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| I just finished "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser. Aside from an occasional guilty craving for chicken McNuggets, I don't eat a lot of fast food. It's unhealthy, tasteless, and tacky. But occasionally there's that guilty craving, or the unfortunate situation of being starving and trapped on the interstate with nothing but rest stops to choose from. So I do ingest the occasional burger or two. About 3 chapters into this book I was determined never to touch fast food ever again. About halfway through, I started seriously considering shopping at Whole Foods and buying all organic meats and dairy products. If you decide to read "Fast Food Nation," for the love of god, don't read the chapters on the meatpacking industry and e. coli contamination while you're eating. (Unless it's while you're eating a McDonald's cheeseburger--in that case, the poetic irony might be worth it.) | |
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| I chipped a tooth a few weeks ago, and today was the first chance I had to get to the dentist and get it fixed. [I was a lopsided vampyre for a while, since it was my left canine.] Yay for good family dentists, and for UV-activated bonding resin.
On a sad note, I drove home by way of the old family homeplace. I need to never do that again - it's far too depressing to see the house my mother designed 50 years ago with plywood over the windows and trash dumped in the driveway. Obviously the "real estate wizard" who bought it 4 years ago wasn't nearly as good at the flip/sell/repeat routine as he thought. On the other hand, my grandparents' lot on the other side of the road is unrecognizable...the buyer tore down the farmhouse and barn, and built nine cookie-cutter trash^H^Hct homes there...three of which are abandoned, and one of those has had its roof fall in. [Thus "trash^H^Hct homes."]
Now, I just have to wait for my lip to retreat from the other room so that I can get something to eat and/or drink....I'm hungry and thirsty! | |
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| One of my chief complaints about swing dances is that they start so bloody *late*. The earliest dance in town is Hot Jam, and though that officially starts at 8:30, it's pretty empty til about 9. Wednesday nights at the Graveyard don't start til 9, and Swing Soulstice on Thursdays pushes things to 9:30. So I was extremely pleased to hear that the Graveyard was doing a holiday special dance this past Sunday, starting at an unheard-of 7 pm! Since I'd spent the afternoon at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ahhhnahhh's place helping to clean up from rslatkin's birthday brunch, it seemed silly to go home and come back out again, so rslatkin decided she wanted to come out to dinner with me and watch the dancing.  I've been feeling a bit burned out on dancing lately, but Sunday was a great night. The band was hot, there was a nice crowd, and I was feeling good about everything. It was neat having rslatkin watch and see what I've been spending all my free time on for the past year. :) Last night was Hot Jam's holiday bash, and they also had a live band in to play for the evening. It was another great night of dancing, and a lot of people came out who haven't been around for a while, so the crowd was a good size--almost too good, as I got stepped on a few times, and bumper-danced rather a lot. While the band took a break, it was announced that there would be a "White Elephant Jack and Jill" competition. I assumed this meant that the prizes were white elephant type gift items, but went around joking that it must mean you brought a partner you didn't want and tried to trade up. As it happened, I was closer than I knew. The first person chose a number at random, and was paired up with the corresponding lead. The next person had the choice to either steal the first lead, or to pick another random number, and so on. So when Nima announced that the competition was about to begin, and called for 7 follows and 7 leads, I found myself in the front of the crowd that had started to form, waffled a minute, and then said, "What the hell?" And thus found myself in my second Jack and Jill competition this year. Some readers may recall my last experience with a Jack and Jill, where I didn't fare so well. This was different. Not that I won, or anything, but I know I danced well, even if I didn't quite follow everything perfectly. Best of all, the music was pretty darned fast, and I kept up with no trouble at all. Ok, it helped that I had one of the best leads on the dance floor as my partner. This was no mistake--my original partner got stolen, and I had my pick of the other leads. Hell, I thought, let's be ambitious, and walked over to the winner of the advanced division of that last Jack and Jill I was so upset over. He's a nice guy, and when I said, "Ok, I know you're like twice as good as I am," he replied, "Hey, no, don't go there. Just have fun, that's my strategy." And we did. It was a grand experience, and I went home feeling on top of the world. 
(Thanks to Melissa for the picture!) | |
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| My much-beloved "Black Mandarin" Motorola W490 cellphone died over the weekend. (a.k.a. "The Halloween Phone" thanks to the orange trim on the black phone).
The local T-Mobile stores seem to only have three kinds of phones in stock: cheap throwaways, very expensive high end (G1 and Cliq), and Crackberries. I got a cheap candybar style (Motorola W233) to tide me over while a replacement for what I do want comes from the website.
(A Motorola "Heather Grape" W490 - grey with purple trim -- am I a creature of habit or WHAT?)
The W233 works well enough, but I am now 110% certain that I will always go for a flip phone like all the rest I've used. It works, but it feels SO damn weird. I find myself wondering how anyone stands this form factor....
This does confirm my suspicion that I would utterly hate to use an iPhone...a fat candybar phone is still a candybar phone. On the other hand, I'll keep the W233 around as a backup -- it does work, and I have to admit that I kind of like the radioactive green trim....besides, it's camera-free*, so I can take it into secure areas that the W490 can't visit.
Thank Heavens I had all of my contacts on the SIM card, and had not invested in any expensive ringtones.
*At one time, it was possible to get a decent phone with bluetooth and and without a useless damned camera...I know I'm bucking the trend, but I despise phone cameras, since they are nothing but a source of problems for me. | |
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| Sometimes when he's in a "mood," Z won't sit in his high chair to eat, but wants to sit in my lap and be fed. I know I should encourage independence and regular meal habits and all that, but I also know he won't fit on my lap forever, and someday I'll miss this. I don't want to look back and think, "I wish I'd held him more." Some mornings we bring Z into bed with us for his morning bottle. I know I'm not supposed to be giving him bottles anymore, but it's pretty much impossible to get him to eat solid food first thing in the morning, and we like to snuggle him in bed while he drinks his milk, which we couldn't do if it were in a drippy straw cup. I believe it was Stephen who likened snuggling his two-year-old son to being in bed with a sackful of ocelots. This is pretty accurate, except in this case the ocelots have been crossbred with octopi and chihuahuas, thus creating a hybrid race of hysterical eight-legged mammals. But...he won't want to snuggle us in bed forever, and at some point it will of course be wildly inappropriate. I don't want to look back and think, "I wish we'd snuggled more." (I try to keep this in mind when I wake up with a small foot or a pint-sized butt in my face.) I knew that parenting a toddler could be a lot of tedious, frustrating, exhausting work. What I didn't know was that it would be so much sweet, snuggly, hilarious, ROFLMAO *fun*! I love you, little guy. - Tags:zxl
- Mood:happy
 - Music:Fast Food Nation
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|  Z discovers a new food and art medium. Hilarity ensues. (Click for full photo set.) | |
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| You who have been with me lo these many moons may recall that, shortly after Z was born, my doctor put me on Zoloft for post-partum depression. I took it for several months, and it was very helpful. So at some point I decided I had adjusted to motherhood, and carefully weaned myself off the Zoloft, happy to think I could go back to unmedicated normal. This state of affairs held for a few months, and then just after the New Year, I began to notice a certain creeping, foggy exhaustion coming back into my life. I also found myself having a lot of difficulty and frustration dealing with the myriad developmental changes Z was going through as he got older and more complex. It came to a head shortly after Z's first birthday. One day in the car with Aaron, when I picked a fight with him for nothing I can recall now, and burst into tears. We decided that perhaps unmedicated normal was not all it was cracked up to be, and I went back to the doctor, who agreed to put me back on the same low dose of Zoloft. Wow, what a difference. I am all about better living through modern chemistry. Most noticeably, when Z throws a tantrum or gets sick (which often go hand in hand), I am so much better able to deal with it than pre-Zoloft. Aaron says he has never seen me smile so much, and I agree with him that I feel happier than I ever remember being. Which makes me wonder how long I'd been suffering from untreated depression. When Aaron first met me, I was a bitterly angry person. If you'd asked me, I wouldn't have described myself as unhappy, it was just that I spent a lot of time being angry at the world for being stupid--which meant I spent a lot of time angry. Much of this stemmed from the abuse and social marginalization I suffered in middle and high school, which primed me to assume that the world really was out to get me, specifically. I wonder if I'd been able to have some kind of drug therapy or emotional counseling, if that would have helped me way back then. I'm not sure I would have accepted it, though--I would probably have been suspicious of it as an adult attempt to entice me to conform. I also look back on my teaching experiences, which were incredibly frustrating and fed my anger at the world's stupidity. I wonder if I'd been better able to deal with the various academic stupidities, and the petty annoyances attendant on working with adolescents, if I'd had the Zoloft to regulate my moods. I was easily frustrated in those days, and tended not to stay in any one job, or location, for very long. I now wonder if the reason I spent so much time job hopping in the late 90s was that it was only the limerence of a new job that was keeping the depression at bay--and once that wore off... I knew a lot of people on one kind of medication or another for depression, but it never would have occurred to me that I should be one of them. For one thing, I wasn't sad, I was *angry*, and that anger always seemed justified. But mainly it was that they always seemed to have much worse problems than I did--my life was good, my life was great, and I certainly didn't have self-esteem issues (quite the opposite, frankly). How could I possibly be depressed? This, of course, has an obvious answer--if life is that good and you're sad or mad or anxious anyway, then maybe these emotions aren't merely situational; maybe they have a difference source. I try not to think of it in these terms, but...how much of my life did I waste this way? How many potential successes did I turn into failure through blindness to the fact that I needed a little help? All of which is by way of saying, if you're feeling depressed, get help. It makes a world of difference. | |
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| A gross creature which gobbles up a fish's tongue and then replaces it with its own body has been found in Britain for the first time. (Be warned: yup, there's pictures.) Did Noah save space on the Ark by bringing on specimens that were already doing their tongue impersonation trick? I can't figure out cymothoa exigua is an argument for Creationism, assuming God made David Cronenberg in His image, or an argument for Evolution, assuming that there's a gene sequence that controls both (a) finding fish tongue delicious and (b) a willingness to swim into a much larger fish's mouth. I also wonder if cymothoa exigua has a tongue, and there's even a smaller creature that eats and replaces its tongue, and so on. | |
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| From Benjamin Franklin: American Life, by Walter Isaacson:
Eldridge Gerry, arguing against a large standing army, lasciviously compared it to a standing penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure."
(I'm noticing a theme to my posts today.) | |
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| From Equality - What Are We So Afraid Of?My name is Doug, and I have a penis. My wife's name is Elena, and she has a vagina. Our neighbors are Tom and Kevin. Each has a penis, like I do. Elena and I wed in 2004 and have since led a blissful life together. Tom and Kevin have also led a blissful life together. They have not wed, however. That's only because they live in New Jersey where blissful marriages between two people with penises or vaginas have not yet been welcome. If this all sounds even loosely juvenile so far, that's because it is...
Vast numbers of folks are just plain afraid that acknowledging what is equitable will somehow make them weak, vulnerable and unwelcome in familiar places. But it is our gay brothers and sisters who are the ones unjustly unwelcome in the most familiar of places.
Why are we so afraid to welcome them? Why are we so afraid to welcome anything but the status quo, anything but life's rich pageant? I have never heard an argument that is judicious or vaguely relevant. As infantile as this may sound, all there is is the fear of two penises, two vaginas. Nothing more, nothing less.
If over 40 percent of heterosexual first marriages currently end in divorce, 60 percent of second marriages and 70 percent of third attempts, it is downright preposterous for us straight folks to proclaim our holier-than-thou arguments. Yet, according to the National Center For Vital Statistics, Massachusetts, where gay marriage has been running strong for 5 years, retains the national title as the lowest divorce rate state...The entire article is a must-read. | |
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| ""Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. " - John Kenneth Galbraith | |
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| It's Dec. 10. See Nov. 13. On the bright side, our pediatrician's office *finally* has a stock of both seasonal and swine flu vaccines, and we have an appointment Saturday morning to get Z a shot of both. I'm just hoping the irony gods haven't caught up with us, and that he hasn't *already* gotten one form of flu while waiting for the vaccine. :P - Tags:health, sick, zxl
- Mood:drained
 - Music:Benjamin Franklin: An American Life - Walter Isaacson
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| My wife has previously posted about a rather curious Facebook advertisement she ran across.I nearly spit out my coffee when I saw the same creepy guy appear on a computer screenshot used in a "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" segment on Tiger Woods. Click on the link above, and then check out the upper right corner of the screen, arround 3:40. (Warning: this section of the segment is talking about one of Tiger's many alleged mistresses; this particular alleged mistress makes the sort of films that probably have, by design, a relatively low wardrobe budget.) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#34336791It's him! The creepy Facebook guy! | |
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