personal Finance PSA

2007-10-06T22:59:00.000-04:00

I was bitching to a friend today about how much harder it is to save money now that my mortgage payment is significantly higher than my rent.

"But you own... a house is like a bank account."

Um. Dude. No. A house is a place you live in (and usually own). I cannot walk up to the water heater, burn a candle for the Wells Fargo Gods, and say, "Hey, can you spot me $100? There is this really cute pair of wedge heels at Nordstrom's..."

It doesn't work that way. Unless it is 2005, or unless your or an immediate family member needs an expensive and lifesaving surgery, or unless you are using that money to make major repairs/upgrades to said home, the equity you have in your home is not play money. So if you are buying new furniture, designer pocketbooks, Carribbean vacations with it, you're a moron.

Furthermore, unless you own your house - you you you, as in you have paid off the mortgage and own the place outright - that equity's not really even yours yet.

Which means: When my rent was $X and my mortgage is $X + $600... that means I have $600 less a month to save/use as play money. Which is like taking a 9K paycut (on top of which Uncle Sam has been anally raping us both on taxes since we tied the knot), and on top of that, I'm paying 1/2 the money if the toilet breaks/carpet needs replaced. So deal with it if I bitch about finances every now and then. First time homeowners in their 20s often have a less than financially comfortable first couple months.

Eureeka!

2007-10-02T12:31:00.000-04:00

To Neil Clark Warren, the Religious Right, the Alternatives to Marriage Project, and all you downers who luuuurve to quote divorce stats at newlyweds and engaged folks:

I have found the reason for the divorce rates in this country: Advice given on thenest.com. Every single thing you post about - my inlaws are assholes, we've been trying for 6 months and I'm still not knocked up, my H might lose his job, we can't agree on a color to paint the bathroom - the advice is the same: "Have you no self-respect? Leave this loser!"

Now in all fairness, it's not quite as asinine as its sister board, theknot.com. That site is a bunch of self-righteous bridezillas insulting each other's weddings, stalking one another, and predicting divorce rates. Yeah, some of the posts are funny, but it's more sad. Among their posters, you will find 17 year old fiancees; couples who have been together 2.5 years and have a 15-month old son (you do the math); 20 year olds on their second wedding; ladies who are not even dating anyone yet already planning their weddings, and lower-middle class brides still living with Mom & Dad while planning a lavish extravaganza in 2010. Surely, though, those of us who are married ARE better than people who are single/engaged, not to mention those of us who got married in the "magic" window of maybe 24-29 are just mature enough to get married but not old enough to be desperate hags, but why flaunt it?

The difference between a Fiance(e) and a Boy/Girlfriend

2007-09-25T22:40:00.001-04:00

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it annoying when someone insists on referring to someone's fiance(e) as "your boy/girlfriend". Dude. A boy/girlfriend is someone you are "just dating" - you may or may not have any intention of marrying that person. But, for now, you're not ready to take that step, and enjoying the present with that person - be it in the occasional date or in a full-blown "living in sin."

And yes, from a legal standpoint, being engaged is the same as just dating (or just being friends, or not knowing that person from Adam). But from an emotional/social standpoint, is it ever different. If you have anything resembling a healthy relationship with your fiance(e), then of course the two of you are still having dates and enjoying the moment with one another. For many, saying "Will you marry me"/"Yes! I will!" is the emotional equivalent of "I do". And, following the period of insanity known as "wedding planning", at the end of the engagement and being fiance(e)s is the legal commitment known as marriage. See the difference? Referring to someone's fiance(e) as their "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" basically discounts the commitment these two people have made to one another and downplays the sacred, important journey the two are undertaking together.

I can speak only for myself here, but the only people I have ever heard refer to Mr.TMCL and I as "boyfriend/girlfriend" since we got engaged either didn't like one of us, didn't support our marriage in particular, or didn't support marriage in general.

Conclusion: If someone is engaged, they have a fiance(e). NOT a boyfriend or girlfriend anymore.

This PSA has been brought to you by TooMuchCoffeeLady.

What the hell, Hot Topic?

2007-09-25T14:54:00.000-04:00

"TMCL, you really are obsessed with this Cheese fella, aren't you?" - Mad Asian Woman

Yes, Mishl is right, which is part of the reason I am so outraged and saddened by Hot Topic's latest editions to the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends line.

I mean, they've misquoted Cheese all over the place! It's "GottaGoGottaGoGottaGoGottaGo", not "CheeseGottaGo". And it's "I'm a horsey!" not "I wanna horsey". "I like chocolate milk", not "Cheese like milkshakes". And so forth, and so on.

People, people, people! MacMcCracken and Candi Milo have got to be the greatest comedic genuises of all time for creating Cheese, and you can't even get the guy quoted right? Cheese saves lives! Cheese saves marriages and brings families together! There is nothing Cheese can't do. In many ways, his cross-eyed smile, club foot, and flatulence are humankind's only hope!

The "I Pooted" body spray is the only thing that might redeem you from my banning your store from my conciousness for good. Might. If you want to take a stab, Hot Topic corporate folks (would it ever be hilarious to meet you lot!) send me an email, and I'm more than happy to provide my mailing address.

My turn to be a Bridezilla

2007-09-24T15:43:00.000-04:00

Confession Time: Mr. TMCL was married briefly in 95 (days after he became old enough to drink beer at his own reception), and filed for divorce within the year. After an 11 year hiatus, the man is taking the plunge again. Would I have preferred to be #1? Sure, but we all make mistakes when we're younger; not to mention I get a beautiful, awesome, stepdaughter out of this marriage. I almost made the mistake of rejecting him because he was divorced, and am so glad I just gave it a shot. In fact, everyone that I know who is married, their spouse has something about them that would have made one of my single friends reject that person.

Anyhoo, WTF is up with people's attitudes about "second weddings don't deserve X, Y, Z." Um, hello, this is our first wedding TOGETHER, and unless I'm seriously a moron, it is my first wedding, period. That means (future in laws, this means you) that you're the jackass if you get bent out of shape that we registered, are having a church wedding/reception, etc. If you truly feel that "well, I've already been to a wedding for Mr. TMCL", "It's wrong to have a celebration unless it's a first time for both of you," "your engagement was too short,", "your stepdaughter is going to grow up to be an ax murderer if she gets a stepmom/half siblings" etc, then do us all a favor and don't fucking come on Saturday. Please. Save the wear and tear on your car. It's just that simple.

And yes, I can't help but feel hurt there hasn't been a shower, bachelorette party, anything like that. Yes, I have been engaged before, but not long enough to have any of those celebrations. Don't get me wrong, my drinking alcohol would probably be a bad idea, I already have a blender, and I can afford to buy my own ginsu knife or whatever, but it's more feeling like people were actually happy for me and wanted to celebrate with me. I'd even have been happy to have like a dinner where I'd had to pay for my own plate. I don't even need gifts, or food, just more time to celebrate with my friends. With having moved and having a new house, time with my friends is not something I get a ton of these days. Something, anything, to demonstrate to me that Mr. TMCL and I aren't the only ones happy about this. Friends of mine who have had less formal/expensive weddings, shorter engagements, assholes for spouses, have all had that stuff. Maybe I'm being a whiny baby, but I don't understand what I did wrong that all of a sudden that's changed.

Oh, and, if all of a sudden, you claim to have gone from being a complete and total lush to not being able to handle being around alcohol at all (with no mention of a 12-step program or anything like that, not to mention I know you better than that), don't be floored if I call bullshit.

This PSA has been brought to you by TooMuchCoffeeLady.

A Great Big F-U to my Pancreas

2007-09-21T15:33:00.000-04:00

No, seriously, I effing hate your guts and will one day have you removed, you stupid, ungrateful, malfunctioning peice of shit. Seriously, what the hell is your problem. Aside from my coffee guzzling habits, which should have had no effect on you, I eat like a freakin hippie saint - barely touching refined sugars, bleached flours, lots of fruits and veggies. I have exercised twice a week, despite my wonky hip (that car accident, remember? Consider yourself lucky I can still walk), and my BMI has never reached above 23%. I know I'm small framed, but dammit, my fat jeans are a size 4!

And here you go reacting like I'm some obese person who sits around on the sofa all day chugging regular soda and eating bon-bons. High cholesterol, intestinal disturbances, f*cked up blood sugar, hormonal disturbances my ass. This is America, bitch! I've treated you damned well. SORRY for having a peice of candy like once a week. Jeez. You've seriously overreacted. But, in your face, asshole, so did my endochrinologist. Notice me shitting my brains out on the hour? Highest dose of Met the law will allow. So take that.

Speaking of which, Adam Sandler? You only think you hold the world's record for The Longest Pee, dude. If you can seriously sell CDs and make money with that shit, I'm going to start bringing a tape recorder into the can with me. I'm still better looking than you, even with the insulin gut and zits. I hope you're at least donating the proceeds to the American Diabetes Foundation, beeyotch!

And let's talk for a second about how happy I am to get to spend the rest of my life on the South Beach diet. It is seriously, the biggest pain in the ass to eat the way I'm supposed to be eating. Do you internets have any idea how much of the food in this country is chock full of bleached flour, refined sugar, and other substances that are apparently a "poisin" to my body? About 99%. It blows. And, the foods that aren't full of that crap cost about 3x what regular food does, and are massively inconvenient to buy/store. Papa John's, you are put on notice. OFFER SOME WHOLE WHEAT CRUSTS, dammit!

In closing, I will say it again. Fuck you, my pancreas. Hard. In the ass.

XOXOXOXO,

TMCL

Guess who's back? Back again...

2007-09-21T15:30:00.001-04:00

Yep, internets, part at the urgings of maybe my biggest fan, The Coolest Person in The Universe (TCPITU), and part at the myriad rants I have bottled up inside me, I have decided to revive this blog.

Since I last typed I have:

- Bought a home
- Moved to the Baaah-ble Bay-ult
- Gotten a new job
- Gotten diagnosed with diabetes, the first effin week at my new job in fact

And, I'm full of bile about most of that.

How to Prevent Global Warming...

2007-02-25T11:50:00.000-05:00

Plan a brunch with Mad Asian Woman and a few of our other fabulous girlfriends. Even if it was 60 and gorgeous the day before, the temperature is guaranteed to fall below freezing, and mass snowfall is guaranteed to ensue.

Next Sunday, ladies... it's brunch at the North Pole. 11AM our time, sharp. The trip will be a pain in the a$$, but I feel it's the only way to stop the ice caps from melting.

Reasons Not to Take The Christmas Tree Down Yet

2007-01-16T07:31:00.000-05:00

I'm too lazy.

Green matches the decor in our living room.

It'll be Christmas again in 11.5 months anyway.

Will help us keep the spirit of Christmas in our hearts year round.

Lots of the ornaments are red, and red is the color scheme for Valentine's day - in less than a month!

Arbor day is in May or September or something like that. I could start a new trend by having a fake tree in the living room to celebrate this holiday.

Mr. TMCL can take the ornaments off the tree and make them fight each other.

Spam, Spam, Beautiful Spam

2007-01-13T12:35:00.000-05:00

I usually ignore spam, but sometimes it's just so freakin' weird that it becomes a train wreck that I can't tear my eyes away from. In this case, I wonder if the writer is a schizophrenic with a piss-poor command of the English language, or if her pharmacist just gives her cooler stuff than mine does.

Klava Stacy
to Magdolna

Is Magdolna my first name? No, she's my old-gypsy-fortune-teller-with-five-teeth-and-a-drinking-problem alter ego. They need email addresses too.

Unclean! Profane! Leave-for you soil me with your presence.

Badly written and overly melodramatic soap opera, or start of a German Schiesse Video?

Silence? Into the car. Speak to me in the office about a salary
you a little time to look around before you have to play your first
some kind of symbol stamped into each of the bricks.

You're gonna pay me? Cool! To do what, teach you how not to write run-on sentences? I'm not going anywhere with you though, till you use a nicer tone of voice.

We all looked
unhappily and tragically turned out to be Liokukae.

Gosh, your grammar sucks. Who's Liokukae, your Polynesain lover?

was now dripping from the metal tube and the starter reached out and

See, I told you not to buy a used car. That isn't going to be cheap to fix.

Any prints lifted from the coins? he asked over his shoulder.

Yeah, and check it out! If you fold George Washington's or Abe Lincoln's head, you can make a mushroom! Damn nickel, Tom Jefferson's face just looks weird when you fold it.

licking the last drops of yummy from our fingers when the shadowlike
Heaven forbid, I muttered gruelly and put the bowl aside. I

WTF? I hate when Heaven forbids me from using poor table manners.

Isnt that for me to decide? Steengo snarled in his best admiralish

When'd he get promoted? He was just a Commander last I checked...

Trainwreck in Progress...

2007-01-12T07:31:00.000-05:00

Q: What do you get when you take:

1. A germophobic, beer-and-toilet-humor-loving, small-town jock from New England;

2. A spliff-smoking, Armani-clad, hard-partying, trustafarian Arab who redefines "EuroTrash";

3. And a straight-laced, nerdy "born again" from the Bible Belt;

and make the three of them live together in a 12'x14' room?

A: Either the funniest reality TV show ever made, a recipe for World War 3, or BabyBro's college dorm room (he goes to school about 10 miles from where I live) for this semester. I give this one three days. I'm readying the spare bedroom and unearthing my Beavis & Butthead DVDs as we speak.

Happy Birthday, Bro

2007-01-05T07:12:00.000-05:00

You'd be 25 today, old enough to rent a car. Would you have ended up tall and brunette like BabyBro or have stayed short and blonde like me and Sis? Liked toilet humor like me and BabyBro, or thought it was dumb like Sis? Would we have made fun of you forever for being scared of Santa Claus?

Instead of mailing your gift today, I get to call Mom and Dad and listen to them cry.

I still miss you, and honestly, I wish to God it could've been somebody else's brother that died. Honestly, I can think of some others right off the top of my head, without whom humanity would have been better off, that deserved to die young more than you. Why are they so fucking special that they get to live and you don't? None of us did anything do deserve having to grow up without you.

I love you, Little Baldy.

On the Road Again...

2007-01-04T09:40:00.000-05:00

I've finally had it with the traffic around here.

Last night, I acheived the ultimate in "I'm just sitting on my ass doing nothing", when I managed to hack into a neighboring business's wifi and send actually emails from my car on my commute home last night. (That's right, if you heard from me between 5 and 5:45 last night, you were getting email live from the toomuchcoffeeladymobile. How did I do this without totalling my car and/or getting myself and others killed? Easy.

In the 45 minutes in question, I moved half. A. Mile.

And worse, Tuesday morning it took me over two hours to commute the 11.5 miles from my apartment to this job. In that time I managed to:

do my hair
give myself a manicure
read 20 pages of a novel

And, tragically, this wouldn't be the first time I've accomplished any of these in my godawful morning commute. Best of all, public transportation is not an option (it's not just that it sucks, it's that there are no metro stations anywhere near my office) and if and when Mr.TMCL and I are ready to buy a house, anything we'd be able to afford would more than double both of our commutes. And the both of us have good jobs that pay quite nicely. What in the world do less well-off couples do?

At what point do you say, enough, I've had it, I'm leaving the area? I'm close. I really am. There seems nothing you can do here to avoid being controlled by your commute.

Holy crap! Liberals, here go your excuses...

2007-01-02T08:07:00.000-05:00

It would seem that there is yet another arguement against killing human embryos for medical research purposes... if you absolutely, positively need embryonic stem cells (ie, if the more stable adult stem cells, you know, the ones with a better track record of yielding results, just won't do), you can now get them from adult skin cells.

Assuming the (borderline liberal rag) Washington Post isn't lying, then, that's one less reason to murder the unborn - instead of sacrificing a human embryo's life to get some stem cells that (a) may be rejected by the donor's body and (b) may not develop quite right anyway, you can just take a little bit of that person's flesh and get what you need.

So it would seem ... that the pro-embryonic stem cell crowd is not so much lifesaving medical pioneers, but rather a modern-day American Josef Mengele movement.

Happy New Year!

2007-01-01T15:45:00.000-05:00

To all my friends and readers! Wish you all the best in 2007.

New Year's Resolutions

2006-12-30T19:42:00.000-05:00

People always ask me what mine are in January, and they're kind of barking up the wrong tree. See, for me to make New Year's resolutions in January is kind of arbitrary - on January 1, 2007, I'll be approximately 27.625 years old - not really a new year. To me, it has always made better sense for me to make them when my *real* new year starts - in May, when my actual birthday is. Quite honestly, I'm a lot more likely to keep them in May, just because January and February are so dark that I get all unmotivated and bummed.

However, this year is different. I do have a New Year's resolution that I am making for this January 1, and I am enlisting help because I need someone to stay on my overcaffeinated butt to up-hold my resolution. Basically, just check my other blog periodically and email me maybe every other week asking if I've made any progress. Any takers? You can reach my email through my profile. ;)

Google Keywords of the Day:

Naked Asian Women

New Years'

Drunk

Debauchery

MEChA

Colbert Report

Garfield

Fun With Google

2006-12-29T07:43:00.000-05:00

So as of late, I have become obsessed with checking the counter on my page. So cool that I have a fan in India, and in London, Toomuchcoffeelady's gone global! :)

Someone in Bedford, PA checks out my blog several times a day, yet never posts comments. Gee, I wonder who that would be... Grow up, dude. What are you hoping to accomplish here?

But maybe it's time for me to start watching my language. The google searches that bring people to my page? "Fattest Women on the Planet". "Children Hatred Psychological Problems". Awesome. I google some weird shit myself when I get bored at work, I understand. This is beyond amusing though, so let me see if I can't get on more google searches.

Google Key Words of the Day:
Circus Midgets
Libertarian
Kevin Federline is a skeezy no-talent assclown
New Years' Resolutions (I make mine in May)
Women
Chick Lit
Technorati
NaNoWriMo (sigh, one of these days)
Elephant
James Bond
Peewee Herman

Man, I need to do some work...

I Hate Winter (A post about Not-the-Weather)

2006-12-28T09:18:00.000-05:00

I'm borrowing trouble to even be thinking about this in December, but... I'm already dreading January and February.

How ungrateful, right? I have my first (and let's hope only) "engaged" Valentines' day, lots of wedding planning stuff (which is fun in its own right), and my semi-secret project to look forward to.

But seriously, when it's cold, crappy, and dark outside by 4 PM, the whole world just seems crappy and dark. Skiing, Christmas, New Years and Valentine's day are, in my humble opinion, the only redeeming qualities of winter. That's one activity that can't even be done in the "temperate" climate of Liberal Yuppieland, and three isolated days. Whoopee.

Where I grew up, it is freaking freezing in the winter (we're talking, I've had the ink in pens left in my car/pocketbook freeze on me), but at least it's pretty with the snow. And you can actually enjoy snow sports, rather than just being cooped up inside for months. And at least they PLOW the snow off the roads so you're just "at a higher risk for" rather than "guaranteed to get into" a car accident. Unlike Liberal Yuppieland.

Welcome winter. If you're gonna pull your half-assed act around here this year, well then... you suck. Go home.

Another Ridonkulous CL Experiment...

2006-12-27T21:41:00.001-05:00

I nearly gave my poor Mom a heart attack over Christmas by telling her I am planning to sell ad space on the walls of my wedding reception site to recoup some of the costs (hey, cheaper and less work than decorating!)

Now if my Mom isn't the brightest crayon in the box, she can at least give the brightest crayon a run for his/her money. But the average person on CL is a total moron, so I'm going to see if I get any bites...

Selling Advertising Space

Reply to: your anonymous craigslist address will appear here
Date: 2006-12-27, 9:40PM EST

I am getting married at the VFW Hall on May 9, 2007 and am planning to have over 100 guests at the reception. For the low price of $10/square foot, you can put up a poster advertising your business on the walls of the reception hall. I like the idea of boosting the local economy, and let's face it - traditional wedding reception decorations are a lot of work, wasteful, and expensive.

It's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Proof they really DO hate kids in China

2006-12-25T23:56:00.000-05:00

Seems China has gotten just as stupid as the USA in terms of who can and can't adopt. It seems it's now better for a child to rot in an orphanage than to be adopted by a fat parent. Or a depressed one. Or - gasp! - one who's on their second marriage.

See, I hear a lot of criticism of those who adopt from abroad, rather than from the US. Well, from what I understand, you need to have a perfect, shiny-happy record for the last several decades to be considered a fit adoptive parent. (Unlike being considered a fit biological parent, which seems to require functioning ovaries and/or testicles). So American orphans rot in foster homes for 18 years and get all screwed up, when all along they could have been adopted by loving parents, who, say, maybe had to seek counseling once in high school, or possibly grew up in a less-than-Ozzie-and-Harriet-home. The weird truth is there is *no* perfect parent out there. They're *all* going to screw their kid up in some way.

But in pursuit of unattainable parental perfection, there are kids in need of parents and wanna-be-parents in need of kids, neither is getting their needs met, and everybody's sad and suffering. Great going.

Now China's jumping on that bandwagon. Not only are they keeping kids and adoptive parents from each other, but they are forgoing the $14K in tourism and legal revenue (times God-knows how many couples each year) that they generate each time someone comes to their country to adopt a child.

Over some stupid prejudice about fat people.

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-25T23:27:00.000-05:00

And if that's too politically incorrect for you, well then... freak off! For the record, I am showing solidarity with real religious minorities*... I have on my new Hankey the Christmas Poo slippers as memorial to all those who have been forced to hear someone wish them a "Merry (Holiday you don't celebrate)". God forbid! I know I personally would much rather be told "Drop Dead" than be forced to hear "Happy Diwali".

We now have 364 more days till the next Christmas (364 days to be honest - peace on earth and goodwill toward men ain't happening anytime soon) and the burning question remains - do we spend more on ourselves at the after-Christmas sales than on Christmas shopping itself?

*Catholics as a downtrodden minority is so passe that I declare we officially don't count anymore.

Nom de Plume...

2006-12-21T12:05:00.001-05:00

To my loyal TMCL fans - I may be expanding my horizons, but like a true superhero, cannot reveal my mild-mannered alterego.

Help me think of a pen name. I am open to any and all suggestions.

How do you say "Enough Already" in Kazakh?

2006-11-14T19:41:00.000-05:00

I'll admit to being as big an Ali G fan as the next person, and to dragging Mr. TMCL to see the Borat movie (and yes, the wedding is miraculously still on after making my poor fiance sit through the "Eat my Asshole"! hairy naked guy scene), but holy freakin SHIT, I'm tired of hearing about Borat!

To the uppity Kazakhs getting offended that Sacha Baron Cohen is portraying your country in a "bad light": It's a freakin joke! Deal. Americans are routinely stereotyped as fat, dumb, violent, materialistic, bigoted, inbred, loud, uncouth, promiscuous, gluttonous slobs every day in the media and you don't hear us complaining. Has anyone declared war on you because of this film? Have Kazakhstan's booming tourism and high tech industries suffered economic losses because of Borat? Do you realize that 90% of the world's population would not have the slightest freaking idea where the hell Kazakhstan even is if not for our buddy Borat and his antics?

We could even go out on a limb and say you're not fully recognized as a people and as a country until there are some obnoxious stereotypes of you out there. Borat has given you that. And in fact, it sounds like Borat's Kazakh tales were pretty spot-on less than half a decade ago. Suing Sacha kinda makes you come across as golddiggers.

To the whiny entitled Americans complaining that their jackassery has been caught on film: Tough. Next time, try not getting wasted when you know your subsequent behavior is going to be filmed. Is this really that difficult? You're obviously a sexist racist drunk idiot and/or a self-important snot. Now the world knows what all your friends, coworkers, and family know. It probably wasn't news to them either. What kind of idiot doesn't suspect they're going to be in a movie when some known comedian with a video production crew in tow makes you sign a release form before they film you?

Finally, what the freak is up with all this Borat buzz in the news? Didn't we just have an election or a war in Iraq or something like that?

How Feminism F*cked Women Over

2006-11-04T12:40:00.000-05:00

"Destroy the family and you destroy society." - Lenin

Biodork has brought it to my attention that perhaps I need to set the record straight on something. I am not a misogynist cavewoman. I just hate modern-day feminism.

When the woman's rights movement was initially founded, this country needed it. Women were second-class citizens, couldn't own property, couldn't vote, if they didn't find a husband by age 18 or so they were screwed, if anything ever happend to him they were screwed until they found another one (commodifying men in fact. If they weren't pretty and able to give birth, they were worthless.

This was wrong and needed changed. Enter Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and their compadres. How nice of these ladies to make sure the rest of us women weren't living in a van down by the river if we ever found ourselves husbandless for any period of time. They were the true pro-woman feminists. They wanted women to have the opportunities and abilities both to get educations/jobs *and* to have children, and to make this country a friendly environment to those possibilities. They were pro-child. Pro-man. The interests of the three groups *can* coexist.

That was when my great-grandma was my age though, so these ladies are long dead and for all intents and purposes, forgotten.

Enter the Second Wave of feminists. The Gloria Steinems who love abortion and hate men. The Betty Freidens who hate marriage, hate motherhood, and launch campaigns to make all women who want either or both be reviled as worthless patriarchical throwbacks. They're not about women's choices, they're about railroading women down a path to this mold that they (a select but powerful few) think all women are obligated to want.

Stereotypes are spread about men that they are stupid, unfaithful, insensitive, pigs. Some are, but evilness is not confined to the male sex. Anti-male affirmative action gives women preference in hiring and school admissions, leaving the residual question "did she get hired because she was the smartest and best candidate, or because she has a vagina and having a woman on staff proves something?" As a lady who has a "man's job", I agree that the XX-chromosone and the left-brain dominance are not the common combination. It *isn't* the typical woman who gets 750 on the Math section of the SAT's, likes the "logical" disciplines better than the "humanities", and doesn't pursue a job where she can feel "fulfilled" or "make a difference". But the second I have an "off" day and make a mistake, there goes the question in my coworkers' heads. And it gets a little old to see one of the other token females pull me aside and tell me how "you have to choose between family and career" (says what law? You think abortion is so great? Then how come every woman I know who's had one has lingering deep-seated psychological problems as a direct result?) and "if you get fat, you're not going to be successful" (If one serving of french fries is going to take me from on the thin side to obese, that would indicate a very serious metabolic problem.) And if one more bitter, dried up old baby boomer lady tells me how she had it sooo bad at work when she was my age as justification for acting like a complete bitch towards me, I am going to vomit. None of this shit inspires me to be selflessly devoted to my career.

And by the way, my impending nuptials and family plans do not make my intelligence or education a waste. Was I obligated to be homeless before I snagged a husband? Apparently so... before I met Mr. TMCL, seemed like almost every guy I met "the normal way" (not online, where you make said preferences clear upfront) just assumed that because damn me, I have a job, meant I categorically hate children. Nor should I have ever been put down by the feminazi fringe or kicked out of the sisterhood for wanting these things. You want to advance women? That's what this woman wants, and is what is best for me. If I'm smart enough to have a career, I'm smart enough to figure that out. Deal.

Thanks to their influence, there is limited knowledge of public health as well. Why should my gynecologist feel nervous to tell me that fertility declines sharply at 35ish? Even if you don't have an MD, is this really a suprise? Do the majority of women you know give birth in their 40s and 50s (without donor eggs, multiple miscarriages, and birth defects)? How about tell us the truth, even if it's not what you think we want to hear? Or should all doctors just not give us bad news? If you had lung cancer, would you want your doctor to say, "everything's cool, keep smoking 3 packs a day" or "get some chemo and nicorette unless you want to die a slow painful death"? It's my vagina, not an arena for sociopolitical action. Women deserve to know the truth.

If feminists really do speak for the wants of all women, then why all the backlash? If all women need men like fishes needs a bicycles, want careers not babies, etc, then why is it certain married women (with or without kids) that I know froze me out between the year-plus period between "turned 26 without a ring" and "got engaged"? Why did my soon-to-be-ex-doctor's ignorant-ass nurse recently tell me I'm mortally sinning to be taking birth control? Why does it feel like I'll be getting married, gaining social acceptance, and committing a major act of civil and social disobedience all in two little words: "I do."?

Women who want marriage and children can follow their hearts (which will whoop-a-dee-doo, get them conditionally "in good" with these bitches) and then run into a bunch of brick walls put there by the feminists. They can pay a big fat marriage penalty tax. They may be (justifiably) scared to tell their bosses that they're pregnant. Their health insurance might not cover childbirth and/or pregnancy, and they might lose their job if they take maternity leave. They might be forced to work when they'd rather be at home with their children, thanks to tax rates being jacked up by "feminist" programs designed to force women out of the house. Daycare might eat up most of their salary, and their employers might not be willing to let them leave on time to pick up their kids there. How is this advancing women?

And how could I be for any of this in good conscience unless I hated men or hated myself?

So until the woman's movement is legitimitely interested in making this world a better place for all women, without making it a worse place for the unborn or for me, count me out.

Reality bites, would you like some enablement with that?

2006-10-29T15:30:00.000-05:00

In honor of WTP...

There are some major social and macro economic problems in this country that need to be fixed. The housing market is out of control. Our national deficit is higher than most of us can count. Many of us literally can't count, or read, or speak proper English. Inflation on housing, education, healthcare, etc, is out of control. Americans are fatter, more STD-ridden, and more depressed than ever. Homosexuals are being denied their civil rights. Jerry Falwell, Al Sharpton, Bat Buchanan, my fifth grade teacher, and Gloria Steinem are all still alive and kickin'.

But at the same time... we all have choices. Granted, we have a limited subset of options, but from those we are able to choose what we decide is the best option for us. Sometimes, we wish there was a broader selection in the subset or realize we made a wrong choice somewhere along the line. But if we can't realize that at least sometimes, to a degree, it's our fault, then we're never going to be able to make our lives better.

Life is unfair, and someone will always have it better than you. Nobody is "entitled" to anything they don't work for; if they still get it anyway, that's luck and you look like an immature ass to begrudge them. You never know what dissapointments someone else has suffered, and unless they directly and purposely injured you to get to where they are, get over yourself. If you're so jealous of what they have, ask them how they got that. The truth isn't always what you want to hear, but you can't fix your problems without honest understanding of the underlying causes.

And nobody's obligated to say "Oh poor baby, the world is so evil and none of your problems are your fault!"

If you don't agree with this philosophy, you're sure as hell not alone. Just understand that bitching and whining about how the world isn't handed to you on a silver platter isn't going to make anybody take you seriously or help you succeed.

The Nightmare before Christmas

2006-10-29T14:50:00.000-05:00

Why in the hell is Christmas all over the place?! There are Christmas commercials on TV, Christmas stuff in the stores, etc... It's not even Halloween Yet!

Where have I been, I could have sworn that the big Santa ballon passing down the street at the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (ever wonder how much of that, we, the Macy's customers, pay for in markup on the stuff we buy there?) was the start of the gimme gimme Christmas season.

I remember 20 years ago putting my poor parents (actually any adult with the misfortune to be within earshot) through 30 some days of "So is it Christmas yet? What about tomorrow? The next day? How about the next day after that? I was only a little kid, how was I supposed to know I was probably annoyin the crap out of these people? Now it seems that old bitch Karma is gonna pay me back, making me listen to 60 or 70-some days of "So is it Christmas yet?" from my own kid.

Such is the price we pay when we loathe liberals enough to practice Christianity and reproduce!

David's Bridal...

2006-10-23T16:39:00.000-04:00

You sell my phone number to one more freaking telemarketer, and I'll post nasty things about you on the Internet. You got that?!? I'll be getting a dress somewhere else (I heard your alterations suck anyways) and I won't be patronizing any of the scores of vendors you so kindly sent my way, to call my cell phone during peak hours.

Asshats.

The Best Arguement for Immigration in the US, aka TMCL Has No Shame

2006-10-23T11:27:00.000-04:00

The sweet little old Indian woman who gave me my facial this Saturday was horrified to learn I am only 27, based on the little wrinkles I already have around my eyes. They rivaled hers, and she has grandkids. Perhaps I should have mentioned, this is par for the course for the lightskinned, but I didn't. So I scored about $50 in free samples of enzyme and collagen anti-aging creams. Sweet!

Charities that suck

2006-10-20T15:53:00.000-04:00

Because I'm a misanthropic b*tch, I passed on the opportunity this weekend to plunk down a couple hundred clams for a charity function for "the arts" (ie, for an ego-trippin', "look at ME, I'm making a difference!" stuffy, expensive dinner party). What the hell is "the arts" anyway? Because Shakespeare makes me want to stick a fork in my eye, and all paintings kinda look the same after awhile. I could give a rat's ass if going to a charity gala is "the thing to do", the place to see and be seen. If people REALLY cared about the cause and wanted to advance it, they'd take the tens of thousands of dollars spent to throw the party and donate it to that cause.

Millions, if not billions of people are going to bed hungry, dying of nasty diseases that there is no cure for, dying of nasty diseases that there is a cure for but they're too poor to afford the $20 for the medicine, sleeping in the streets, being tortured and/or sold into slavery, etc, and you want me to make sure the people of Liberal Yuppieland have a few more freakin' Monets and Picassos to look at. Where in the hell are your priorities? Get a grip!

You want to really make a difference and give someone less fortunate a better life? Then actually DO something, be all action and little talk, ie, make your MO the direct opposite of how most people in Liberal Yuppieland roll. And by DO something, I mean, make sure people's base needs for living are met. Start at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and work up. Does everyone around you have food to eat? A house to live in? Potable water to drink? Adequate medical care? Adequate parents or caretakers? Major social problems solved? No? Then make sure that's taken care of first. Spend an afternoon at a Habitat for Humanity build. Take in a foster child. Drop off groceries at a food pantry.

And, for the love of GOD, if you are nice enough to contribute your time, money, resources to the charity of your choice... good for you, and keep it, up, but don't make the rest of us listen to it endlessly. It makes you sound like an effing tool who only does this to inflate your ego and perpetuate your own sense of self-righteousness*. And don't turn around and act like an asshole to the people you encounter in day-to-day life either - it only confirms our suspicions. You can and do make a difference by doing little acts of kindness to one random person - even if you two are the only ones to ever know about it.

*Unless you are YakLover, in which case, your idea to "get lost" and show your date the house we helped build is pretty ingenious. God help the poor people who have to live in something our team put together. I'm betting Leaning Tower of Pisa by '09.

Don't let facts and figures get in the way of self-validation...

2006-10-16T11:40:00.000-04:00

Thanks to EvilElf, who I know sent this to me because of my bitching that I'm getting married "old"....

Which is it, New York Times? Is it that "To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered" (the title of today's article) or is it that "Among Americans aged 35 to 64, married couples still make up a majority of all households" (caption 5 on your slideshow?). In fact, the poll comes up with married NYT online readers being 61%.

Yes, folks are marrying later. Yes, more people are divorcing. This is not a suprise. But comments like "married couples have finally slipped into the minority" make the writer sound a wee bit biased. Why is it that the happily cohabitating couples make the papers, while the relationships that end because one partner insists on marriage and the other doesn't, or the relationships that result in marriage strictly because one partner realizes that it's the only way s/he's going to be able to keep the other don't get mentioned? I know of maybe two cohabitating couples where both partners are happy with their status (most cohabitating couples I know have a situation where one person feels "in limbo" or cheated by the "just living together" status), and many married couples.

Yes, Sex and the City is a cool show. But obviously, the NYT is trying to validate the choices and situations of much of NYC's demographic of young swingin' singles. Nothing wrong with being a swingin' single if that's the life for you. But for goodness' sake, at least let people make informed choices using accurate information. You mofos are as liberal-raggy as the Washington Post and the Boston Globe!

Or they could let gay people get married. Civil rights are a terrible thing to waste.

"In all our years of searching, we have found that the only thing that makes the emptiness bearable is each other..."

2006-10-14T14:02:00.000-04:00

Thank you, Amy, for helping make the emptiness that much more bearable. I'm glad we're friends.

Now help me think of an alias for you...

Medical unethics

2006-10-03T14:55:00.000-04:00

So I just stopped by the health fair at work because I can't resist free pens, magnets, and candy. I'm a dork like that. I grabbed a really cool metal pen and a hershey kiss off a table and heard:

"Hi there! I'm Casey! Let me tell you all about liposuction!"

And this woman around my mom's age launches into a looooong description and sales pitch of lipo (thank you so much for telling me what liposuction is, I'd never heard of it), what she can do for people, shows me all the before and after pictures of her surgery, and asks my name so she'll recognize it when I call for a consultation.

Um. I'm a size 2, very much height-weight-proportional, to the point where my cheeks sink in a little sometimes. At my last medical appointment, the nurse even told me, "You don't need to be any skinnier." And obviously (I like to think) I look to be a younger woman, which means I'm probably not even started with, much less done with, having kids, so having any sort of plastic surgery on my body at this point would be pretty stupid unless it was reconstructive or something. (Who'd want to spend all the dough on lipo just to get all fat and pregnant again in a few years?)

Basically, I am by no stretch of the imagination overweight, and quite honestly I am APPALLED that a professional who'd taken the Hippocratic Oath would try to sell me liposuction! What the hell is wrong with people, a significant fat loss on me would probably make certian organs in my body stop functioning. Sure, businesses are all about making money, but jeez, medical malpractice suits aren't cheap either!

If you're not even engaged yet...

2006-10-01T08:31:00.000-04:00

... then WTF are you doing on TheKnot? Apparently, there are discussion forums for those of you planning your wedding possibly ages before your guy is even thinking of marriage and/or before you may have even met said guy, or insulting us engaged women by asking us how we "conned" our fiances into proposing.

Um. Is it humanly possible that we were proposed to on our own merit? Sure, many of us were probably ready before our fiances and husbands were, and in fact these men may know deep down that we deserve nothing less and marriage/kids/house/SUV/etc are the only way to keep us.

And these women may also, be deserving of nothing less.... but it's a little hard to keep that in mind when you read:

"Hi, I'm 19 and been with my man for 3 months. He hasn't even brought up marriage yet. I'm sooo annoyed because I've been planning my wedding for four years now and I need to get married on 7/7/07, have been dreaming of it since kindergarden. Ladies, how did you make your men propose???"

"I met my BF in grad school and have been with him 16 years, lived together 14... He has never brought up the subject of marriage, why hasn't he? Should I trap him, I assume that's how you all got your fiances and husbands? Speaking of which, I'm in my mid-40s... that isn't too late to have a healthy baby is it?"

Honestly, you have no business planning your wedding or hanging out on a wedding website before you get the ring on your finger. You just aren't. And if you do decide to hang out on TheKnot before you're engaed... be understanding when you become a big fat joke. You look pathetic. I wouldn't wish being unmarried on my worst enemy. But... no matter when you meet Mr. Right or how many frogs you kiss first, a marriage is something you have to earn and continue to work at. There are many nice/normal "knotties" who are just freakin appalled by this stuff, and joke to make you and your brand of psychosis less frightening.

Now I'm not condoning the self-righteousness of some of the engaged and married women on there or in the real world at all... Not everyone who's reached their mid-20s and not found a husband is in her predicament because she's a bar-hopping, disease ridden slut, as some of these "knotties" claim. There are such things as being unlucky in love, having to kiss a few frogs before you find your prince, still getting your self/career situated in your 20s and preferring to do that on your own, etc, that happen and that people shouldn't be judged for. But reading pages and pages of crap like what's posted above, and it's easy to see how some of these "Ring on My Finger Club" ladies feel so smug and superior - Holy stereotype, you make all single women look psycho and desperate by writing crap like this.

Update (for my male readers' peace of mind): No! Not all women are like these psychos on the Knot... 99% of women do NOT start planning their weddings before they hit puberty, and 99.9repeating% of us would NEVER trap a guy. Only the morally bankrupt and desperate do that. Geez! Although Ibid, your reaction is the exact proof of my point that a very few bad seeds are perpetuating these horrific stereotypes about all womenkind. Although seriously, only a moron wouldn't notice if their girlfriend had poked a bunch of holes in a condom.)

The Popular... Cancer?!

2006-09-29T09:56:00.000-04:00

I'll be the first to admit, I'm registered for some of the Cook for the Cure items at Bed Bath and Beyond. Why not, they're really cute and I like the fact that some of the profits from that overpriced stuff are being donated to cancer research.

What I'm wondering though is why is it only offered in pink? Other gynecological cancers are just as deadly to women and just as underfunded as breast cancer. And there's just as much misinformation and lack of information out there. In fact, thanks to Managed Health Care, your gynecologist isn't necessarily required to *tell* you if you are at a high risk for cervical cancer (AKA abnormal pap smear), the onus is on you to hunt him or her down and ask. Why is there no hip, trendy cause to raise awareness of and find a cure for these cancers? Or any of the myriad other cancers that there are that affect both women and men?

Cancer totally sucks and I'm all for finding a cure. My heart goes out to everyone else who's lost someone they loved, watched a friend suffer through chemo, or gotten that lifealtering diagnosis themselves. There are just far too many of us affected out there. But that said, why the emphasis on just one specific kind? Where and how are the survivors of the other types of cancers and the loved ones of those who lost the battle supposed to rally and find solace? Bravo to the Susan G. Komen crowd for raising the money and awareness that they have - more power to you all! But is contemporary American society really so shallow that we need a cute little gimmick before we're able to take notice of and care about a very dire issue, before we have to deal with it on a personal level?

A great idea would be to design a line of coffeemakers to support some other kind of cancer. My buddy DonTrump at home tells me that coffee is America's biggest source of antioxidants. Sad but beleiveable if it's true. Make them as cute as this Kitchenaid stuff and they would sell like crazy.

I challenge any of you internets to come up with ONE product whose sale benefits any other type of cancer, much less a line of said products, and I will make sure to register for it.

PS - How said is it we have to sell pink blenders and such to take care of our own - none of whom have done a damn thing to deserve their awful fate - while we blow trillions of dollars on a useless, fruitless war?

I wanna play!

2006-09-28T17:04:00.000-04:00

I want to add to the Banned Books List.

Why or how the freak my childhood favorites James and the Giant Peach (adventures of a little boy and his insect friends), How to Eat Fried Worms (boy stands up to bully), A Wrinkle in Time (this Lutheran minister I know sees Christian themes woven throughout, but a cool intergalactic adventure nonetheless), and The Pigman (I could understand My Darling, My Hamburger being on that list, but seriously, you canNOT hate Paul Zindel!) got on the list is beyond me. Many of them won Newberry and Caldecott medals too, so my literary taste can't be that bad. I'm sure The Cat in The Hat, Chronicles of Narnia, Superfudge, the Ramona books, and Pat the Bunny will follow though.

But anyway, my additions are:

Bartleby the Scrivener
Les Miserables
Everything by Shakespeare and Herman Melville
Oedipus Rex
The Old Man and The Sea
Killer Angels
Canterbury Tales and everything else that was left in "Olde English"

See, I found them so boring that they offended me. When I was in high school, I'd rather have gouged my eyes out than read them. I never understood the value of universally-acknowledged shitty books in the classroom.

And even though I'm not even pregnant, I'm afraid that when I do have children, they'll get their hands on one of these books and never want to read or go to school again, thus becoming vidiots who live in my basement masturbating to anime porn and smoking weed till they're 60. Therefore, there is a clear link between Shakespeare, sexual deviancy, and recreational drug use.

Nice going, assholes...

2006-09-26T19:48:00.000-04:00

This is what happens when you attempt to fight a war on terror directed against your country, somewhere besides your country's soil. Um, I got B's and C's during my brief disaster - I mean, stint - as a Polysci major and I could tell you that.

Lissen up, Tex: Instead of continuing this ridiculous "Hafields and McCoys Face off" on the global arena, why don't you close the damn border (no, not the one with Canada!) that terrorists from around the world leak through, crack down on expired Visas and such, break down the light-years of red tape that keep the government moving like molasses, and actually do your freaking job and take care of your country?

If you've ever spoken to me or read my blog for 30 seconds... you know I am not some hippie peacenik by a long shot. I am all for war if it's going to actually accomplish protecting our country. Well... you all have spent the better past of the past decade making this country less safe through your freaking stupidity.

We could have had John Kerry just hand the country on a platter to Al-Quaeda for a lot cheaper.

Open Letter to Liberals Who Lurk Here

2006-09-26T18:07:00.000-04:00

Thanks for stopping by my blog, I always love to "meet" new internets.

Although I'm not really a "political" person, my values/viewpoints/etc tend to be more of the right wing variety. I have certain frequent visitors who have different worldviews from me, but in general are able to be respectful and contribute positively to my posts, even if they think I'm on glue.

However, I am aware that the word "Liberal" denotes "intolerance for anyone who thinks differently from I", so if you are a Liberal, much of what I have to say will probably really piss you off.

But as you have noticed, I have the comments moderation button turned on. That means if you post here trying to attack me personally, ie, suggest I join a certain hate group (hello! Even if I didn't find that shit completely repugnant, the fact remains I'm not a WASP) just because I choose not to live downtown, cuss me out because I think some public figure you adore is a douchebag, or tell me the world would be a better place if I shot myself because I don't like terrorists, or call me a word that even I wouldn't say because I like Israel, etc, etc, I'll be disapproving your comments.

Am I suppressing your freedom of speech? To a degree, but tough shit. Last I checked, the Internet was a lawless and nebulous body that isn't governed by a Constitution. This is MY webpage and I am the master of all I survey here. Love it or leave it.

And if you don't like my color scheme, such that it bothers you enough to mention it on your website - bite me. That or help me design a new template.

XO,
Toomuchcoffeelady

Need YOUR Book Reviews

2006-09-26T13:19:00.000-04:00

Proof I am not ill-read, uneducated, or a dumb blonde perhaps?

I am receiveing feedback from friends and family (loyal On My Home Planet readers) that I would be less po'd and wound tight if I stopped reading so many nonfiction books about how evil this world is for awhile, and subsitituted them with fluffy Chick Lit "crap".*

So I need reccommendations. I usually wait till it's available not only in paperback, but also on half.com and its peers. I am more Red Dress Ink than Harlequin (although in the 90's, they served their purpose, namely, irritating my mom. But back then, a perm served me well too...) I like Valerie Frankel, VC Andrews (the real one, not her ghostwriter), Sarah Mlynowski, Rebecca Agiewich, Claire Zulkey type stuff.

*Except for Dr. Brainiac, who has made me promise to give Slander a chance. It's a pity Ann Coulter offended me so much with her cruel comments about 9/11 widows (my first time reading her stuff); and noticeably absent from her list of "liberal rag" papers is The Boston Globe; otherwise, I might have grown to be a fan otherwise.

Size 0 Isn't Always too Skinny!

2006-09-23T12:22:00.000-04:00

Those of you who know me in real life (esp those who have been clothes shopping or to the beach with me) can tell you that I'm rocking a tiny potbelly and a dash of cellulite on my thighs. It sucks when a back injury makes your beloved daily run not so much an option anymore at the ripe old age of not-even-old-enough-to-rent-a-car-yet, leaving lameassed powerwalking suggested by your chiropractor as a viable alternative. Consequently, I no longer hit the pavement and/or make it to the gym as much as I should. I was actually considering working out more until the European fashion industry told me that - by virtue of my clothing size - not only am I unquestionably borderline anorexic, but that the mere sight of me could potentially push some adolescent girl over the edge towards developing an eating disorder.

How am I sooo skinny if I have noticeable flab? By the dictates of London and their blanket rules for all of womenkind, of course. Here's how it works: rocking the potbelly, generally eating cholesterol/sugar/bleachedflour-laden foods, exercising maybe once a week and eating veggies about twice a week, I naturally stay at a size 2 (I can wear 14/16 kids in a pinch). What can I say? Genetics have given me a small skeleton, such that no matter how fat or thin I am, I always look "small". And I have met quite a few healthy grown women next to whom I look Amazonian. My dad and almost everybody in his family regularly shovels in enough food to feed a small country in one sitting and still looks like a bunch of pipecleaners knotted together. My metabolism isn't quite that insane, but eff it, I am beautiful and I like me.

From a medical perspective though, I should be eating better and exercising more. My cholesterol number is nearly double that of my body weight in pounds. Genetics probably also gave me a proclivity towards heart disease and osteoporosis. Etc. But if I were to clean up my diet and tone up like logically it sounds like I should do in the better interests of my health, I'd very likely drop a clothing size, which according to these ignoramouses, would plant me firmly in the "anorexic" category. Nevermind that I am nowhere near as skinny as the size-0 Lilly Cole. If I were that bony, I'd probably wear like a size 8 kids'. Amazingly enough, everyone is built differently, thus it's asinine to make blanket rules that a certain clothing size is just across-the-board dangerously thin. Should women who subsist on iceberg lettuce, evian, and nose candy be portrayed as "how all 3 Billion of you ladies are supposed to look"? Absolutely not, and the misogynistic assholes who run the fashion industry need their asses kicked for promoting that. But the EU needs to recognize that not every size 0 got that way via some unnatural and unhealthy means.

Here's the irony in all this though: Bravo to London and Madrid for not wanting young women to see only one narrow (pun intended) standard of beauty. But if you're going to push the fact that everyone's built differently, be enlightened enough to recognize that there are plenty of healthy, well-fed size 0s out there. Emphasize more BMI, a far more objective way to measure fat, rather than just a clothing size. Journalists reporting on this, that goes for you too. Excessively thin models are the problem, not size 0 models. You can be one without being the other. Get it right, and stop using "size 0" and "anorexic" interchangeably, it makes you sound ignorant.

Furthermore, the ugly truth is that it's a deeper seeded issue than fashion models that causes people to have eating disorders. If modern human society for two seconds stopped sending people, especially women, the message that our intrinsic moral value as a person is determined solely how physically pretty others perceive us to be, then maybe young women wouldn't be pushed to go to such extremes to meet these beauty standards. If European legislators are that concerned about eating disorders, they need to treat the actual problem rather than its symptoms. Problem is it takes far more guts and far more work to fix the real problem.

And kudos to France for being above this jackassery. The scrawny little genes of one of your native daughters are in part to blame for my tininess anyway.

Welcome to "The Club"

2006-09-23T04:51:00.000-04:00

The "Ring on My Finger" club that is. In the eyes of much of society, engagement isn't about "getting ready to get married." Engagement is about "OK, I definitely have to treat this person like a legitimate human being, if I haven't been already."

And no, I can't make a happy "I'm engaged!" post. Sure, I'm happy, but this is my blog and I like to bitch! None of you are here for my positive sunshininess anyway. So bitch I shall...

When I turned 26 a year ago and was -gasp!- unmarried and childless, it gave people cause to be judgemental and act superior. A few people who I had thought I would be tight with till the day I died decided I was a moral failure as a woman, completely toxic, and in one case, too dangerous an influence to be around their child. I stopped getting invited to hang out with certain people, socializing was for "married couples only." What I did and did not choose to do in my spare time was up for public criticism as though it were a moral issue. I was bombarded with the messages that I was still single because I wasn't smart enough, interesting enough, spiritual enough, slutty enough, educated enough, a good enough person, fit enough, pretty enough, on and on ad nauseum. Heard some stupid bullshit preaching about how I'd better not want a family, and why the hell haven't I gotten that graduate degree I know I never want, but society seemed to demand of me as a historically overacheiving, 26-and-unmarried woman? (Holy hell, can we please let that stupid 1500 on the 1995 SATs go already?! I mean, that was so long ago that I hadn't even heard of the Internet! Not to mention, my being intelligent doesn't negate my right to decide what's going to make me happy and pursue those goals!) I was a weak and needy person for wanting to get married, a bad modern-woman for wanting children, etc. My marital status or lack thereof, was far more a product of "lack of options" than an actual conscious choice on my part, and those close to me were aware that I was unhappy about my situation. Beautiful and glamourous though she was, I just never wanted to be the Wilona in the Good Times of my life.

Now I am legitimized. A carat and a half on my left hand is the key for me to be "worthy", who knew? I'd have bought one for myself years ago if I'd known how much nicer it was going to make everybody act towards me. Now that I'm part of the "Ring on My Finger Club", people who turned on me before are slowly crawling back to me wanting to make nice. But what does it say about your character that someone has to be married for you to want to treat them like ahuman being? (Sidenote... I am also encountering those who apparently have been feeling all along, "Well Toomuchcoffeelady has XYZ and I don't, but I'm married and she's not so I'm going to throw my happy personal life in her face!" and are now at a loss for grounds for feeling superior.) People now accept me and my choices for what they are, without trying to tie some negative moral significance to it to cut me down. It's all of a sudden OK for me to have the personal goals that I do - strong marriage, having children and being a damn good mom to them - it's OK for me to define and go after what makes me happy now, I'm getting married! Although I am still the same mortal with the same shortcomingas as before, nobody has criticized me nor suggested that I do something to better myself (which I heard basically daily as one of the Not-engaged-not-married). I am slowly noticing adults (the kind who remember the 70's) seem to be taking things that I have to say more seriously, like having a ring has made me smarter and more perceptive than ever before.

The funny thing is, as much as people would bash the institutions of marriage and motherhood in front of me when I was single, or pitched them to me as something I somehow wasn't good enough to be able to handle had the option been available, they've completely stopped that now. Um, if you have been blissfully happy all along with your (married with children) life, why did you make it sound to me like you were miserable? If you agreed with me that my old "all I have going for me is a resume, fat paycheck, etc" existence was a shallow and piss-poor substitute for what really matters in life, why didn't you tell me so or even try to help me figure a way out of it? Better you had been honest with me and tell me what I have been missing - even if the truth hurts. And it's not like I hadn't already figured that out. That is what you're supposed to do if you care about someone - be honest with them, even if it's just unconstructive criticism, know that calling out the elephant in the room alone sometimes can be enough to help them. When you're not, it makes me wonder what else you see in my life that I don't that you could help me by briging to my attention. Last I checked, we were here to help each other.

I don't know why, but as a society, we seem quite hung up on other people's choices, especially those that have no effect on us and are really none of our business. For whatever reason, the "marrieds vs singles" seems to be such a hot button.

It's not that I'm complaining about the attention and special treatment, but the fact is that the support should have been there for me all along. My moral value as a human being and who I am on the inside have not changed just because I'm engaged; I am no more or less deserving of being treated well than I was pre-engagement. Those in my life should have been accepting me for who I am, what I want out of life no matter how close or far I was from attaining those goals, and where I am in life all along, not just suddenly granting acceptance to me because a man gave me a diamond.

Why Gentrification Sucks

2006-08-30T15:53:00.000-04:00

Gentrification - n. Misguided attempt on the part of the liberal self-perceived cognoscenti to alleviate their karmas of white guilt, which is misguided because it's actually racist in the premise that poor, dangerous, innercity, nonwhite neighborhoods will start getting better solely because Caucasian yuppiefolk move in.

Not that I don't appreciate liberals' efforts to make my stomach turn (ironically, nausea = toomuchcoffeelady eats less = stays skinny = stays closer to oppressive beauty standards of the evil Western patriarchy = pisses off the feminazis) but if I hear one more self-righteous yuppie jackass brag about the condo they just bought in the "gentrifying" area of such-and-such, and how they're "helping the neighborhood" and "helping the city" simply by gracing a historically poor, nonwhite neighborhood with their presence, I am going to kick their ass.

First of all - Just because something is a good real estate investment, doesn't necessarily make it a good idea or a safe thing to live there. For example, if an area is crime-ridden and poor, and some idiot gets the idea to raze *some* Section 8 housing and displace its residents to it's-their-problem-where to build luxury condos and offices right next door to remaining Section 8 housing, crackhouses, pawnshops, etc... resentment is going to build and eventually erupt in violent crime. Directed, I'll bet any money, against the uppity newcomers that live and work there. Not to mention that until the neighborhood/city cleans up significantly, you'll be putting your kids in private schools just so that they learn to read before they hit puberty.

Second - You're all openminded and hip and want to live in a "diverse" neighborhood, go for it. Knock yourself out. In fact, stay out of the suburbs, where there are already too many people and not enough homes. But don't put in my face every 10 seconds how you're "helping the city" and "enlightening the common folks" by living in a nice pad in the ghetto. As a self-supporting, taxpaying adult in a capitalist country, I am entitled to decide where I live. If the "energy" (traffic, crime, cramping, smell, noise, violence, corruption, rampant STDs, and endless political bullshit) of city life isn't for me, it isn't for me. Doesn't make me some elitist, racist, etc (shame on you, accusing an "oppressed" woman like myself of being an oppressor!) just because I like to see trees and grass outside my window. You're not God and it isn't your place to judge me anyway.

Third - What the eff makes you think that you are really "better" than poor minorities, just because you have light skin and a few more degrees than they? Are you seriously that egotistical and condescending? Are you going to quote Neitzsche at your new neighbors, and that's going to solve all their problems, put food on their tables, get them health insurance and good jobs, keep their kids out of gangs and get them into good colleges and careers? If your house gets broken into, if you get attacked some night coming home from work by some violent gang member, are you going to tell them about the hidden sexual imagery in Shakespeare and expect them to leave you alone? Do you seriously think that the minimum wage jobs created when Starbucks moves into the neighborhood will lift your neighbors out of poverty? Don't tell me for one second that you're going to sit down with your 22 year old single mom of 4 kids neighbor struggling to make ends meet and offer her concrete solutions and assistance on how to improve her lot in life. THAT is helping people. Moving people and their problems from one part of town to another doesn't help for jack.

&*%$ You and Your Double Standards!

2006-08-15T12:41:00.000-04:00

Lord knows I hates me some whiny, chronically victimized feminazis who complain endlessly about how this horrific, awful world oppresses women, and find sexism at every turn, but I have to complain about a double standard here that women face. Why do people who treat us like they would treat another man expect us to act like ladies in return?

I get it that Liberal Yuppieland is in a "neutral zone", with "Northern charm and Southern efficiency". I get that being a Northerner, I am more prone to a more blunt style of communication that offends the politically correct and sometimes entails 4 letter words that get beeped out on TV, and that that's not everyone's bag, but GOOD LORD.

Men, if you raise your voice at a woman, get in her face and cuss at her (assuming she has self-respect and a backbone), she will yell and cuss at you back. This holds true whether at the office, driving, or in team sports. So if you call me a "f-ing bitch" or tell me to have intercourse with myself or something equally lovely, just because I cut you off in traffic or make a call you disagree with, plan for me to respond in kind. Just don't turn around and tell me that I'm not being "ladylike" for returning your treatment, and don't complain to others that "ladies shouldn't talk the way TMCL just talked to me."

I act like a lady 99% of the time, but if you're not going to speak to me in an ungentlemanly manner, I owe you no politeness. Either you can act like a gentleman and not raise your voice or cuss at me, or you can take it like a man when I give your rudeness right back to you.

But you can't act like an @sshole and have me respond in a demure, ladylike manner. Doesn't work like that.

I have figured out exactly what is wrong with some people

2006-08-13T20:18:00.000-04:00

The complete and utter inability to see that just because something is right for YOU, does not make it right for the entire rest of humanity. The choices that many people make in their lives may well have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on yours (provided they're not in a position of power). Furthermore, just because someone does something with their life, doesn't mean they're forcing you to do it with yours.

Morality is not always cut and dried. Right vs. Wrong can oftentimes be such a multifaceted entity, that it's not always the best idea to make snap judgements about others when their choices aren't hurting people. And a lot of things in reality, needn't be made into moral issues, because they just boil down to preferences, personal choices, etc.

We're morally obligated to be good to one another, but at the end of the day, YOU are the only one who you have to look in the eyes in the mirror everyday so you need to be true to yourself. You really can't be a good person if you're betraying yourself.

That will be all.

Open Letter to those who entertain me

2006-08-11T16:57:00.000-04:00

Now that the parents are home safe and accounted for, I can return to getting my thong in a bunch over petty crap once again.

Such as books and TV.

Bitch the first: How F*CKING long is it going to take for Freakonomics to come ou in paperback? It's been out for close to a year. Seriously, I don't spring for hardbacks, so the publishing industry needs to start printing paperbacks specifically to accomodate me and my wishes.

Bitch the second: Is there a reason that every single bookstore within a 10 mile radius of my work and home is only carrying the first and third books in the "Uglies" trilogy? I breezed through Uglies in a day and a half (would've been a day if I still had the energy to not sleep like I did in college, sad that I can feel how I've aged in a lousy half-decade) and now I can't find Pretties anywhere! And no, ordering off Amazon isn't an option, I want it right this second and I don't want to have to pay shipping. And effing put Specials in paperback already, GOSH!

Bitch the third: The Cartoon network needs to start putting the Dr. Tran cartoons back on the air, and only air Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episodes that feature Cheese. If two of your "obscure ad campagin" billboards feature Cheeseisms, then he's obviously the funniest character ever created and you need to put him on your show more often cause it's lame-o without him. And for Cripes' sake, put Family Guy on during normal waking hours. Cause Toomuchcoffeelady said so. (And internets, no comments about me needing to buy a Tivo or peeps in their mid-20s being too old for cartoons. I will hear none of that!)

My life will be so much easier once the world realizes it's all about me.

Attention Terrorists

2006-08-10T11:26:00.000-04:00

"100 years ago, you were living in tents in the desert, and in 100 years, you'll be back there again." - Suriana

And the reason that will happen is because this terrorism bullshit is making everyone hate you, your culture, and your faith. Pity too, cause many of the Arabs and Muslims I know, although they likely will never go down in history books, are top-notch human beings.

But then the vast majority of the world does not in a "diverse" metropolis, and does not have a circle of friends that (de facto) resembles a Bennetton ad. Just because I know that not all Arabs and Muslims are bad people, doesn't mean the whole world knows that. At all.

Here is what you fuckers are actually doing: Sure, you are making air travel a hassle and scaring the piss out of people now. BFD, so I'll be roadtripping instead of flying on my next vacation. The beach will be there next year, and the year after, and the year after, till the end of the world. But you are making people the world over hate people of your ethnic group and religion, and it will come back to bite you in the ass, sometime very soon.

You're pissed about Israel? I don't see any Jewish extremist groups trying to murder the whole world. As part of a growing international anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment, Palestinians and their cause will get less and less popular. People may start turning Zionist just to piss you off.

We all know how you get your money: oil. The world isn't just getting pissed about being anally raped at the gas pumps, even the biggest global warming skeptics are going to start buying hybrids and electric cars just to cut off you motherfuckers' revenue stream. Why line the pockets of your enemy so that they have more money to kill you?

Oh, and I understand this is your way of trying to force us all to convert to Islam? Uhh, don't think so, you're making it such that people around the world are viewing it on par with Satanism. Christian missionaries have at least learned to build hospitals, be civil, not be genocidal maniacs, and not be racist sexist assholes toward natives of the country that they're in; take a chapter out of their book.

And guess what? Asinine Western "political correctness" may have empowered Al-Quaeda's growth greatly, but there comes a point when people can have a funny way of putting their ability to not get killed over not hurting your feelings. And we're getting near that. Despite the "progressive" ideas perpetuated by those wacko liberals ("let's try to understand our attackers", etc), humans are at the core, humans, and can be very discriminatory. Student and work visas for Arabs may mysteriously dry up, setting your ethnic group behind the technology/education curve in coming generations.

So keep it up. In the long run, it's only your own people and your own cause that you are setting back.

PS - Can't say I've ever read the Koran, but I highly doubt it says anywhere in there that God is cool with you killing people, or just generally acting like sexist assholes either for that matter. And I doubt there are 72 virgins in all of Hell, where you will undoubtedly go. But maybe if you learned to follow the most basic post-Dark ages hygeine routines (such as showering more than once a decade), you wouldn't have to pound your camel's ass to get your rocks off in this world.

And fuck you.

PPS - If my parents are not back in the US and safe in the next 24 hours, I will make what you tried today look like child's play.

Why you are still single...

2006-08-08T14:20:00.000-04:00

Because your pickup lines suck!

Wanna see my room?

You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my whole fucking life.

Are you European? You look European... maybe did someone in your family come from Europe? (note: I am unmistakably Caucasian)

It's not that I'm looking for a greencard... it's just that I didn't believe in love until I saw you.

Hey, you in the sexy red backpack!

Can I read your palm? (from a clean-cut preppie type)

(In response to my telling him to go to hell) But heaven's right here, baby.

Dude: "I'll wake you up in time to go to confession tomorrow..."
Me: "No thanks, I don't sin."
Dude: "Oh, but the night is young, and we could sin at my house."
(And my beloved late grandfather used to question why I can't seem to find a nice Catholic guy)

Do you play sports?

Hey, Blondie! Let's f*ck!

When we were in 6th grade, I had a wet dream about you.

So, like, you like went to Catholic school? (huh huh heh heh) So, like, did you wear a uniform? Do you still have it? (huh huh heh heh) Did the nuns, like smack you when you were bad? (huh huh heh heh)

I have actually heard all of these, and the older I get, the more pathetic of lines I seem to hear. For these guys' sake, I hope they never run out of Kleenex.

On the upside though, crap like this stops the spread of STDs.

File Under: Movies I Will Not Be Seeing

2006-08-07T18:22:00.000-04:00

Specifically, World Trade Center.

It's a few weeks shy of 5 years since

- our country was hit by terrorists, shattering the sense of security and way of life many of us had cherished our entire lives;

- many families were brutally deprived of their children, parents, siblings, cousins, etc, knowing that they likely died a nasty, painful death;

and I for one am not psyched to see this movie. And I didn't even lose anyone I loved that day.

Have the wounds of the affected really healed that much that it isn't in horrendous taste to start profiteering? I think not. Seriously, Hollywood, have a little bit of class for once in your miserable, unoriginal existence and let people greive awhile longer before you go capitalizing on their misfortunes. Maybe I just had my head up my collegiate ass, but I sort of don't remember my grandparents and other surviving members of the Greatest Generation lining up to see Pearl Harbor (detailing the last brutal attack on this country), when it was released roughly 60 years after that tragedy. Just can't get psyched to pay $10 to have one of my nastier memories relived in gorier detail than I already remember it.

I mean, sure, preserve our history, this is a definite part of it. Just wait awhile to do so, say, until after our country stops doing such a piss poor job of maintaining national security and has defeats Al-Quaeda, and the would is better healed. (Hint to the Feds: try closing the borders, keeping better tabs on people's visas, and worrying less about political correctness and more about reality). God knows how many bereaved people have probably had to go back into therapy because of those previews being all over the TV this summer. I seriously can't imagine how it would make me feel to see a reenactment of a loved one's death on television or the big screen.

I suppose it would be too much to ask if a portion of the profits of this movie were going to help the families of those lost that day? Yeah, I forgot, it probably would be. The timing of the movie is still in piss-poor taste regardless though, so it's sort of a moot point anyway.

Electronic Disturbance and the Crapper: Fun on Craigslist

2006-08-03T15:55:00.000-04:00

I shamelessly stole this prank from male chauvanist pig DCB, whose blog offends, disgusts, and intrigues me. It's like a trainwreck; you don't want to see it, but can't.bring.self.to.look.away. DCB had waxed on about the housing crunch where he lives, posting genius phony Craigslist ads offering to rent out his carport, laundry room, closet, etc.

And people responded. DCB's parting shot?

Thanks to Kathryn for the tarp idea. Other ideas I’d do if I wasn’t bored with this:
1. Tent in the backyard.
2. Weather-proof treehouse.

I, however, was not bored yet, so I posted an ad for:

$100 - Cozy, Private Space for the Right Person
Reply to: hous-189742499@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-08-03, 2:58PM EDT

We have a spacious (10X10) weatherproof toolshed (with electrical outlet where you can plug in an extension cord and make your little house a home. A plug-in A/C unit and space-heater are yours to use while you live here. Shed has 2 windows that open and close, and a padlock (we will give you the combo) so that your stuff is secure while you are gone. Our house's prior owners were big DIY people and well... that just isn't us! We are a family of three, two professionals and a 4 year old. You won't need to see us that much if you don't want. We can even run a DSL cord outside if you wish. Plenty of off-street parking, or 3 blocks from the Metro (Yellow Line).

A friend (the link actually works now!) of mine suggested I add "nice cozy bushes so you can do your business" but I figured that would tip people off that I'm a troll, and nobody would write to me, which would spoil all my fun. So I went forward, toiletless, and here are the responses...

1. Hi, my name is XXX and i was interested in your ad on craigslist. I am 19 and i'm working full time down in falls church. feel free to ask me any questions you have. Please respond to xxxxxx@yahoo.com. I am VERY interested so a response would be greatly appreciated. Thank You! (Sent from a Federal Government email addy no less, your tax dollars at work).

2. hi
i really enjoyed reading about the space you are
listing on cl. i rented a similar space and lived in
it for a few years in alaska. i moved to dc from
there in october and am renting a basement in a
rowhome that costs a lot more a month that what you
are seeking.
i don't know what you mean by "DIY" people. please
explain. is there a bathroom or shower to use inside?
is there a sink with a slop bucket? at my other
small shed i lived in i hauled my own water and used
an outhouse and showered at the gym i worked at. i
have a shower where i work now but would be cool to
have use of toilet and shower in your house if you are
open to that.
please send a pic and tell me more about this place as
i'm very interested. i'm a good person, responsible,
have excellent references, as well as a small friendly
dog.
i look forward to hearing from you. thanks and peace,
XXX (i don't hit the shift key, so i can't get a decent job, and all i can afford is to live in a shed)

3. My name is XXX XXX and I might need a room for a few months. If you
could please contact me @ either xxxx-xxx-xxxx after 9:00pm or xxx-xxx-xxxx.
Thank You.

4. Hi,
I’m interested.
I’m looking for a cheap place, and for $100 a month I could pocket nearly my whole paycheck! Is there a good time for me to come check the place out?
Thanks (Goes on to include full name, job title, employer - a very reputable DC trade association - work address, and several phone numbers.)

5. I am very interested in this space. This would be an excellent opportunity for me as I am saving for a car and a few other things. My name is XXX XXX. I am 28 and currently employed on the weekends as a Certified Nursing Assistant and during the week as an electricians apprentice to save to finish nursing school. Please give me a call at xxx-xxx-xxx. Thank you for your time. (Remind me to just kill myself next time I get sick, lest I risk being treated by a medical professional who lives in a toolshed with 9th century sanitation facilities!!!)

6. I saw your add on Craigs List. I'm a 35 y/o, married, doctoral
student from the University of XXX, who is here in DC on an
internship at a UN agency. I need your place for the duration of my
stay, which will probably be till December. During this time, my
weekdays will be 8AM to at least 7PM out of the house. During the
weekends I might travel, and occasionally my wife (who is studying at
the University of XXX) might come up to spend a weekend with me.
If my profile fits your conditions, please call me @ xxx-xxx-xxx or
send me a reply email.
Many Thanks,
XXX (We all knew that the UN was a bunch of weirdo asshats, but this really takes the cake. To this gentleman's wife: There is such a thing as "grounds for divorce" and this is likely one of them in most states.)

7. I am the Great Cornholio. I have no bunghole. Therefore, I do not require a toilet. When can I move in?

Ok, joking about that last one, but still.

People. THE PLACE HAS NO TOILET. Usually if a living space has a bathroom, it is at least mentioned in the advertisment. Toolsheds do not often come equipped with a crapper, and yet only ONE person asked (the common sense of which is negated by the fact that he seemed waaaaay too interested in outhouses, slop buckets, etc).

Ironically, a post I made on CL that same day (asking a professional question) was flagged and deleted as inappropriate within the hour. But a bogus housing ad to come live in an imaginary family's imaginary toolshed, of course, perfectly kosher.

I weep for the future of humanity.

On Settling

2006-08-02T11:45:00.000-04:00

I am seeing and getting reports that too many people everywhere are just accepting crap and telling themselves they don't deserve any better. Obviously, YES, God/other people/the universe/whoever does not owe us much of anything, but since when is passivity one of the things you're "supposed to do"? Is there anything wrong with saying, "my life lacks this, I feel I need it to be happy, therefore I am going to pursue it" (provided you don't hurt anyone in the process)?

Take the comparison of my two ex-friend EngineerChick and friend CommiePinko, who found themselves pushing 30, single, and unhappy to be that way. EngineerChick took the path of least resistance - "I'm single because nobody wants to date a smart woman!" "If it was meant to be, it would have happened by now!" etc, chopped her hair, stopped wearing makeup because it's unnatural and she didn't want to represent herself falsely, started letting herself go, is a general b*tch to most everyone, and just to be extra "authentic", got herself some Yasmin (aka BC that doesn't provide any of the benefits of the fake hormones, like big boobs and clear skin) and settled for being the booty call of several nonspecial loser guys. Having nothing but a career and being lonely and bitter is noble, she's a martyr and anyone whose life doesn't suck cheated the system somehow. She's given up at age 32. CommiePinko, on the other hand, has always been honest about what he wants out of life, but manages not to bitch constantly when it doesn't just fall into his lap. He got involved in sports, local politics, volunteering, graduate school, his synagogue, makes friends wherever he goes with his positive attitude, throws cool parties, laughs off unfortunate craigslist faux pauses with minimal rubbing it in my face, and probably has one heck of a great time in life. He tried several dating sites, and I undestand has most recently had good luck with eharmony. (Yayy CommiePinko! Good luck!) CP has his whole life ahead of him at age 29. As one should.

Or two of my college classmates BitterDude and EvilElf with their careers. Both are very intelligent, leftish-leaning, somewhat idealistic, hardworking, and have tons of interests (some of which don't translate to high income). BitterDude convinced himself he "couldn't" accomplish the business or econ coursework that was available and strong in our liberal arts program at a top-ranked university. In his eyes, people who geared their studies and internships toward a more business route were stupid, selfish a*holes who made a concious choice not to help the world; people who had trust funds or rich parents or whatever and the associated other choices had had too much handed to them. Somewhere between his attitude, his unbending ideas, and his pooh-poohing of "networking" as being for the weak, he took a full year after graduating with massive loans to find a not-so-well-paying job that barely keeps him in his shitty efficiency 2 blocks from our college campus. Last I heard, he is working his butt off and still complaining about the "stupid" business majors who make twice what he does. EvilElf's family isn't rich either. She was still in school and barely old enough to buy beer when her parents cut her off. She chose a more business leaning major, that despite being the toughest in our school outside of pre-med, she did extremely well in. EvilElf didn't befriend people based on their dads' jobs, but when an internship came open at our friend PartyGirl's dad's firm, she wasn't too proud to apply. EvilElf now has a "corporate" job that doesn't necessarily fufill all her interests, but she sees the experience and the salary as means to a few different ends. I am sure her 9-5 life doesn't have her reeling on the edge of her seat, but she satisfies her interests through volunteer work, outside activities, reading, planning vacations, political involvement, and hopefully a secret project.... and now has decent enough work experience that she is exploring pursuing her dream job. She's a heck of a lot happier and infinitely more financially stable than BitterDude.

I could go on and on and on - by EngineerChick and BitterDude's mindset, people who:
-get medical treatments such as bypass surgery or allergy medicine;
-move themselves to a safer neighborhood;
-purchase homes;
-leave abusive relationships;
-get higher education;
-go to therapy;
-join activities they enjoy and make friends;
-bathe;
-etc
are all totally evil because they made their lives better by doing something that didn't happen naturally.

F*ck character building. There is nothing noble about suffering for suffering's sake. If you do something that makes you suffer, and nobody benefits from what you do, you're not a martyr, you're a tool. A tool in need of an attitude adjustment.

I mean, jeez, people! Who said you were obligated to be unhappy? Who are you helping? How can you say "it's not meant to happen because it's not being handed to me on a silver platter" when all the tools you need to make it happen are right there available to you?

If you are unhappy, get up off your ass, take off your blinders, and get your shit together. You're not getting any younger.

Happy Birthday Amy!

2006-07-31T22:20:00.000-04:00

To one of my favorite loyal readers (a few hours early)... Many happy returns! Hope this is your year!

Love,

TMCL

PS - Get yourself a blog one of these days!

TooMuchCoffeeLady is a Bad Single Woman

2006-07-30T18:48:00.000-04:00

That's right biotches... I stayed in not ONLY Friday, but also SATURDAY night!

Ok, so it was more than an abject rebellion against Liberal Yuppieland's ruling stupidarchy that proclaims all unmarried 20-and-30-somethings owe the LY singles scene a life debt of killing our brain cells with excess alcohol and wasting our lives getting cancer from secondhand smoke and getting stupider and more pissed off being treated like shit by superficial drunk assholes in smoky bars and clubs. I felt like crap and don't remember most of Friday evening.

Saturday I woke up feeling better, so I went to a barbecque at my friends' church and learned that yes, you can shock a preist... if your name is TooMuchCoffeeLady and you open your mouth. But toward the end of the day I felt like crap again, so I spent Saturday night in my little nest of blankets with Saturday Night Live, root beer, and a good book, which I recommended earlier. . . It f*cking rocked. For someone who needs others in her life to be happy, I sure am uncomfortable going to crowded places full of strangers. (Not to mention my pathological need to escape the city before nightfall is somewhat strange.) It's like society sends single people the message that "me time" is only something you have a right to have after you have a ring on your finger. Last night, I stole that right and in my acetominiphin-induced euphoria, I loved it.

Not to mention I loved watching the SNL cast lampoon S*x and the City. GENIUS!!!

Viral pharyngitis is a bitch, sure. But as a catalyst to my rebellion, it pretty much was a nice break. If I were a good LY single, I would (a) not have dared miss a Friday and Saturday night at the bars and clubs, who the hell do I think I am; (b) eff being tired and feeling sick, how dare I have feelings, I am an attractive single and I owe random, superficial losers who wouldn't give a flying f*ck about me if their lives depended on it, my presence and casual flings; and most importantly (c) I would have been chomping at the bit to spread my virus around.

Although maybe the last one doesn't really count, since viral pharyngitis isn't an STD, but let's be honest, I am also a bad LY single because I don't have any of those, nor will I date someone with one. (See: probably one of the reasons I am still single.) And no, let's not be wussy little PC people and blanket-call them "STIs" (I for "infection") because well, many of them aren't. You can get rid of infections with antibiotics- like urinary tract infections, gonnorhea, etc - or they go away on their own - like the flu. Diseases stay with you - like herpes, AIDS, Parkinson's, etc - you can't get rid of them. No need to "empower" people who have infectious diseases that are transmitted via sex to make them feel like they are entitled to sleep around. Sure, it only takes one infected partner and having one doesn't make you a bad person by a long shot, but being irresponsible and feeling entitled to having sex with and infecting others does.

Note to real-life friends of TMCL: If there's a chance you might have caught the bug from me (ie, we hung out during the incubation period) I already called you. ;)

Ladies with Cooler Lives than Mine

2006-07-30T14:53:00.000-04:00

1. Since she did send me a free copy of her book and all, for advertising her book on my site, it would have been bad manners not to read. Rebecca Agewich's BreakupBabe, based on her blog and a shitty part of her life, was awesome. It is a thought provoking and insightful book, disguised as a fun adventure in avantgarde literati.

2. Speaking of brainiacs whose biting social commentary is disguised as fun reading, I am still waiting for Claire Zulkey's next novel to be published. This chick points out the elephant in the room that is our crazy universe in her trademark amusing, smartassy way. I read her blog pretty often, am pissed that I missed her last novel before Amazon stopped selling it. It's beyond trippy to see someone a few weeks older than you (NO, being a gerontophobe with a slight complex about my relative lack of acheivements, I can't just say "your age") be all famous: I was reading that crappy free paper on the train a few summers ago, and there in the middle of the arts section is that chick I knew from school. Pretty cool that she didn't sell out and get the boring corporate job that most of our class did; she was the only one at our recent class reunion whose job wasn't totally boring. I wanted to be a writer too, but my ESTJ ass could neither stomach the risk nor turn down the dough people were throwing my way for not being scared of Excel. Claire, if you don't tell me when your next novel is being published, I will fabricate embarassing drunk stories and embarassing glasses/pajamas/messy hair photos to share with the world, and people will believe me because I used to sleep on the other side of your wall.

Rockin'! I'm officially a two-time downtrodden minority...

2006-07-28T17:23:00.000-04:00

Well, Dad, thanks for that double x chromosone which has gotten me into my near-Ivy alma matter and some pretty phat jobs, not to mention the ability to go through life at 5'3 without shame. And apparently, thanks Mom too, for the lack of eumelanin, which in addition to sparing me the pain of waxing my arms and face every week, and even letting me skip a day shaving my legs if I wish, has officially made me a two-time oppressed minority.

Here I thought that if people didn't like me, it was because of things about my personality (lack of inner monologue and general tact, and extreme conservative viewpoints mostly), or that if they thought me unintelligent, it had to do with my neurological disorder that causes my vapid pre-3 cups of coffee persona or the fact that I'm quiet sometimes, or that they expected me to be stuck up cause I'm so beautiful, or expected me to be a slut cuz that's a common stereotype about Catholic chicks. Nope, none of those. It's the hair.

The world is discriminating against me, blaming me from everything from the Vikings to the Holocaust to Britney Spears. YES!!! Nothing I have failed to accomplish is my fault any longer (it's the rest of you-all non-blond people's fault), and now the whole world knows and has to face their treachery.

To make up for the pain and disadvantages I have suffered, I hereby request the following (or funds for the following) from the Federal government, for myself and all other eumelanin-free-Americans, our future progeny, and our progeny's progeny:

1) a lifetime supply of mascara so I never look like one of those weird eyelashless people. Lancome will do nicely;
2) a taser to zap people who harass me on the street for being "guera" (Die, you motherfuckers, there are millions of us here so leave me the fuck alone);
3) a public education program to tell blond and redheaded men to please dye their eyelashes so they don't look like weird eyelashless people so that our disadvantaged race can keep the marriage/procreation within ourselves;
4) a lifetime supply of paba-free spf 60 sublock. I like the stuff that makes your skin sparkle and smells like coconuts;
5) a lifetime supply of selsun blue to get the green streaks out of my hair when I go swimming;
6) a lifetime free membership to MENSA;
7) a lifetime supply of t-shirts in blonde-flattering colors with slogans like "I got a 1500 on my SATs bitch!";
8) a lifetime supply of volumizing and moisturizing styling products cause blonde hair needs it;
9) one pair of polarized sunglasses, I like Juicy Couture (who needs to stop being so damn racist and make me some damn polarized glasses);
10) a list of 10,000,000,000 snappy comebacks for every brunette douchebag who assumes I'm unintelligent based on how I look;
11) cosmetics companies to START MAKING FOUNDATION FOR PALE PEOPLE, and try not to give it unattractive names like "white supremacist", "corpse", "fish underbelly", "Aryan nation", etc;
12) a written apology from my high school for only offering French, Spanish, Latin, and Portugese as foreign languages, denying me of learning German, Swedish, or Gaelic and perpetuting the brunette supremacy by forcing upon me the language of dark-haired people; and finally;
14) (I know I skipped one, superstition) a law strictly enforcing all the loser "blond fetishists" out there (ie, guys who ONLY date blondes, and have the generall attitude of "you are supposed to be into me because you're blonde and I'm into blondes... I can't spend my 30s masturbating to anime porn in my mom's basement after all!" , despite not being blond themselves) to wear an identifying mark so we know to stay the hell away from them. I reccommend a big red B tattooed to their foreheads.

That and an extra cool bil for lost economic opportunities (even though my double minority status is going to make more quotas work in my favor, what if I'd gotten into Harvard and were now making 6 figures, if I'd inherited my dad's dark hair?) and we'll call it square.

New Conversation Topic... Please for the Love of God

2006-07-23T20:22:00.000-04:00

Matthew McConaghey beat me because I wouldn't marry him.

It's all the rage in Paris.

I'm trying to fuse my middle and ring fingers together.

It's easier to flash gang signs this way.

I got shot in a drive-by.

I got drunk and got a Satanic tattoo, which I need to cover up until the laser treatments take it off.

It's so comfortable.

I dig the Darth Vader hands look.

My bookie Guido broke my fingers when I couldn't pay him back.

I need to hide my track marks from my boss. (Thanks, P!)

In other news, you are probably the 83578937589759th person today who's asked me about my cast. Having a freckle-gone-bad removed from my hand is no fun, wearing a cast during a heat wave in July is no fun, trying to program an insanely complex accounting system with one hand is no fun, changing the dressings and bandages on my nasty wound is no fun, having to look at that shit while I'm in the middle of changing the dressing and bandages is no fun, showering and getting dressed with one hand is no fun, wondering whether I'll have a huge ugly scar next to my (someday!) wedding ring is no fun... And finally, listening to the questions and judgements of 83578937589759 idiots a day who think this is a good conversation topic, or that freckles-gone-bad are removed solely because they're not attractive, is no fun.

Making jokes and being sarcastic, however, IS fun.

So let me have my fun. And be glad you don't have your hand in a cast.

PS - Using my hand as the object of a neghit exposes you for the insecure douchebag that you are.

PPS - Confidential to my friends: It's not cancer, everything's cool. Please don't worry. But please do help me come up with more assy responses, I love seeing people's expressions. I made a guy spit soda today.

Another Public Service Announcement: To "THAT guy"

2006-07-18T16:45:00.000-04:00

The "one who got away"... got away for a reason. She may have lost interest in you because you were either an ass or failed to display understanding of the most basic of dating etiquette/how to treat a woman. It's your problem, not hers. And no hard feelings, but for the love of GOD... learn to understand that most of the time, when you have a few dates with someone, and it fizzles out, for whatever reason... the other party considers it case closed.

Whether you weren't interested, she wasn't interested, you wanted different things - it just wasn't a fit and didn't work out. If she was really that great, and you were really that into her, you'd have done things differently and not let her go. But since that was not the case, understand why she may not be interested in revisiting anything. You didn't make her feel like you thought she was worth the effort, so she cut bait. She has no hard feelings for you, just considers the chapter of her life that involved you - however brief - closed.

And don't bitch about it to her - she's probably flattered you see her as such a fantastic catch, but annoyed that you didn't make more effort.

Instead of In-depth commentary on the war in Israel...

2006-07-18T13:37:00.000-04:00

This blog will be providing in-depth bitching about the evil sadists who are in charge of the kitchens at my office. Who the hell cuts off the free coffee supply at 2PM? Do you people not realize who you're dealing with? You have TooMuchCoffeeLady all up in your GL, and if you deprive me of my sustenance and the basis of my identity and apparently my sex appeal, my head will explode!

I'm still waiting for my addiction to be recognized as a disease rather than my irresponsible abuse of a legal substance, so I can use the EEOC to sue.

But in the meantime, I'm calling Forbes. 100 Best Companies to Work For, my ass.

Et tu, Marie Claire?

2006-07-10T14:34:00.000-04:00

Oh, come ON. Keep this crap up and I'll consider cancelling my subscription.

I open the August issue of one of my favorite magazine trio (the other two are Cosmo and Glamour) to find the following drivel published in an interview with a female scientist based in Cote D'Ivoire:

(when asked to comment on the Harvard dean's statement that men and women think differently)

"Science has proven that intelligence is determined by the X chromosone... Maybe in a few thousand years men will have died out, and we women won't have to deal with them."

Did I sleep through biology class? Because I thought men had X chromosones too. Not to mention, I thought they were sort of needed for the continuation of the human, or any species that requires sexual reproduction. All I know, is it's really intelligent and really fair to go bashing 1/2 the human species like that. Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Steven Hawking are all complete idiots after all - they must be, they have pee-pees.

I won't even touch the fact that this lady is a never-married, single mom. I'm sure that has nothing to do with her bitterness towards men. Ten bucks says some hot, rich, intelligent brain surgeon will read that article and propose to her because she's got such a great attitude.

But I will touch the fact that wrapped around this feminazi drivel were about 200 pages of how to look and dress prettier, take better care of our hair, and look younger.... when most women worry about that stuff either directly or indirectly to attract men.

Either MC are hypocrites, or they secretly desire an evil fembot race to take over the earth.

I must now congratulate my ex (an intelligent creature, despite that Y chromosone) for drilling a hole through an issue of MC once. Perhaps he was trying to preserve my sanity, rather than trying to get my goat.

TMCL's deliciously evil prank of the day

2006-07-07T17:32:00.000-04:00

Called my college friend Jason from my new office number (which he does not have), and hilarity ensued. I think I've got a rep...

Jason: "Hello?"
TMCL: "Jason... This is Stacy. We met a few months ago, remember me?"
Jason: "Um... in the personal or the professional sense?"
TMCL: "Personal. We had that one night stand, you were really drunk? Listen, we need to talk. I'm pregnant, and it's yours. Let's talk about child support."
Jason: "I - what the - how... TOOMUCHCOFFEELADY IS THIS YOU?!?!"
TMCL: "Am I seriously your only friend who pulls practical jokes or something?"
Jason: "You scared the crap out of me... Next time, try it on a straight guy though, it would have been much more effective."

At least I had him going for a second there....

A Public Service Announcement: To "that guy" in the gym...

2006-07-06T14:51:00.000-04:00

I understand that, while it's not the primary purpose of the gym, it can also be a place to meet women. Especially if you happen to look really good while working out.

That is, unless you use the weight room as an opportunity to demonstrate how you might scream during $ex.

"OH BABY! OH YEAH! THAT'S IT!" followed by heavy breathing and screaming (a la Meg Ryan's org@sm in When Harry Met Sally), sounds not only borderline pornographic and definitely skeevy, but is way out of place in the gym.

Do you scream like that when you hit all green lights on the way to work? Find the movie you wanted in stock at Blockbuster? Score a free dessert in the office lunchroom? Then don't make us listen to that crap in a place of workout.

No matter how hot and buff you are, we women are laughing inside - at you, not with you.

Come ON, Wonkette...

2006-06-28T11:38:00.000-04:00

Honestly, it was pretty cool to see a link to my piddly little blog posted on such a staple of the blogosphere such as yours... But please, in the future when you quote someone... try to capture their message more accurately.

Some statements made by Ann Coulter really offended me, and contributed to a sneaking suspicion I have that she's actually a woman-hater (aka Feminazi, who these days also seem to hate most women, specifically those who have something going for them besides careers.) She minimized the grief of bereaved families. Distasteful. There is also a gap between what she practices and what she preaches. My post said just that.

There is a big difference between a woman-hater and a lesbian. Huge. One might even hope that, given that these are the people with whom they fall in love, lesbians hate other women less than straight women do. Unlike Ann Coulter, lesbians are getting married, adopting and having children, or fighting hard for the legal right to do so. Implying that someone is a lesbian because she is cruel to other women and publicly denigrates their marriages and families, is just plain ignorant. Obviously, that namecalling started with "Anonymous", but two wrongs don't make a right.

It's no wonder gays and lesbians are still unfairly treated like second-class citizens in this country, when they are constantly Satanized even by a more "progressive" forum such as Wonkette. Keeping a group of citizens down, especially for something that is biologically based, is only hurting society.

Further, Ani is bisexual, not a lesbian. Maybe you meant to say"has a lot of KD Lang records"?

Everyone - keep reading, commenting, and showing love. You rock! Just please don't use my blog to hate on gays and lesbians.

XOXO,
TMCL

Does casual sex still look attractive?

2006-06-27T16:08:00.000-04:00

So it seems that HIV infection in Liberal Yuppieland is out of control.

Really, is this any suprise? Many people here - of all races and sexual orientations - still think this is the 1970s. Just log onto the blogosphere, or go out on the town, or listen to twentysomethings recount their weekends in management consulting firms and government offices around the area, and it quickly becomes obvious - nobody here gives a flying fuck about their health. We're all entitled to free love (even those with infectious, incurable diseases) and damn anybody who wants more.

More CL fun...

2006-06-27T15:45:00.000-04:00

Honestly, WTF is wrong with people?

Let me rewrite your ad for you buddy:

Sexual predator (40-something, fat, balding, and mastrubates to anime porn) so desperate for female company that I'm willing to have a "kept woman"/live in concubine as a "guest". There is a gym in the building, make sure you use it. If you don't let me see you naked whenever I want, I will charge you money to live with me. A small fraction of what you would pay to live elsewhere in a luxury high-rise right on Broadway, but enough for me to get a couple hours with a hooker nonetheless.

$650 - Female Roommate Wanted - Your own bedroom in 2 1/2 Bedroom apartment
Reply to: hous-175772826@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-06-26, 7:47PM EDT
Furnished bedroom available in spacious 2 1/2 bedroom apartment. Doorman, high floor, city and sunset views, sunny, etc. Washer, dryer and dishwasher in the apartment. The apartment has good heat, is quiet for sleeping, has good air-conditioning, high speed internet and a spare computer for the roommate's use. It's an elevator building and there is a health club in the building. I'm looking for a female roommate who will occasionally not wear clothes when I ask in exchange for free rent. No sex whatsoever required. Otherwise the rent is $650/month, everything included. Bleeker Street at Broadway google map yahoo map
this is in or around Bleeker Street and Broadway

For the record, any guy who states "female roommate only" (aka, 90% of the men looking for roommates on CL) is categorically some socially inept pervert with a few sex offenses under his belt. In fact, if you're a "female roommate only" guy, you should just SAY, "I am expecting someone to cook and clean for me, and give me NSA sex on demand." Hello, get a wife if that's so critical to your existence.

WHY would anyone in their right mind would respond to this ad?!

When your coughing fits last 5 minutes or more

2006-06-27T11:55:00.000-04:00

GO THE HELL HOME. Lady with SARS or Bird Flu a couple cubicles over, this means you!

If you are sitting on this floor, you are either in accounting, payroll, or benefits administration. That means that nobody is going to die if you take your laptop and work from home, or if you even go all crazy and take a sick day.

But seriously, with the exception of maybe 3 people, everyone here is either pregnant, has small children at home, has elderly parents living at home, has health issues of their own, or some combo. The rest of us just don't want to listen to you hacking up a lung. It's grossing us out.

BTW, you are not some martyr, hero, or dedicated employee for staying here in this condition... you obviously have no common sense and/or no problem exposing other people to your virus in a misguided attempt to suck up to your boss. It's irresponsible, selfish, and stupid.

And because of your spreading your germs, other people are going to get themselves or someone in their home very sick, and because unlike you they respect themselves and others, they are going to have to use sick days or even FMLA, because you were sharing the wealth. So your being the hero and getting the firm 15 extra hours' productivity... has seriously backfired.

If you want to work somewhere where facetime is more important than your own and other people's health, go work in management consulting.

Ann Coulter is a Closet Feminazi

2006-06-26T12:19:00.000-04:00

Now, I am a conservative/rightwing type, but I don't think "Ms" Ann Coulter is the same.

Sure, a lot of what she has to say is very profound and something that people should really think about.

1) In her trashing of 9-11 widows, she used the same "minimize the tradgedy of being widowed or divorced" bullshit argument that many anti-relationship liberal types do: "How do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce them anyway?". Um, nice going, you sound like all the single, bitter, promiscuous, can't-stand-to-see-anyone-else-in-or-wanting-t0-be-in-a-happy-marriage liberals who annoy the crap out of me. Are you maybe jealous that despite being skinny and blonde, you can't seem to find a husband yourself?

2) She refers to herself as "Ms" despite her arguments that "Ms" is a liberal construct. Conservative and proud, yet never married? Put your money where your mouth is lady, your title is Miss.

3) If she's so pro-family, pro-child, pro-life (an admirable position of course) why doesn't she live according to those principles, instead of modeling after the prototypical careerist feminazi? According to all the happily married people and many of the ultraconservatives I know, finding a loving spouse is a peice of cake. Esp if you're skinny and blonde.

Honestly, though, say shit like that about bereaved women and children, and you have effectively nullified any and all credibility the other points on your platform have.

Makes me wonder if she's a double agent for the liberals, a plant to make conservatives look heartless and crazy.

Fight to the Death for Fluff

2006-06-24T23:11:00.000-04:00

Give me a freakin break.

I don't know who is stupider, a school for serving a sandwich made of peanut butter and pure processed sugar, or the Senator who not only sends his son to a Boston public school and doesn't make the maid or the cook pack the child a lunch, but puts a dispute he has with them into legislation, or the Rep who's lobbying to make the Fluffernutter the Official Sandwich of Massachusetts.

Listen up, you liberal efftards: Yours is the only state in the country losing population, your highway system is a mess, your housing costs are out of control, job market's not great, your public schools suck, and you are home to the largest drug port on the East Coast. You all have more important things to worry about than sandwiches.

Like being stuck in Liberal Yuppieland because you can't find a job in Boston.

Comcast SUCKS!

2006-06-23T12:36:00.000-04:00

Seriously, they're living up to Cox's name.

Specifically, the buttheads pulled Comedy Central, Lifetime, the History Channel, Fox, as well as every other English-language channel that doesn't completely suck, off our cable package. It happened yesterday with no warning whatsoever.

We are left with two channels in English (home shopping network and the all-cop-show-all-the-time channel) and the rest are in Spanish, Korean, Russian, Arabic, and God knows what else. (Why does every lazy idiot who refuses to learn English feel compelled to move here?!) I am an American, for Pete's sake, you're lucky I speak two languages. I'm not going to learn 6 or 7 completely different ones just so I can veg, and neither is the Average Joe whose IQ is significantly lower than mine.

Let me be the first to point out that if they pulled the plug on Spanish-language programming, people would be crying "racist" and blocking the streets in mass protest.

It is time for three things:

1) Me to get a pay hike so I can afford
2) Satellite TV so I can boycott these jackass cable companies; and
3) This country to be English-only once and for all.

Me Next!

2006-06-22T16:53:00.000-04:00

Welcome, traveller, to the Brave New World of the Planet Bell Jar.

Here, our society has no flaws, our people no faults. Yet a lot of life can still really suck here.

"How?", you ask. "If you society and your people are both intrinsically perfect, how do your lives manage to completely suck sometimes?"

Well... it's not that people are asshats, or that anything is wrong and needs to be fixed. Simply, every freaking personality flaw we have is the result of a disease. That's right. For example, we don't get "road rage" becase half the people from this country can't drive, nor because the highway infrastructure here is piss-poor and the public transportation options non-existent, nor because of macroeconomic and social problems that force people to spend a couple hours a day commuting. It's those damn neurochemicals betraying us again.

I'm just waiting for PC pseudopsychiatry to tell me and my loved ones that the fact that I'm a complete and utter bitch with the intelligence of a houseplant before my daily coffee, is in fact, due to a rare neurological disorder. Remember, it's not my fault I am addicted to caffeine - it's those godawful genes I inhereted from my (white male, and therefore inherently evil) father.

CNN seems to get it... kind of...

2006-06-22T16:32:00.000-04:00

Why the hell is CNN paying attention to blogs?! I'd kind of figure this forum for amateur journalists (none of us as gifted or brilliant as the wonderful Christiane Amanpour et ali) would piss off the professional journalists more than anything.

But in the meantime... How interesting that we're all bitching about gas prices. is it because they're out of freaking control?! This is not Europe, and there is no reason for gas to be $3 a gallon. Why the hell is our government not listening?

And on the subject of gas... ever think of implementing a halfway decent public transportation system? What about sufficient highway infrastructure so we're not all trapped in our cars for hours on end in some bottleneck? What about puttting some controls on the housing market (or perhaps crime) so that people can afford and desire to live within 30 miles of their jobs?

Had I only known finding a husband was this easy...

2006-06-21T17:20:00.000-04:00

Yep, according to my dermatologist's secretary, a few small snips were all that have been standing between me and wedded bliss.* Let's hope bandages and scabs are considered more attractive than moles. At least for the next few weeks.

Um, scratch that, first let's hope the feeling returns to the right side of my head and neck sometime this week. I want to know why I wasn't given this "local" anastesia when I had my ears pierced. It would be nice during gyn visits as well.

BTW, what on earth does this say about that lady's perception of the male species?

*Not to disagree that looking one's best is always important, but jeez!!! Were two small moles seriously that ugly?

World Cup - Enough Already

2006-06-19T15:50:00.000-04:00

re: the guys camped out in breakrooms across America, crowded around the TV for the last 3 weeks straight, watching endless rounds of this infernal soccer match:
- Is this fascination with soccer due to latent homosexual desires (soccer players are not exactly an unattractive lot) or are football and baseball being replaced as our national pastimes as this country goes more "sensitive" and "global"?

Discuss amongst yourselves. And move the hell out of my way, I need more coffee.

Don't let reality hurt people's feelings or anything...

2006-06-13T16:51:00.000-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/health/13brea.html?ex=1150344000&en=2d8cdc2ace79a5a1&ei=5087%0A

So basically public health officials have found a relatively (not easy, but following millenia of traditions) simple way to make babies grow into healthier adults, and to reduce risks of SIDS, cancer, and other deadly infectious diseases in women and children, and sets out to let the public know. A public service, right? I mean, people want to know how to improve their and their offspring's quality of life, and how the hell else would, say, an accountant who got a B- in high school biology in the 1990s know about micronutrients, cell mutation, etc?

But then, what do people with MDs know? Smarter than these doctors is some idealistic liberal from a nonprofit. Instead of being grateful to the Dept of Health and Human Services,

"I'm concerned about the guilt that mothers will feel," said Ellen Galinsky, president of the center. "It's hard enough going back to work."

Well if they feel so guilty, they need to talk with their doctor about how to change the behavior. Or better yet, they should lobby employers in this country to either pay men enough so their wives can stay home, or to not make a woman's life impossible if she has to/chooses to be a working mom. But in the short term, it's not like we don't have laws in this country that say employers have to accomodate medical needs - in other words, present your anti-pump employer with the option of honoring your doctor's note or tangoing with your attorney. Open and shut case.

But for Pete sake. Scientific facts and hard data are just that. Breastfeeding is good for babies, advancing age is bad for fertility, never giving birth ups your chances of gynelogical cancers, women earn 76 cents on the dollar to men because more of us choose low-paying jobs, married people are physically/emotionally/financially healthier than their single counterparts, your dating pool is greatly diminished if you're unattractive, poor, or have a communicable disease, you really do need to know English to get by in the developed world, and condoms don't protect against all STDs. Life's a bitch like that.

If the truth hurts people's feelings, too freaking bad, but political correctness should NOT stand in the way of women knowing how to take care of their own and the next generation's health. When the hell did it become wrong to relay news and facts that happen to be not what some people want to hear?

And a shout-out to my own mom for keeping me diabetes-, SIDS-, etc free.

Yuppieland County Police Sucks

2006-06-11T17:10:00.000-04:00

Someone please explain to me...

How is it that if I were to spit at my hispanic neighbors and call them obnoxious ethnic slurs, I'd be in jail right now, but when they spit at me and yell obnoxious racial slurs, I'm told the remarks don't count as racist because they aren't said in English, and lectured about semantics of "deragatory vs racist" remarks?

If you call someone a rude name specifically based on the fact that they are WHITE (ie, you would sound like an idiot calling someone else that word because it refers specifically to white people)... you're being RACIST. End of story.

There is no translation in Spanish for "spic" or "wetback", so I guess if I were to go to, say, Puerto Rico and spit at people and call them those obscene names, then under US law, it's totally cool?

Why male friends rock

2006-06-09T15:03:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Phil (aka 1/5 of the non-girlieman population of Liberal Yuppieland), who had the presence of mind to not only befriend me years ago at our internship, but also to order satellite TV, I get to see my favorite musician of all time live in concert from a few time zones away this weekend. I would never order satellite TV... no woman would. Sure, I'll totally spend the $50/month on highlights, manicures, etc, but I can't afford satellite TV.

That means for the price of 1/8 gallon of gas and whatever I bring to the party, I can see Jimmy semi-live and forget for a few hours that I live in a landlocked hellhole hours from the beach, all without risking a contact high.

Because, let's face it, potsmokers (ie, what liberals become when they don't have the wherewithal to get yuppie jobs and move out of their moms' basements) annoy the hell out of me.

You rock, Phil. And BTW - this makes enduring your endless couch jokes all worth it. Almost.

Corrupt government and further evidence that the US is becoming a third world toilet bowl

2006-06-09T10:31:00.000-04:00

Last night the Senate inadvertently the real reason gas prices are so freaking insane: it's not just OPEC's racist, anti-Judeo-Christian, anti-Western (and BTW, racism is racism is racism no matter whom it's directed against; and calling it "reverse racism" or implying that only American WASPS are capable of being bigots is... well, patently racist in and of itself) agenda and Big Oil's greed... it's the corrupt American government also.

So you have Alan Greenspan in to talk about the root cause of rising oil prices - Big Oil's been planning a bottleneck since the 70s, ie, seeing that a need for increased capacity was coming and patently refusing to put the infrastructure in place to accomodate that. It's so noble to broadcast the Senate hearings on looking into Big Oil's spiralling profits and insane price increases, but what's the freaking point of even wasting anyone's time or breath discussing the matter when the government has no intention of doing anything about it?

The smirks and eyerolling on the faces of the Senators (nice job, morons, not even keeping a poker face on national TV, to maintain some facade of actually giving a crap about the American public's economic welfare!) said it all: Price fixing and gouging have been happening for a long time, and there is not a damn thing Uncle Sam is going to do about it. Why? To obtain employment as a politician you need to be rich - you need to have come from generations of money to have not only the connections to get yourself elected, but thte funds to run your campaign and to feed yourself and dress the part until you win. How have the majority of the wealthy-for-generations become that way? OIL MONEY.

That's right. It's a direct conflict of interest for anyone in Washington to do anything to put a stop to something that is financially crippling a lot of American families. Sure, we Americans tell ourselves that we're sooo lucky that our government isn't all corrupt like (fill in the blank with any country but a Western European one). It's obviously not true, so we need to stop lying to ourselves and take our heads out of our asses... leaving more room for us to take it in the ass when we visit the pump.

Race for the Cure

2006-06-02T16:51:00.000-04:00

Best of luck to my girl, Mad Asian Lady, as she not only conquers the 5K Race for the Cure run tomorrow, but raises thousands of dollars for breast cancer research and earns herself a new Coach bag.

I iwll not be participating myself, but as a PSA, I wanted to spread awareness of some facts I learned there last year:

Being around even secondhand cigarette smoke increases your risk of cancer exponentially. Your friends who smoke around you are endangering you more than they are endangering themselves.

Having your first child after 30 or never giving birth at all increases your risk of all female cancers. So if you think your high stress job that leaves you no time for family or noncomittal asshole guy is killing you.... you're more right than you think.

Much of the reason breast cancer's so common in women: crap they put in our cosmetics, aka phletyates (sp) and parabens. They get absorbed through the skin and greatly your chances of getting cancer. Even companies like Clinique, who donate money to Susan G. Komen, use these chemicals. Take home message: buying really-higher-end beauty products may save your life.

Thinner women with bigger ( C cup +) boobs = fucked. Very high risk group.

Boob jobs also up your risk.

Vegetables and exercise are your friends. Duh.

Good luck tomorrow to Mad Asian Lady!!

Publicity Stunts

2006-06-01T11:44:00.000-04:00

What a weird-ass idea... I personally am hoping she goes for option three (aka rescue an innocent baby from the famine and HIV ridden hellhole that is Namibia) rather than join some freakish religion that's done more harm than good (Dune was a FICTIONAL book, you stupid losers!), gives some spoiled rich brat a free mani/pedi, or make a sex tape with some old hag nobody's ever heard of.

Sure, it's cheap to use a baby as a pawn in your publicity stunt, but it's good to see celebrities imitating each other when they do something positive that actually helps people. Blowing smoke from your ill-informed "let's jump on the liberal bandwagon and be hip and PC" opinions and doing not much else is not onlly pathetic but doesn't help anyone. Susan Sarandon, when was the last time you did something tangible to help the victims of the "republican conspiracies" you've so nobly identified?

It's the same issue I have with liberal yuppieland really - talk is cheap. Do something if you want to make a difference. Nobody here ever does. Regardless of Kathy's motives, there's a very positive end: some little kid may be getting a chance to live HIV-free and see their 44th birthday.

Best ever excuse to get off the phone....

2006-06-01T10:40:00.000-04:00

"I gotta run, it's time for me to inject mice with dengue."

Only a viral pathologist could pull this one off.

I think this transcends pringles cans, bees, EGs, pissing on CDs, and football guys waving at us.

The Big Fat Conundrum

2006-05-27T15:04:00.000-04:00

So it's pretty widely agreed that in order (in most cases) for a woman to get a job, doctor, husband, not be treated like crap by most of humanity in this country, she must be thin.

And pretty, and stylish.

It's also pretty widely agreed that in the US, obesity is a HUGE problem. Pun intended. Note the irony that a nation obsessed with thinness is one of the fattest in the world.

I am not considered thin in Liberal Yuppieland, despite fitting into a size 2 or 4 and being at what medical professionals tell me is a healthy weight/body fat percentage. I am just a shorter, smaller-boned person and always will be. That's my DNA, and there's not even a plastic surgery invented to fix it.

I was about to feel all guilty for not having been to the gym or having done crunches in a week when I ended up going shopping yesterday for new summer clothes.

Nothing in the petites' or the regular misses' department fit me. Misses' shirts are like a dress on me, and the bulk of the stuff in petites starts at size 10P or so - way too big. There were like 4 garments in my size to choose from. Although it is nice of them to mark petites's sizes up so if short women ARE fat, they feel even worse about themselves. Where is there a selection of stuff that fits me properly? Teenybopper stores like Express and Limited Too (where I'm far from the biggest size). Or Saks and Nordstrom, but I can't stomach $300 on one outfit.

My message that I can take away from this excursion: You're not thin enough according to the harsh judgemental society of Liberal Yuppieland (no six-pack and not ALL of your bones poke through your skin.) However, you are not big enough to be able to buy clothes off the rack that will allow you to dress your age.

So, fashion industry: Which the freak is it?!?! Am I too fat or too thin?

Women's worst enemies: One another

2006-05-26T00:29:00.000-04:00

This one's for you, Reenie...

I have come to the conclusion that American women have noone or nothing to blame for "oppression" and unhappiness but ourselves. (And most recently, the lazy asses in homeland security are also to blame, for intentionally letting in 12 million illegal immigrants from a certain country where disrespecting, intimidating, harassing, threatening, and attacking Caucasian women is considered "part of the culture" and perfectly acceptable, and anyone who has a problem with that is racist, but that's for another post).

We evaluate one another for our "potential" and expect each other to be nothing less than 100% overacheiving and perfect in all aspects of life. Specifically, smart women are expected to become the next Andrew Carnegie or Albert Einstein, and beautiful women are expected to get married and have a family. And women who are both and "want it all"? Express that you have XYZ career goals, some self-righteous bitch will rip your head off: "What about a family?" Express that you want the 2.5 kids, husband, SUV, white picket fence, and some self-righteous bitch will rip your head off: "What about your career?" Basically, if you have a vagina, expect to be criticized. Make that "criticized from here to hell and back" if you have the nerve to be female, beautiful, and smart. And God forbid you ignore all those psychotic ravings, identify what it is you need to be happy, and go for it. You're a woman! You don't DESERVE to be happy!
And the women who hit the genetic jackpot and were born both intelligent AND beautiful - we're anathema. Why? Jealousy. Smart-but-unattractive women and Pretty-but-dumb women want nothing more than to convnice themselves and the rest of the world that intelligence and beauty are mutually exclusive. Seeing a woman who has both just takes away this excuse and makes their poor little PC self-esteem worse. Hey, people - those of us who are both... yeah, we lucked out to get both qualities. But in the name of soothing YOUR pathetic feelings of inadequacy, we are NOT going to back down, apologize for who we are, and not be our real selves so that YOU can feel better. This is who I am and who I'm going to be tomorrow, whether or not that makes you feel inferior to me. There's always going to be someone smarter, thinner, richer, prettier, better off in life than you. The world is not fair, and life is not equal. Deal. And shut up and quit projecting your inane insecurities onto me please.

Here's the rub, though. It's not men or society doing this to us, women are doing it to each other. We lost the ERA, so according to the jackass Baby Boom/Bust/Gen X "feminists" that negates our right as a sex to be happy. That's right, in the name of liberation, let's all three billion of us make each other as miserable and guilty as humanly possible. It will advance women's cause like no other if we're all bullying each other. I've had this small disappointment in my life (caused either by circumstance or by my own choices and actions) therefore I'm going to do my best to make sure you don't succeed in anything, even if your goals are the furthest thing from anything I've ever wanted.

No wonder the ERA failed, the congressman saw NOW (and our entire gender) for what we are: a bunch of freaking psychos. We can't stand to see one another succeed or even be happy. You can't respect, empower, or assist a group who continually degrades, disempowers, and puts obstacles in place for each other.

On "Careerwomen"

2006-05-18T15:53:00.000-04:00

Liberal Yuppieland is pretty much acknolwedged by its residents as being a bad community for those of us who desire commitment/marriage/family. (Damn US! We wish nothing more than for our "boring" traditional aspirations to wreck everyone else's lives.)

But the "theory" I have been hearing lately from men as to why they act less than gentlemanly and don't commit is that "women are too into their careers around here." I used to just write that off as "I'm too insecure to talk to a member of the opposite sex", but to be honest, I've just been hearing it too much lately and don't believe that so many men are so stupid.

So. Take this for what it is worth, from a beautiful woman who made manager at a pretty prestigious company at age 26. Long before gender roles, marriage, and finances even entered my conciousness, I was reading at 3 years old and scoring 1500 on the SATs at 16 years old, effortlessly. What can I say - I was born "smart". It's a genetic predisposition, not a choice on my part. Any time two smart people reproduce and the baby's female, chances are she'll turn out the same way.

But the point is - the only reason for me being where I am? NO OTHER OPTIONS. So for anyone thinking I find finance to be spiritually and emotionally fulfilling... not quite. It comes easy to me and it pays the bills nicely. The option for what I truly want - husband and family - has yet to present itself. Until it does, I need to eat, so I got a job. End of story. Furthermore, the fact that I don't have a second income (ie husband) doesn't negate my right to have enough money to have a reliable automobile, savings account, 401K, etc.

And I'm not the only woman in my shoes. In fact, I think the older we get, the more of us feel that way, and to a greater degree of intensity. I'll even go out on a limb and say that often (not always, because Anne A, you are brilliant!), the higher IQs my female friends have, the more often they seem to think like I do.

So guys - don't blame today's women. While feminism opened a lot of doors for us, it closed a lot of doors for us too, and we need to adapt and survive. And I might add, the working world is still very un-female-friendly. And the further a woman is removed from the "married with children" paradigm, the worse the work world is for her.

So that women you've been meaning to ask out? Do it. If she rejects you, 99 times out of 100, it's cause she's not into you, not cause she's too into her job.

Here is your solution to obesity

2006-05-09T13:47:00.000-04:00

It's not another diet. It's not develop an eating disorder. I call it "STOP PUTTING A MILLION POUNDS OF REFINED SUGAR IN FREAKING EVERY FOOD PRODUCT WE PRODUCE IN THIS COUNTRY".

Seriously! I get that some people want "real" soda and regular sugar in sweets, but that crap is added, in copious amounts, to bread, tomato sauce, fruit juice, dried fruit, yogurt, oatmeal, peanut butter, and basically every processed food in this country. Most people are too poor to buy organic. Fine. It's a bit annoying how fast it goes bad anyway. But is there a need to dump tons of sucrose into the middle class's food?

Refined sugar is not a preservative, it's not filling, adds no nutritional value, it messes with your blood sugar, and converts to deadly visceral fat in the blink of an eye. Not to mention foods that aren't supposed to be sweet, like peanut butter, taste sickly saccharine when you dump all that sugar in there. What, is everything we eat supposed to taste like dessert? No wonder eating disorders are so widespread in the US, all you have to do is look at 90% of the food lables and realize that most of what we eat is 1% nutirents and 99% bleached flour and refined sugar.

What's even more sick is people ranting and raving about not the major public health risks caused by the obesity "pandemic that we are choosing to inflict upon ourselves", but rather they are focused on the aesthetics of the issue. NBC today is featuring a nice piece on childhood obesity that isn't talking about early puberty, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension in people whose bikes still have training wheels, but rather is showing shots of the fat stomachs and legs of random kids around town. So it's not pretty to see flab on a kindergardener, but jeez, this is NOT a nation of supermodels!!! Pay attention to the health risks of this problem PLEASE.

And all these crazy diets that don't follow balanced meal plans (Atkins, South Beach, and Cabbage Soup, I'm talking to you) much less reality are just slowing down people's metabolisms and - you guessed it - making us all fatter.

More Sanctimonious Whining (about Gas Prices)

2006-05-08T23:12:00.000-04:00

I am going to hurl if I hear one more overeducated liberal who fancies him or herself a tree-hugging hippie praise high gas prices.

"It will force Americans to stop buying SUVs, stop driving, and it'll be good for the environement!"

OK, live in the real world much? Americans drive because (a) public transport in this country sucks, and (b) affordable housing is so few and far between that most of us HAVE to commute an hour plus to get to our jobs because we can't afford even a rental property any closer to our jobs. Riding a bike 50 miles ( a pretty average commute) to work is not practical and it's not SAFE.

Just because YOU can afford to live in the 'gentrified' neighborhood (your self-congratulating smugness is about as pleasant to be around as passing kidneystones by the way) and bike a mile to work doesn't mean we ALL can afford that. Or want that safety risk/higher car insurance and taxes from living in that shithole.

Not to mention, gas prices going up is not only making getting to work, school, etc unaffordable; it's going to drive up the prices of other necessities like water, food, medicine, etc. Ever hear of inflation? Our salaries aren't going up the 50% that gas prices have, or the hefty price hike that commodities that need to be transported are going to have... (or the 300% that home prices have, come to think of it). So you're saying you're GLAD that American families are getting more and more impoverished?

Trustafarians and sanctimonious whining...

2006-04-30T09:48:00.000-04:00

I ran into a friend from college I've lost touch with, who tells me her ambition is "not to become a corporate whore". That's a noble enough ambition, but... you have to be aware of the implications of that choice, and how the decreased bankroll will affect your lifestyle. She doesn't have that awareness; to her, shopping at OldNavy is slumming. Yet, she's anathema to actually getting a job.

I am so tired of people who feel entitled to, and go in debt up to their eyeballs to have, the lifestyle that can only be supported by having a sizeable bankroll - organic foods, designer clothes, nice house, lots of international vacations - yet are the first to scream "sellout" the minute someone takes a white-collar desk job. These people don't realize that for those of us not born with a silver spoon in our mouths and fat trust funds in our names (or without supermodel looks or superstar singing and/or athletic abilities), that we HAVE to become "corporate whores" to acheive that lifestyle. And by "that lifestyle" I mean "anything above and beyond living on the street", which is exactly where I'd be if I didn't have a job. Yes, I had to start working at the lower levels of my "Maslo's hierarchy of needs" pyramid. I can't spend 100% of my time on spiritual enlightment when I need to put a roof over my head and food in my mouth. Of course I'm not emotionally fulfilled by mortgages, but I deal. It just doesn't work any other way. Don't get me wrong, if you have that kind of money, more power to you, but at least realize that your situation is not that of the other 6 billion people on this planet.

And even if your family does have enough money so that nobody for the next umpteen million generations ever has to take a job... how do you think you got so rich in the first place? You guessed it, your great-grandpa was a corporate whore himself. And very good at it. So why are you living off his money and turning up your nose at the rest of us who want something similar for ourselves and our families?

Please remember how American TV works...

2006-04-25T21:39:00.000-04:00

...or the ultimate in "chick TV" will destroy the country! If it hasn't already...

Specifically, Sex and the City. I love watching it as much as the next woman - many quality discussions have happened during commercial breaks, many important life issues resolved afterwards by a council of girlfriends, many an excuse to binge on pizza and icecream. Good times.

When I was an exchange student, I noticed about a bajillion cultural differences between my home country and my host one. A large one of which was this: In the US, we know that TV is byperbolle - real life is never that way. In that country, TV imitates life to a tee. My neighbors and classmates assumed a lot of bad things about me, unfairly I might add, because they thought being an American, I was just like the 90210 girls they saw on "yanqui" TV. Some people missed out on getting to know a great person because they way they acted based on those assumptions pissed me off so much.

I've been back in the US for 6 years now, and I think that Americans aren't getting it either anymore. Specifically, men are watching Sex and the City, assuming women are all that way, and it's destroying gender relationships in this country.

Among the unrealistic garbage on that show that men now assume is true/expect of women:

Style: So a corporate lawyer, and a trust fund baby-turned divorcee worth a few mil maybe can afford to be decked out in the latest from Prada and Manolo. A journalist and a PR professional - most likely cannot. Not to mention, they certiainly can't afford to rent their own, multi-room apartments in Manhattan. Much less to buy them.
Aging: (Natural) blondes and redheads in their 30s and 40s DON'T HAVE PERFECT SKIN. Unless they have had several facelifts, botox, collagen, and decades of expert dermatology care.
Drinking: Nor is it normal to down several cosmos a day at that age and remain reed-thin. It's not possible in your 20s when your metabolism is faster. Not to mention, anyone in real life who drinks that much has a red nose. (See Ted Kennedy)
STDs: Never in that show did anyone get an STD, and those four screwed two thirds of one of the most populated city in the USA. 25% of adults have herpes. 70-some odd percent contract HPV at some point. Curables like chlamydia and gonhorrhea probably abound. And those numbers skyrocket in urban areas. It's just impossible in this day and age to have that much sex and not get at least one disease. Times four.
Sex drive: We are not all Samantha Jones. Many women - I mean, of the ones without psychological problems - aren't all about getting laid, "loving" and leaving, humping and dumping. That would be the stereotypical male. And yet of all the people I know, male and female, none of them are into that - they're either looking for committed relationships or single-by-choice and respect themselves and their bodies. Nor is sex discussed among women in such a mercenary, "I'm just using these guys, it's power for me" fashion.
More about sex: I don't know anyone in real life that routinely fucks after two or three dates.
Bars: Are for people where people who aren't old enough to rent cars and who aren't old/wise enough to know any better, troll for soulmates. But not so much in your late 20s and beyond. I know one person who met her SO in a bar (hi, Carissa!) and I maintain she and he just had dumb luck.
Relationships: NO selfrespecting woman, esp in her 30s, would put up with the crap Carrie takes from Big for six years. Nor would she move five time zones away with "just a boyfriend". Nor is a woman who has suffered through the hell of law school and high-stress, low-respect life at a corporate law firm going to shack up with a bartender and let him mooch off her for life. I know very few women who truly love their careers. And since when do moms get promoted in the real life corporate sphere?
Biological clocks: If yours starts ticking in your mid-30s like Charlotte's did... good freakin luck. And look how well that turned out for her. Sure, real life women may sometimes accidentally get pregnant in their mid-30s like Miranda did, but they're in the vast minority. Most of my friends - in their 20s and 30s - who are parents took a few years of trying. With medical intervention.

In short, the only part of that show that was realistic was Samantha getting cancer and saying on the show that breast and other female cancers are largely caused by not giving childbirth. That 30-second soundbyte was the only admission in six seasons that yes, there are dire consequences for a lifestyle like hers.

But men seriously watch this stuff (why is a straight man watching chick TV, anyway?) and expect women to be just like these ladies. They're in for a big dissapointment. And so are the women, who also lose out as a result of these psychotic expectations.

Unhealthy social interaction? Check MeetIn...

2006-04-18T13:07:00.000-04:00

http://www.meetin.org/city/MEETinDC/index.cfm?CFS=Yes

I'll admit, I have been to a few meetin events myself, and, as I was strictly in search of a fun afternoon/meeting potential new platonic friends, I had a decent time. But after a few conversations with some self-described "meetin junkies", I became less and less impressed, and wonder how healthy of an environment it really is.

Meetin leadership stresses (at least the Liberal YuppieLand chapter) that the group is militantly "anti-dating". It's great that it's not a meat market (or at least it claims not to be, I find it hard to believe that hooking up doesn't take place given many of the events seem centered around alcohol and partying), but the other extreme is not so great either.

Dating is arguably natural societal constructs - the couples/marriage/family unit has been dominant, all over the world, for millenia. People "clicking" and possibly falling in love is really just a natural outcome of being in social settings - it's the numbers game of the more people you meet, the more likely it is to happen to you. In other words, unless you and/or everyone you hang out with is majorly flawed, the more friends you have, the more likely it's gonna be that you'll at least get dates.

For one reason or another, we've all had times in our lives when we're single and NOT looking and there's nothing wrong with that. And there are the Samantha Joneses of the world who are the eternal bachelors and bachelorettes by choice and love their lives. But the vast majority of the single people I know are really pretty sad that they don't have a special someone in their lives. It's about a 25-75 split between "it's your fault you're single, you're too picky" and single for lack of other options, the latter being the larger group. Maybe that's why something like 90% of everybody over 18 in this country either is now, has been in the past, or will be in the future, married. Financially, professionally, physical-and-mental-health-wise, living longer, succumbing to STDs and cancers less often, less frequently the victims of violent crime - married people fare better across the board. You can't blame people for wanting that.

And why create an organization where people are discouraged from something so common? It's just unnatural. A group that strove to be a truly healthy and welcoming social environment wouldn't try to tell its members not to date one another if they wanted. They're adults! Get over it!

I'll stop gesturing obscenely if you'll SOBER UP AND LEARN HOW TO FREAKIN' DRIVE!

2006-04-13T02:26:00.000-04:00

To everyone who learned to drive south of the Mason-Dixon line:

YOU SUCK! You are an inbred, boozesoaked psycho who no more belongs behind a wheel than a neonazi gang belongs teaching a kindergarden class. Designate a driver if you're going to happy hour. Don't get behind the wheel if you're so blotto you can't remember your first name. Use your damn blinkers. Don't take 10 minutes to make a simple right-hand turn. Don't drive 15 mph unless you're in a parade or a traffic jam. When I'm trying to switch into your lane, don't speed up so I can't get in. Stay in your own damn lane. Buses, this means you. If you don't know how to drive on the ice, STAY OFF THE DAMN ROAD! And by the way, traffic wouldn't suck so bad around here if you didn't insist on staying half a mile away from the car in front of you. The green light means go and the gas pedal is on the right. Use a headset if you insist on talking on the cell phone. Don't stop dead center in the middle of the lane in a parking lot. Speed bumps mean SLOW DOWN, not stop for five minutes. Turn off your freaking hydraulics; your car's older than you are, worth $10, and your sound system looks ridiculous. If you plow into my tinfoil compact with your Hummer at 50 MPH, don't act all scandalized when I have some choice words for you. The police officer's not going to ticket me for fucking swearing at you when the accident's clearly your fault. Oh, and I-95... is not the freakin Indy500 track. So don't freaking drag race there, mkay?

Especially in a state where there are a lot of Northern transplants who are all allowed to pack heat. Get a clue. No wonder we beat you idiots in the Civil War, "y'all" have no flippin common sense.

Question for you smokers

2006-04-11T16:28:00.000-04:00

For those of you who smoke in public, knowing that others are likely to get fatally ill over time because of inhaling your secondhand smoke: What the freak is your deal? They have known for like 15 years that secondhand smoke causes cancer (see: why nonsmokers like Dana Reeve die of cancer every day), so why do you continue to force other people to inhale carcinogens - without the benefit of the filter you have in front of your mouth - in the name of YOUR vice?

Yes, it IS your body and you DO have a right to kill yourself slowly and painfully if that's what you want. Cancer is a fantastic way to lose weight quickly, and chemo is an excellent (and insurance-company-subsidized!) way to eliminate unwanted body hair. But do you honestly believe your lack of self-control and lack of self-respect negates the rest of our right to protect our health? Or do you honestly expect everyone who is asthmatic, pregnant, a child, elderly, a cancer patient/survivor, etc to wear a gas mask everywhere so nobody's right to preserve their well-being cramps your style? What if I decide my desire to kick your ass trumps YOUR right to look after your well-being?

Limited Edition.... SHOES?!?!?

2006-04-07T12:35:00.000-04:00

http://www.style.com/manolo/home_flash.html

They seem to start at $500, and go up to about $1600.

Oh, come ON. They're shoes! And how can something be "vintage" when it's a reissue of a shoe first made in 1994? If that shoe were a person, it wouldn't have even gone through puberty yet. That's not antique. Wearing something that was high-style 12 years ago is what's know as "bad fashion sense". Which God knows dominated the 80s and 90s. Hey, I have some decade old toilet paper, maybe I could sell that for a couple hundred clams? It IS vintage after all...

If not for Sex and the City, this Manolo guy would be yet another over-expensive designer that the masses drool over, but know they can't afford. But since TV portrays these shoes as something journalists can afford to purchase weekly.... they must be affordable.

I give it a week before some tool walks into work wearing them. And a week and two minutes before she starts bitching about how she can't afford to save money, and how do people afford homes and children? And three minutes after that until she starts cutting down my 9 wests or Steve Maddens (which only paupers wear) and criticising me for not spending more money on myself. I must be stupid to save money if I am a childless nonhomeowner. I give it two weeks before some armani-clad tool with middle-class parents I know from college who is now half a million dollars in student loan debt and working on their third masters degree in genocide studies or something equally lucrative - or working at a nonprofit for 12K a year - is doing the same.

Platonic my ass. Get a clue.

2006-04-04T14:35:00.000-04:00

Following is a sampling of what can be found in this morning's Craigslist in the "Looking for platonic friends" section:

(To my friends reading this - none of you are allowed to move! See what I'd be left to contend with?)

Seeking workday distractions.... - m4w - 27

Reply to: mailto:pers-148042375@craigslist.org?subject=Seeking%20workday%20distractions....%20-%20m4w%20-%2027
Date: 2006-04-04, 9:23AM EDT

so here's the deal...I'm in a relationship, which I'm happy with. However, since we've been together so long, and given that we both work, the excitement that used to be there isn't quite what it used to be.

I'm looking for someone to e-mail/chat with during the workday to make it go by a little quicker, and who knows, perhaps make work a little bit more exciting in the process. I'm 27, 6-0, PWM; all other pertinent details will be revealed - but you have to e-mail first. :)

Oh poor baby! You mean BOTH of you have to work?!?!? OMG, like 90% of American adults... Does your girlfriend not have email? Sorry, buddy, but if you're "looking for a female friend to make your work a little bit more exciting".... it sounds to me like you're "ok to settle with your girlfriend, but you still want to see what's out there just in case". If your potential female-friend-waiting-in-the-wings is just wants to be a friend, why would she care about your height, income, and looks anyway? You have no business being in a relationship and acting on your curiosity at the same time - It's not freaking Burger King. You can't have it your way.
Wanted: drinking buddy - m4w - 28

Reply to: mailto:pers-148027618@craigslist.org?subject=Wanted:%20drinking%20buddy%20-%20m4w%20-%2028
Date: 2006-04-04, 6:48AM EDT

Want to have some laughs, drinks, and some good times?

I'm in the area for a few months on business and looking for someone to hang out with. Drop me a line if you're interested in getting together in DC or in the Arlington area!
This guy wants a platonic female friend to get drunk with. Too bad, so sad, your job makes you travel. Happens to people all the damn time. What gives you the right though, to expect some woman to just throw away a few months of her life for a fling with you?
sick of eating alone - m4w - 40

Reply to: mailto:pers-147985935@craigslist.org?subject=sick%20of%20eating%20alone%20-%20m4w%20-%2040
Date: 2006-04-04, 12:08AM EDT

I was having a number 1 medium at McDonald for lunch today, and it became apparent that I am getting sick of Big Macs and Whappers with fries. I wanted to go to a nice sit-down place and have well cooked meal served to me. Maybe little too pricy to enjoy it everyday, but a couple of times a week will be a nice break from fast food arena.

If you enjoy restaurant food prepared for you at the time of your order, but get self conscious about being a single diner, surrounded by diners with lunch companions, you are just like me, and we should dine together.

I'm a married (with 2 kids) IT professional 40 year old male. I love to try new things and open to suggestions.
Why the hell are you seeking "platonic" female friends to go out to nice restaurants with if you're MARRIED? What's wrong with taking your WIFE? I doubt she knows you're posting here. Again, you're opening the door for feelings or an affair to happen, and for you to lose custody of your children and your house when your wife smartens up and divorces your ass. PS lay off the damn big macs, if you all expect women to be thin and fit, then toe the line yourselves.
MWM at work searching for CONVERSATION - m4w - 34

Reply to: mailto:pers-147811956@craigslist.org?subject=MWM%20at%20work%20searching%20for%20CONVERSATION%20%20-%20m4w%20-%2034
Date: 2006-04-03, 2:40PM EDT

Yes it's another dreary Monday. So would anyone like to chat w/a prof male (yes I'm married) who is supposed to be working yet is posting this ad on craiglist....movies, weather, relationships...whatever I'm game...drop me a line at crd_456 at yahoo dot com...come on you can't be working too hard if you've read this...
Be honest here, dude... you JUST want to shoot the shit about relations with a woman in a platonic sense? Ooooooookay....
Looking for new friends - m4w - 25

Reply to: mailto:pers-147733905@craigslist.org?subject=Looking%20for%20new%20friends%20-%20m4w%20-%2025
Date: 2006-04-03, 11:17AM EDT

Looking to meet some new ladies in the area. I guess i am just tired of my same old network. Not that we are boring, by any means. Isn't it nice just to say you met someone new today (what if they were sexy and you got along great?)

So you want someone sexy with whom you get along great? Are you maybe looking for a date or possibly a GIRLFRIEND? I can't imagine caring how sexy my platonic friends are or aren't.

Free massage for ladies - m4w - 42

Reply to: mailto:pers-147720797@craigslist.org?subject=Free%20massage%20for%20ladies%20-%20m4w%20-%2042
Date: 2006-04-03, 10:37AM EDT

I learned massage from thailand and wanna practice more.if you (ladies only with picture)pls email me and we can set time ...

Why, pray tell, do you care about their PICTURE if you are only looking to practice massage on someone lying face down?

OK, people of Liberal Yuppieland, here's the deal:

1) If you truly are only interested in friendship with someone, yet you have physical attractiveness criteria for that person, you are a shallow friend and they're better off without you. If you want a "platonic" friend who's your activity partner in XYZ, stimulates you with interesting conversations, lives with you, etc; AND you care what she looks like (want to find her attractive): drumroll please.... WHAT YOU'RE PROBABLY LOOKING FOR IS A GIRLFRIEND. You will be accepted by mainstream society if you have a personal life, and you are not required to have the perfect job/house/degree/whatever to have a right to do so.

2) If you are married/taken/unavailable, but you need another woman's company to make your life exciting or spice up your days... you are so opening the door to become a cheater. Just don't. Either work on your marriage/relationship to put back in what's missing, or break it off already. And women who agree to this arrangement - for the love of GOD! Get some flippin respect for yourself. Why be some guy's whore? Or some professional help, if breaking up marriages really floats your boat. Many platonic intergender friendships... there's one person who'd go for more in a second, and do whatever it took to get the SO/spouse in the picture out of the way.

3) You are NOT "polyamorous" or whatever the cool little "alternate sexuality" term of the week is. You are either homosexual or heterosexual, anything besides that and either you are not being honest with yourself about your sexuality and/or you obviously have problems committing/staying faithful. Regardless of your morality and religion or lack thereof, the fact still remains that STDs are real and some are deadly.

4) Don't use your flippin' "career" as an excuse for why you need meaningless sex and nothing more. If you are a commitmentphobe, then grow up and admit it. If you have to spend that much time at work, either you are too stupid to do your job, or your boss is managing you badly and you should get some self-respect and consider leaving. People have careers and personal lives all the time. That's exactly how the human population has sustained itself and the economy and technology have developed continually since the beginning of time - people learned how to balance things. And it's not only the stupid people that reproduce either. Smart people, quit hiding your piss poor social skills and selfishness behind your IQ. That shit is played out.

Jobs: The New Abusive Spouses

2006-03-29T23:41:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Women's "Rights", the Sexual Revolution, and other causes implemented by the idiotic Feminazis of the Baby Boomer generation to "improve" women's lives, there is a new breed of abusive husband running amok in the 21st century. With this abusive husband, you get all the detriments of being with an abuser-controller, and none of the benefits that even the worst of marriages have to offer. After five years of this hellish "marriage", I am starting to wish I could stuff Earl in the trunk, so to speak.

Here are the "warning signs" of an abuser, lifted from a women's shelter homepage, and here is how a job meets these criteria:

Jealousy and Controlling Behaviour
Controlling behaviour is often disguised or excused as concern. Concern for your safety, your emotional or mental health, the need to use your time well, or to make sensible decisions. Your abuser may be angry or upset if you are 'late' coming back from work, shopping, visiting friends, etc., even if you told him/her you would be later back than usual. Your abuser may question you closely about where you were, whom you spoke to, the content of every conversation you held, or why you did something he/she was not involved in. As this behaviour gets worse, you may not be allowed to make personal decisions about the house, clothing, going to church or how you spend your time or money or even make you ask for permission to leave the house or room. Alternately, he/she may theoretically allow you your own decisions, but penalise you for making the wrong ones. Concern for our loved ones to a certain extent is normal - trying to control their every move is not.

A job will control your life. I am now accustomed to being called out of town at the last minute, bitched out if I wish to attend the funeral of an immediate family member (at my last job, some fucking whore called me three times in an hour while we were burying a woman I lived with for the better part of 2 decades). Imagine five years of being forced to provide a doctor's note/ court papers/death certificate and obitiuary saying exactly what was wrong with you/that you were in traffic court that morning/that you were burying your family, and did indeed, have obligations besides your goddam job. Imagine being followed to lunch, the bathroom, etc, and finding out later that your coworkers were cross examined about who you were meeting with for lunch, and what you were doing in the bathroom, and why do you have to go so much. Let's not forget the countless lectures I've gotten about how I sure as hell better not marry, have a family, or have outside activities, it would make me a worse employee. Plus, they micromanage me (despite years of stellar performance reviews) and that's just annoying.

Unrealistic Expectations

The abuser may expects you to be the perfect husband, wife, mother, father, lover, and friend. He/she is very dependent on you for all his/her needs, and may tell you he/she can fulfil all your needs as lover, friend, and companion. Statements such as: 'lf you love me, I'm all you need.', 'You are all I need.' are common. Your abuser may expect you to provide everything for him/her emotionally, practically, financially or spiritually, and then blame you for not being perfect or living up to expectation.

And how often have I been told "this job is all you need"... We are expected to be the "perfect employee", wholly and utterly devoted to the firm, the industry, the client, with trivialities such as our families, health, friends, hobbies, home and goals to be totally ignored. The mofos I work for now have no issue calling me out of the blue and telling me to be on a plane in an hour for the next indeterminate amount of days.

Isolation

The abuser may try to curtail your social interaction. He/she may prevent you from spending time with your friends or family and demand that you only go places 'together'. He/she may accuse you of being 'tied to your mother's apron strings', not be committed to the relationship, or view people who are your personal friends as 'causing trouble' or 'trying to put a wedge' between you. He/she may want to live in the country without a phone, not let you use the car, stop you from working or gaining further education or qualifications.

Hmm... I am stranded in a hotel room with no cell phone reception, Internet, or cable in a strange city for days and weeks at a time. At this specific location, if I choose to step outside, I will be immediately killed. The hotel's nice enough, see, but it's the eye of the storm, the business travelers' hotel in the middle of the ghetto. Literally. Not to mention the long ass hours they force us to work (try 75 a week) basically isolate us from the rest of the world.

Blame-shifting for Problems and Feelings

Hey, when does YOUR boss ever admit that it was his fuck up, rather than project it onto you?

Hypersensitivity

Let's face it - at my job, nobody's going to die or even come close if we make a mistake or miss a deadline. National security will not be breached, nothing terrible will happen but some megalomaniac asshole will be annoyed. Imagine spending your 75 hour weeks surounded by megalomaniac assholes for whom everything - from you making a typo in an email to your having a degree from a higher ranked school than they - is the end of the world.

Cruelty to Animals

Not specifically where I worked, but I guess if you worked for a non-treehugger cosmetics company that tests on animals, you could make the argument that yours does.

Cruelty to Children
Since abusers want all your attention themselves, they resent your spending time with the children or any normal demands and needs the children may have. .

Again, my particular job is not cruel towards children. However, if I had a dime for every time I have been told that women are no longer welcome at the company/industry/workforce when they have children, I wouldn't have to flippin' work. Oh, and the women at work who BRAG about having abortions because a baby would get in the way of your career? Congrats, bitch, you murdered your own child so you could get that 3% raise. Don't encourage the rest of us to do the same, the last thing I want is to be in hell with you for all eternity. (not the exact definition of hell, but not too far either).

Rigid Gender Roles
Abusers usually believe in stereotypical gender roles. A man may expect a woman to serve him; stay at home, obey him in all things---even things that are criminal in nature. A male abuser will often see women as inferior to men, more stupid, unable to be a whole person without a relationship. female abusers may expect the man to provide for them entirely, shift the responsibility for her well-being onto him or heckle him as being 'not a real man' if he shows any weakness or emotion.

Again, if I had a dime for every time I worked for a sexist asshole who held the fact that I have a vagina against me, including my SOB former supervisor who demanded to know if I was pregnant every fucking time I went to the bathroom or stepped out of the office for any reason, I wouldn't have to flippin' work again unless I lived past 200. In fact, the maybe 10 women I've ever heard of who've made manager in my industry may as well be men - they're all dried-up, childless, unmarried, bitter old hags. Oh, and supervisors who think women are stupid? Don't have to be men. "It sucked for me to be a twentysomething female worker in the 1970s, now I must make it suck for you!"

Verbal Abuse
In addition to saying things that are meant to be cruel and hurtful, either in public or in private, this can include degrading remarks or running down any accomplishments. Often the abuser will tell you that you are 'stupid', could not manage without him/her. He/she may keep you up all night to 'sort this out once and for all' or even wake you at night to continue to verbally abuse you. The abuser may even say kindly things to your face, but speak badly about you to friends and family.

Again, if I had a dime for every time I have been screamed at for mortal sins like using the wrong color pen to copyedit a document, followed to the bathroom, told I was stupid, told I was never going anywhere, told I would be nowhere without this job, and that the economy is so terrible and I'm so stupid I'll never find another one, told I was a bitch who creates a poor working environment because I do dirty tricks like tell my married coworker to stop asking me out or tell my office stalker that being the partner's nephew does not give him the right to phone me repeatedly at 3AM or harass my boyfriend ... Let's not forget the countless supervisors who have interrupted my work (the last time I was stupid enough to work for a woman, the bitch would follow me into the effin bathroom to yell at me!) to scream at me, insult me, or some such shit --- all clearly designed to eff up whatever it is I'm trying to do.

Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde

Very rarely do abusers conform to the stereotypical image of a constantly harsh, nasty or violent person, either in public or in private. More frequently the abuser portrays a perfectly normal and pleasant picture to the outside world (often they have responsible jobs or are respected and important members of the local community or Church) and reserves the abuse for you in the privacy of your own home. Nor are abusers always overtly abusive or cruel, but can display apparent kindness and consideration. This Jeckyll and Hyde tendency of the abuser serves to further confuse the victim, while protecting themselves from any form of suspicion from outsiders. Many victims describe "sudden" changes in mood - one minute nice and the next explosive or hysterical, or one minute happy and the next minute sad. This does not indicate some special "mental problem" but are typical of abusive personalities, and related to other characteristics such as hypersensitivity.

I swear all the abovementioned megalomaniac nutjobs I work with or for are like this - can be very suave and charming in front of clients and when they want something, and complete psychos when it's just you and them. it's just like turning off a lightswitch. "I'll send flowers to your mom's funeral because it'll reflect badly on the firm if we don't, but I swear to God I WILL scream at you for taking the time off work, call you to harass you during the funeral, and make fun of you if I hear of you crying in the bathroom an hour after you found out. I still haven't forgiven you for how angry you made me by taking a day off to go visit her when she had that heart attack."

Drink or Substance Abuse
Everyone in my industry seems to have a drinking problem. You're not part of the in-crowd if you're not skanking around at happy hour every night at 10PM when youleave the office. Don't like the superficiality, married men older than your dad hitting on you, and secondhand smoke of the bar scene? Then you're not "cool." No wonder they drink so freaking much, your life sucks if you work in my industry and you are probably better off dead than staying in your current career.

Threatening Violence

They threaten to fire you... repeatedly. And tell you how screwed you'll be when you're unemployed. Then the ratbastards don't deliver. Fire me! PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! I'd be able to sleep past 4 AM (the time concentration camp inmates had to get out of bed) and have a life.

So all in all, thanks to my abusive spouse, I have stomach problems, a messed up heartbeat, too many wrinkles for a woman my age, massive dental problems (not my job's fault, but I have been trying to schedule an appointment to get the root canal, crown and bridge for two flippin months now and they keep putting me on travel at the last second), carpal, a bad back, migrane headaches, and of course a bad attitude towards work and careers. I will never get a masters' degree, which would just shackle me to debt and to more years of this happy marriage.

If I could go back and time, I would tell Susan B. Anthony, Gloria Steinem and all those other stupid whores who screwed the rest of us over by pushing for woman's "rights" to sit down and shut the fuck up. And then I would stop back to my highschool self, and tell her, "Put that stupid book down! Forget college, just find some loser guy who will knock you up before you're old enough to drive and spend the rest of your lives beating the shit out of you! You will save all that tuition money, because your life will just turn out the same anyway!"

What awful book am I?

2006-03-17T21:10:00.000-05:00

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I first read Heart of Darkness in 1997, the last book for my senior year high school AP English class. Being days away from graduation/escaping my parents' house, I skimmed through it not really caring if I passed the multiple choice test. Come to think of it, I think I remember our class launching a coup d'etat of sorts and not even taking the test.

Too bad I didn't read it for class my senior year of college, when I'd have appreciated it much more. The story of a man from a developed country going to live in a third world jungle and slowly losing his mind would have been much more germane to my life - I was back in the US after a year in a third world jungle of my own on a junior year abroad. Seriously, there is just something about corruption everywhere, being harassed by psycho cops whose last thought is law and order, being turned away from hospitals because my skin's the "wrong" color, people not air-conditioning buildings when its 40 Celcius (approx. "hot as hell" Farenheit), and seeing malnourished children dying on the streets that brings out the worst in a person. Or at least this person. I was totally evil by the end of my study abroad program, having lost much idealism and faith in humanity. To a point, yes, one does have to fight tooth and nail to survive, but having that fight kicked into high gear and sustained that way brings out the evil in me. I thought back to that book often. Unfortunately, they don't have libraries in third world rathole countries so I couldn't re-read Heart of Darkness. Of course by the time I got back to the US, I was too busy reading other books for senior year college classes, and didn't have time for pleasure reading.

I have seriously never understood why English teachers, most of whom seem to be reasonably good people, take such pleasure in cramming shitty books down teenagers' throats. Why the hell do you make us read Herman Melville, Beowulf, Shakespeare and other crap when there are multitudes of fascinating, deep, enjoyable to read books out there. How about The Poisonwood Bible, The Stand, anything VC Andrews (not her ghostwriter) wrote, Gregory Maguire's fractured fairy tales, Valley of the Dolls, A Wrinkle in Time... the list of interesting, enjoyable, quality books from which one can glean foreshadowing, symbolism, etc stretches on and on. What I should have learned in high school english is that reading = frustrating. Thank God the Internet and cable still sucked when I was a child, otherwise I'd be illiterate.

So they're not all complete morons in DC after all...

2006-03-16T20:49:00.000-05:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502409.html

Definitely one of the worst things about my exile in Liberal Yuppieland has been the throngs of freakin' girliemen in this area. I'm sure they were raised as "feminists" by parents who consider themselves "progressive", but girliemen or metrosexuals or whatever the hell "enlightened" society is trying to mold them into, are in fact useless as men. Girliemen have no manners (even the most obnoxious of men at home will hold the door or help you lift something heavy); girliemen are so "enlightened" that they empower you to walk to your car by yourself after dark in the violent crime capital of the US and risk getting attacked. Again, the morally bankrupt, HIV-infected asshat attempting to rape you can tell the difference between a man and a woman; a "girlieman" is too educated and "progressive" to know the difference. Not to mention, what use is a straight man who can tell you all about moisturizers, but can't change a tire? Thanks, but that's what I have female and/or gay male friends for. Congratulations, you're "enlightened". You're also screwed when you blow a tire, clog the toilet, etc.

Metrosexuals: They're here, they're not queer, but they're close!

Although in all fairness, one of the more manlymen I know here is, in fact, gay.

And don't get me started on all the whackjobs who want to challenge "traditional gender constructs." Men and women are not equal, dumbasses. We're biologically, chemically, physically, emotionally, and socially different. Medical science has proven this again and again and again. Not inferior or superior. Just different.

And YES, there is a huge distance between my stance and the "they should never have given them the vote!" camp. Yes, there is. Get over it.

If these "progressive" intellectuals truly respected humanity and wanted people of each gender to be the best they can be, they wouldn't try to make people deny their natural selves to fit some whacked-out dystopian ideal embraced by the over-educated elite who have spent maybe 2 seconds outside the Ivory Tower in the real world. Sure, gender equality looks good on paper. So does Communism.

This is why I got a C+ in Computer Programming

2006-03-16T17:50:00.000-05:00

If someone can help me out with this freakin' HTML, I'd appreciate it. I want my sidebar thing to be up more. I don't know how I screwed up the code.

Cuddle Party My Ass

2006-03-11T01:23:00.000-05:00

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/211251p-181992c.html

He says people come - and return to - his cuddle parties because as adults they don't get their "Recommended Daily Allowance of Welcomed Touch."
After a session of cuddling and non-sexual affection, they feel good about themselves for the rest of the week, he says.

Try getting friends, or better yet, a spouse like adults have been doing since the beginning of time. If you are that desperate for human contact... that's probably because you're lonely because you've been filling your life with meaningless pursuits like career, material things, and yet another feather in the cap that is your resume.

We're communal animals, folks. People need people. How sad and pathetic is it to have to PAY to be hugged?

Idiots! You're not in college anymore

2006-03-10T12:11:00.000-05:00

People wonder about and bemoan the state of twentysomethings and why we're not getting ahead. Sure, there are cards stacked against us in the race to standard adulthood - job market sucks (most of what is out there, they want to own your soul for a few decades), forget about owning a house, and who the hell knows what is going on with the whole "marriage is out of vogue" sentiment of the media/pop culture.

However, could it be in part that we're doing it to ourselves?

Yeah, there's the "get in debt up to your ears in buying things" fad that proliferates around here, but the irresponsibility also extends to where you live and how you spend your free time. In the Liberal Yuppieland Metro area, there are echelons of "I'm not ready to leave college" communities, which are basically like college dorms for older people... Their residents don't let go of the fratboy/sororitygirl party days of yore, with the disastrous results.

"The thing to do" if you're an attractive, educated, "successful" "young professional" is live in one of these communities, which are centered around:

- luxury buildings with insanely high rents (sure, fork over 1/2 your salary to pay someone else's mortgage, ALL 22 year olds need marble fireplaces and jacuzzis in the home).
proximity to bars, and the subsequent lifestyle of going to bars several nights a week, drinking oneself into a stupor, inhaling tons of secondhand smoke, being in the meat market, being judged on how expensive your clothes are/how "pretty" you are (by WASP standards of course; all non-WASPS are fugly)/how skinny you are/how easily it seems you'll put out by shallow drunk guys, and of course making out with/going home with random people and pray to God you don't get one of the million STDs going around.
proximity to absolutely nothing else to do if one were inclined to develop healthier habits.
a general snotty environment, in which everyone brags about what kind of car their flavor of the month drives, the countries they've visited, the restaurants they've tried, the multiple graduate degrees they have or plan to get.
limiting yourself by not owning a car (who can afford the insurance, not to mention the car payment, when all your $$ is going to rent and car tabs), thus further delaying the passage to true adulthood.
having neighbors/roommates who are within a half-decade of you agewise, all went to one of ten schools, all do one of twenty jobs, and all share the same interests.

I spent a year in one of these neighborhoods, before moving out to an "uncool" community, closer to work at the time, closer to bookstores/bike trails/craft stores/stuff I like, quieter and "goes to sleep" earlier, twice the space and quality for half the rent, actual age diversity in my neighbors. I've been saving money for my retirment and more immediate future. Got mostly friends between 5-10 yrs older, as of late been blessed with some friends 3-5 yrs younger, and I'm happier and probably healthier having options besides going to some smoky bar.

I tell my twentysomething coworkers where I live and it offends the living shit out of them. I am referred to as "the one who lives in "the ghetto". When asked why they feel that way, my coworkers tell me that despite the significantly lower crime in my neighborhood, not being near any bars, clubs, etc qualifies it as "the ghetto". They cannot figure out how I spend my time on the weekends, what I do. I guess needing to have savings qualifies me as poor or slumming it.

Awhile back, though, a guy at work had our team - men and women - over at his place in Yuppieton (a "cool neighborhood") for a football game and I dropped by for a bit. This guy is, despite his myopic worldviews, pretty nice. I was there not 30 seconds when I was offered a beer.
"No thanks, I'm driving." Smile and grab a diet coke.
"Come on, don't be LAME! Have a beer."
"Thank you, I'm fine".
"Something else alcoholic?"
"Nope."
"GODDAMN IT! HAVE A BEER!" 300 pounds of my coworker's tub of lard roommate (aka, early 30's manager at his firm) is in my face screaming. People are looking at me funny; some guys are giving me dirty looks. Nobody comes to my defense. I guess a size 0, 5'2 woman can defend herself physically. Making me almost 100% certain that said keg had roofies in it or something. That or they WANT me to get a DUI. OK then I'm gone. People weren't this pathetic at high school parties.

This isn't a rare occasion though. Happened before, many a time, largely at work functions. I've tried the (IMO perfectly valid) "I'm a diabetic, I can't have alcohol and you're being an immature asshole to try to pressure me to do something that will make me very sick" line, just makes people angry. It's no wonder I don't even go to parties or try to be friendly with my coworkers any more really.

Let's not forget my former college roommate who's convinced I'll never find a husband because when I would go to bars, I didn't drink. "That's really the only way to meet somebody, and even when you do go, you never drink." Did I miss an Eleventh Commandment?

And I am referred to often at the office or by friends of friends as "the one who lives in that ghetto Quietton", "the one who doesn't drink".

So you have to go to bars a lot, sleep around a lot, and live in neighborhoods where you party a lot, pften well into your early 30's around here, to be accepted by your peers. That means you'll come out of your 20's with

no savings
lots of credit card debt
perhaps a borderline drinking problem/liver damage due to too much alcohol
decreased fertility if not lung cancer due to inhaling all that secondhand smoke
perhaps decreased self-esteem from having your worth as a human being judged solely on your looks, material possesssions, address, resume, and stamps on your passport
perhaps an STD from too many drunken hookups
perhaps not such a great career due to showing up late/drunk pretty often

and you have the nerve to wonder why a management position, house, spouse, nest egg, all the stuff our parents had at our age aren't being handed to you on a silver platter? Part of the reason our parents had that stuff in their twenties was they didn't DO the shit that twentysomethings do today until such a late age. Not to mention, they didn't seem to NEED several private school master's degrees, the latest techie toy, uberexpensive highlights, eating dinner out every night, and so forth.

Yeah, the cards are a bit stacked agaist us, but really, twentysomethings have a lot of blame to put on our individual selves and our peers for the way things are.

Sellout is a compliment

2006-03-09T18:55:00.000-05:00

Sellout - n. Someone who succeeds at doing something that you, either as an individual or as a group, have told yourselves that you cannot do because you have X characteristic. The Sellout has X characteristic also, but accomplishes Y with flying colors, thus invalidating others' excuses for their own shortcomings, challenging their worldviews, and exposing their laziness/incompetence.

Antonym - sheep.

See also - Black people who do well in school and their careers, Intelligent women who in addition to doing well at their jobs became mothers, Idealistic folks who don't choose jobs that leave them impoverished, Twentysomethings who don't live to get drunk and party.

You're Just Not That Wealthy

2006-03-09T14:10:00.000-05:00

To all you Manolo Blahnik-wearing, coach-bag-carrying, BMW-driving, $14-martini-drinking grad students and "young professional" yuppie wannabes making $40K/yr at a nonprofit....

You can't afford it. We all know it. It's okay.

I know you want to look "successful" and have all the accoutrements of success, but don't you think that when you are parking your sports car or SUV (the one that cost more than your annual pretax salary) at your RENTED apartment, you look like a douchebag? If you need that car to get a woman, or to impress your boss - that woman is a gold digging whore, and your boss is a megalomaniacal moron if he expects you to afford a shiny new Beemer or Benz before you're even old enough to rent a car! Especially onwhat he's paying you. A practiced, semi-intelligent golddigger will put two and two together, realize that you probably are up to your eyeballs in debt, and move on to the bigger better deal.

Ladies - yes, your highlights that cost $200/month to maintain are stunning. Maybe or maybe not in the good way. If you're an obvious brunette (ie, you have really dark eyes and skin) though, the blonde highlights look a little fake. And the black roots look ridiculous. And I am sure you HAVE to have the bobbi brown makeup, designer handbags, $5 lattes several times a day, Prada clothes, etc, but here's another thing... looking that way isn't going to get you promoted faster, get you a better boyfriend, better friends. Your boss sees you dressed like a million bucks (literally), knows what you're making, and assumes you either have a trust fund or a sugar daddy. Fair or not, nobody likes women like that at the office no matter how good a job they do. And those guys at the $14 martini bar? Only care how thin you are (anorexic is best, so easy on the calorie-laden marinis) and how fast you put out. If you are prettier than your girlfriends, they secretly hate you; if you are uglier, they secretly pity you. You are their competition.

That's what "keeping up with the Joneses" is all about - competition. The average consumer debt alone - not including mortgages and student loans - is around 60K. Why else do you think you can finance freaking everything, from coffee tables to television sets? You do realize you pay about 2X sticker price that way... oh, you didn't. The only real thing you're keeping up with your competition on is debt and fiscal irresponsibility on the way to acquiring Almighty material things.