for "healthy" or I guess...healthier spinach and artichoke dip. Any suggestions?
Today is Day 10 of the Master Cleanse, I did it!
I am planning on baking up a storm this Xmas! First up? Pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting for Turkey Day!
Got my New Moon Tickets! Midnight release? Really...I'm too old for this stuff.
My sparkly skull came in the mail yesterday and it is awesome.
I caved and turned on the Xmas music, and also peeked at the Black Friday ads...cheeter pants! I did not, however, get out the decorations.
I have been stuck on the same lame book for over a week. Just....cant....finish....
Connery made a better Bond but as a person he is a bit of an arse....
I had the misfortune to watch this movie last night. I was so looking forward to it. Apparently I like torturing myself.
How do these movies get made? How do they persuade talent to do them? They're not even funny.
Here are my beefs.
1) It's always tight-ass, neurotic, cat-loving, super controlling women who are stunningly good looking but incapable of finding a man. Inevitably because their standards are 'just too high', [a] and they are just plain desperate because its been [insert time period] since they've had good sex. The woman, though intelligent and educated is always extremely naive when it comes to 'how to get a guy' and has to enlist the help of all kinds of jaded or sex deprived friends to help her land a good one.
This is just plain ridiculous. Don't knock standards, they can be very helpful and protective, and can often be a sign that someone knows themselves, and what works for them, well. Also, Sex isn't the be all or the end all, nor is it the most important thing in a relationship. The single woman/cat lover cliche is SO VERY OLD! In this movie the main female character was portrayed in being so wrapped up in her ideals of a man and so desperate to catch him that she allowed herself to do all kinds of hi-jinks that were so anti her thoughtful and controlled character. Granted we all do stupid things from time to time, but you can't sell me on the idea that a T.V. producer who can make split second decisions on which camera to go to, and the best thing to say in a situation would not find an excuse to visit the powder room and remove her climax inducing panties before a business dinner, or feel the need to Cyrano de Bergerac her way through a baseball game date with earpieces, sounding to all the world like someone suffering from acute Turrets Syndrome.
2) It's always guys [b] who are the lowest common denominators of maleness. Sex is the most important thing, and the more you get of it the better a "man" you are. Men only put up with relationships for the sake of getting sex. They think with their penis and as rude and crass as they want to be.
Seriously. Grow up! If this is all that you are going to be, we're well shot of you! Men take responsibility, Men give and receive, Guys take and callously use others. In this movie the main character not only disparages women who are lonely on a regular basis, but he repeatedly ignored his supervisors instructions on air, and basically only did what he wanted to do. Every once and a while you see a glimpse of a relationship with a young boy and his 'responsibility' to the kid, so you're led to believe that there is more to this man than you can see. COME ON! The Diamond-in-the-rough guy is all played out. There is something to be said for seeing the true person, but this is so far from that. The guy likes who he is. He hides the responsibility as if it is a weakness, or something of less value.
3) The Guy helps the Crazy lady catch a Man by playing all sorts of mind games.
This is the worst part of the romantic comedy for me.
Just so we're clear. I think relationships that come about by manipulation of the things you think will titillate your partner and obfuscation of who you really are, so that only the characteristics and traits he/she would like appear, for the sake of securing him/her are wasted time.
I will never play games with someones affection, and I would walk away from anyone who does. It isn't romantic to me. It isn't funny. It's cruel, and it will never build a relationship that lasts. It ends. Always. Either in an apology (if you have some character) or just walking away after you've taken what you wanted (as witnessed by the main guy's answering machine messages in this movie).
What makes it even more frustrating for me is that I frequently work with teen girls who have seen this over and over and think that this is the way they're supposed to behave, or the behavior they're supposed to put up with. They just get their hearts crushed in the process.
As you may have guessed I thought this movie was Drivel, plain and simple. I just want to be able to watch one romantic comedy that doesn't make me want to curse. They're just not funny. They're just cruel and callous. I think I need to watch Wall-e to cleanse my palate. At least robot's understand :)
Can I rate a movie with negative stars?
a) and sometimes they are just absolutely ridiculous ideals, I'll grant you that. They're so over the top. Tolstoy reading, Austen loving, long walks on the beach, love all animals but cats the best, etc.
b) guys are not men. Guys are men in age only. They live life as one big game, enjoying all they can get, never taking responsibility, expecting the world to revolve around them, consequences be dammed, etc.
Crash: hug
for you
me: gahhh i'm so fat right now Crash
132
do you believe this
i was 125 like 6 weeks ago
i want to die
Crash: is it muscle?
me: no it is HIDEOUS FAT
Crash: baby katzen, no! omg how did it happen!?
me: my clothes are tight
Crash: mine are, too
me: i want to hurl self off bridge
just need a bridge
Crash: i think i am up to 140
me: why isn't there ever a BRIDGE when you need one
Crash: so i'll probably fall faster than you
lol
me: LOL
well we're screwed with no bridges
Crash: this is true. at least i refilled my meds today, tho.
me: and i'm in day FOUR of the same anxiety attack
mmmmmmeds
Crash: damn!
that is so not good
me: considered getting back on, today
took a benedryl instead
;-)
Crash: i don't blame you
me: poor man's narcotic
Crash: i keep popping cyclobenzaprine and xanax
cos i ran out of paxil for 3 days and no time to refill it because of evil evil job
me: mail order!
Crash: ooh good idea
me: oh i'd be lost without mail order
funny, in tthe middle of an anx. attack, the LAST thing i wana do is run out to the drugstore
Crash: i should look into that
yeah, no doubt
did i tell you about my nervous breakdown this week?
where i yelled at people at work?
me: you told me you cussed some bitch out
Crash: omg. i so did.
i did not get in trouble.
:)
i even said "fucking" in front of a little kid. at work. and i am not fired. whew!
me: b/c you're rad
Crash: and very, very lucky
hehe
but then i got mad again today at work
but didn't say any naughty words
so i think i'm ok
just a fat ass
with a sore throat and cough
and broken out skin
from being freaking overworked and overangered
me: i am also broken out
bad
stress and candy
ok well i'll have my 7 lbs gone by. thnxgiving
hopefully
i just have to pick a limb to hack off.
Crash: lmao!
i have eaten almost an entire large bag of peanut m and ms today
then i got sick. surprise, surprise.
i find feeling ugly makes me homicidal instead of suicidal anymore. it's weird.
me: at least they taste the same on the way up
Crash: or maybe it's vaguely both
me: HAHA
me too
it also makes me buy stupid shit from mall kiosks
Crash: we should write a book together
like proactiv? hehe
me: i'm that girl, the one they target to buy their dead sea salt shit b/c i look like i have low self worth
I AM THAT GIRL
Crash: ohhh the dudes that want to put crap on you as you walk by
me: yah lookin like 'i just wanna be touched'
Crash: lol!
me: 'can't you see how needy i am? due to my huge ass and my acne right there?'
Crash: i said yesterday i was going to make a new magazine about how girls who have low self-esteem get all the men
me: 'touch me for 40 seconds and i will buy two of your packs of salt shit
Crash: you are hilarious
me: it's TRUE
i'm going to blog it right now
Crash: i know, but it's so funny
you should be on snl
me: lol
Crash: yay!
me: actually i'll just paste this into vox
i'm so lazy
Crash: awesome
me, too
me: as well as fat and pimplehaving
Crash: fat, lazy, broken out assholes
that's us
me: we suck
Crash: but damn, we're witty
me: we have that going for us
Crash: i feel so much pressure to be the funny one
to make up for the ugly
me: me TOO!
Crash: it's like everyone lvoes me b/c i'm hilarious, and i entertain everyone, but then i go home and want to put a gun in my mouth
it's a sick cycle
me: is it better than putting a gun in someone elses mouth?
i suppose it depends on the mouth
and the someone
Crash: i just updated my boyfriend.
i call my blog my boyfriend, btw
me: haha did you paste my blog!?
Crash: nope
but if the feds find mine i'm effed
me: nice i'mma have to read that
Crash: yay!
ok now i have to go
love you. and don't worry, someone is fatter than you today. xoxoxoxoxo
me: love you back, thanks for the sage advice
The first book Christa had me read in our book challenge was The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.
Overall I really enjoyed this book, I started out not knowing exactly what the story was about but quickly adjusted (most of) my expectations once I had a better idea of the tale to be told. Going into the book I thought it was a story about how Susie watches from heaven her family as they try to piece together their lives after her murder, and I thought the story would revolve around her finding ways to guide them to her murderer. However eventually I came to realize that the story was instead about what happened to Susie's family and friends after her death, and the ways Susie got to live out her life by watching them live out theirs.
The story starts out quite intensely with the murder of Susie, which I was not expecting that to happen so soon. It was one heck of a hook though and I found that the first night I started reading it I didn't want to put it down, I had to follow Susie's story and see where it was going! One thing that I loved about the book was the sort of voyeuristic feel to it, the author did a great job making the reader feel like they were right there with Susie watching her family and friends throughout the story. I also loved how real the characters felt, how everyone dealt with Susie's murder differently. Some bottled it up only to explode later, others ran, others let it overcome them almost to the point of insanity, and in varying degrees they all let it rip them apart and most eventually grew stronger afterward.
I found the author's idea of heaven to be an interesting place. It wasn't exactly what I would think of heaven as being, but at the same time it made perfect sense both for Susie and for the story. Without giving too much away, it was a fluid sort of place where each person gets to shape their own existence and world around them, and they can watch the living (which is how most of the story is told, with Susie's comments and memories as she watches her family and friends). The interactions between everyone seemed to me to be the main focus of the story. We got to see how her mother and father reacted to Susie's death as well as some of her friends from school and also her brother, sister and grandmother, and through Susie's eyes we got to see several private moments that would have been missed otherwise. These moments allowed Susie to not only watch her family grow as people, but to also live through them and to grow herself, and it was this aspect of the story that surprised me the most.
I was somewhat disappointed with the ending however, I felt like a few things went unanswered and other things were wrapped up in underwhelming ways but I wont get into that because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read the book yet. I attribute this disappointment to my expectations about where the story was going (before I started reading the book) and feel like if I went in without those expectations that I might of been left more satisfied by the ending. And in that sense, I sort of hope Hollywood changes things a bit in the movie :p
I would give the book an 8.5 out of 10 because I thought the story was well told, fun to read and hard to put down at times, although towards the end though it didn't have that 'I must keep reading this to see what happens' feel. The characters were great, every last one of them, and I definitely could use a lesson from this book on how to make my own characters more believable and memorable in my writing.
Suggested by JM:
“Life is too short to read bad books.” I’d always heard that, but I still read books through until the end no matter how bad they were because I had this sense of obligation. That is, until this week when I tried (really tried) to read a book that is utterly boring and unrealistic. I had to stop reading.
Do you read everything all the way through or do you feel life really is too short to read bad books?
I've almost always completed books that I've started. Maybe because I usually read books that have been well-reviewed or maybe because I'm generally an optimist and that even after a slow start I hope that it might get better, or maybe I have a stick-to-it-iveness that says if you're going to start something you might as well finish it.
Speaking of of finishing it, that does remind me of one of the few books I didn't finish -- "IT" from Stephen King. Clocking in at over a thousand pages and at the apex of his drug-addled, no-one-will-edit-him 80s long windedness (Steve: more isn't always better) -- I plodded along in this for about 400 pages and then said, "No mas!"
Oddly, I know several people for whom this book was one of their favorites, but I couldn't stand IT.
Rhode Island legislators learned yesterday that Gov. Carcieri vetoed the gay funeral rights bill that passed in October.
The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Rhoda Perry and state Rep. David Segal, would have added “domestic partners” to the list of people legally authorized to make funeral, cremation or burial arrangements for their deceased partners. Heterosexual married couples already have these rights.
The Providence Journal reported that the bill was proposed after one man was unable to retrieve the body of his late partner from the state medical examiner for weeks because they weren’t married or next-of-kin.
Gov Carcieri’s veto message, said:
“This bill represents a disturbing trend over the past few years of the incremental erosion of the principles surrounding traditional marriage, which is not the preferred way to approach this issue.
“If the General Assembly believes it would like to address the issue of domestic partnerships, it should place the issue on the ballot and let the people of the state of Rhode Island decide.”
The bill defined a domestic partner as someone who was in an “exclusive, intimate and committed relationship” with the deceased person and had lived with them for at least a year. The bill also said the couple had to be financially “interdependent” by joint mortgage, shared credit card or domestic partnership contract.
Gov. Carcieri said the bill would allow the decisions of a “partner” of a year to take precedence over “traditional family members.” He said a “one year time period is not a sufficient duration to establish a serious bond between two individuals.”
Rep. Segal said Carcieri took his opposition to same-sex marriage too far. He and Sen. Perry plan to override the veto.
Segal also said, “‘I think the man is heartless and this has become a bad joke that has carried on for far too long.”
Even in death we get NOTHING!
I think that gay people should leave their spouses in the morgue and let the state pay for the burials until it is Bankrupt.
It's National Adoption Week. I found out by accident; for my family every week is Adoption Week! I came across this article on Google News. The article talks about the complex reality of adoption:
The British Association of Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) has published information today stating that one in every three parents looking to adopt would not consider a child born out of a pregnancy that included alcohol or drug abuse by the mother. This view on adoption is troubling given that nearly half of children in the U.K. that need adopted families originate from homes where drugs and alcohol were abused.
With National Adoption Week beginning today, BAAF wants to place an emphasis on steering prospective parents out of a fantasized ideal of adoption and into today’s modern reality of adoption. (Bolding mine.)
I don't blame adoptive parents for wanting a baby with a "clean slate". Raising a child with special needs, be that a disability or a troubled past, is heartbreaking and difficult. But the idea that a "baggage-less" adopted child will be just like a biological child is a fantasy. Every adopted child has a past:
Genetic ties and shared history can never be severed. An adopted child and their new family must always live with that difference.
YES. I want every person who has any contact with an adopted child or their family to understand that. I want people to understand that adoption is a beautiful and wonderful thing, but that it ain't perfect. Adoption is born out of hope, but it's also a connection forged out of the grief of parents: birth parents who have to give up a child and many adoptive parents who are unable to concieve. Adoption changes everything you know about family and genetics and love. I want people who know my family to acknowlege that. Don't put adoption or my family on a pedestal.
"Adoption is such a miraculous process!" Yes it is, but so is having a biological child, and that is messy and scary and frustrating while also being joyful and more fulfilling than anything else in the world.
Happy Adoption Week to everyone touched by adoption. God preserve all of us! :)
Not that my proclivity towards nigh-arrogant ranting and circuitous introspection demands any apologies*, but I realized this weekend there are some significant though well-concealed advantages to being a self-absorbed navel-gazer.
You’re going to need me to back that one up, aren’t you?
OK, let’s start with this brilliantly clever circle graph that received its fifteen minutes of fame when it landed on the front page of HuffPo last Friday.
To some, this may seem like an outright insult to Christians on a national level. To others, it comes off… well, it comes off exactly the same way; it’s just that this group of people delights in the insult instead of taking offense to it. It’s why we have wars, you know.
But what if the philosophical implications of this graphic are deeper than either of those cramped assumptions? Isn’t it possible the obvious joke is only there as an appetizer for your brain? Could there be something beyond the glib comparison of three movie monsters to the Messiah?
And if I can get you to see what I’m pointing at, can I then use the same similes and metaphors to confuse things and diminish the entire thing back down to a trite GraphJam entry?
Only one way to find out, I guess.
So anyway, being an artist by profession, I have an appreciation for color that perhaps my non-creative friends lack. Nevertheless, most people who see the above image would take note, albeit to varying degrees, of what could potentially be the most significant aspect of the illustration: that the hues change tint as they overlap. Oh sure, it’s done primarily to distinguish the individual circles while avoiding the clutter of each circle having a black stroke around it. But if we’re willing to assume a respectable level of intelligence for the graphic artist, we can very easily contrive some other, more important symbolism in this design.
For example, considering the person’s artistic nature, we can decide that the three circles are a subliminal color-mixing palette. Voila! Instant Philosophical Proposition! We are now conveniently positioned to make the symbol represent whatever we want simply by piously stating, “The final question is this: do you see God as additive or subtractive?”
The beautiful cleverness of this is that we’ve now opened up the argument for what defines something as additive and what makes something subtractive. Further applying these parameters to an omnipotent being keeps the idea immortal by giving rise to mutually exclusive factions, each with its own specialized and unequivocal interpretation of the image.
The Three-Circle Purists say the underlying message merely reinforces the graphic’s original idea that God is the culmination of all monstrosities to the point of becoming the blackest monster of them all. They refer to the very manner in which the tints darken as they progress towards Jesus Christ as their evidence. Declaring him to be a subtractive deity, they give God the name “Simmik” (spelled cmyk) and dub him the Bringer of Blackness.
The Paradoxicals, however, insist that the diagram represents Jesus’ tendency to spend the majority of his ministry in the presence of the most misguided, baleful sinners and that the choice of colors is intended as a subtle testament to that necessary irony. They claim repeatedly – almost to the point of recitation – that it is light from which God and all good things are born and thus, just like light, God must be additive. To them, the completeness of God results in a clean, perfect whiteness. He is given the title “Regrebloo the Pure”. Countless hymns are composed rejoicing in the promise of that glorious day when all colors will come together to form the most perfect White.
Of course, the cynical 3-CPs are all over that with shouts of racism and accusations of a religiously driven eugenic agenda. Science fiction novels begin to be regularly presented as oracular tomes. PK Dick and Isaac Asimov become revered as great prophets.
The Doxies then issue a collective sardonic snort by taking out full-page ads and erecting billboards likening fundamentalist 3-C doctrine to that of the Church of Scientology, citing as fact the very arguable notion that L. Ron Hubbard was also a science fiction author. This campaign fails miserably, however, as does their droll attempt to humiliate their adversaries by referring to them as “C-3POs”.
The battle rages for decades. Nonsensical self-help books emerge with titles like I, Robot. U Can’t Subtract! and Paradoxicals Do It With Guile. Passion becomes petulance and devotion turns into duress. A purist menacingly holds a 2x4 like a baseball bat and a doxie pulls his handgun…
Then, only after countless lives have been lost to the argument, does the illustration’s creator (by now aged 106) finally issue a public statement declaring that he is, in point of fact, completely colorblind.
And just like that, the sum of time and energy dedicated to either side of the debate is fully devalued. All the stock placed in both ideals is instantly obliterated. Every measure of strength and motivation imbued by the conflict is just as effectively depleted.
There was really never anything more to the illustration than an insensitive jape…
…right?
*In fact, some people actually like that sort of thing. I simply provide a service – an abrasive but oddly arousing service. So do hookers, but unlike a prostitute, I service you free of charge.
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