Makes me remember that there are douchebags everywhere. Just a thought. I'd have some more, probably similarly phrased thoughts if I was more certain of the situation, but I don't like to run my mouth about stuff I don't know about. Unlike some.
DENTISTS ARE FROM HELL. 4 wisdom teeth removed. pain.
I went to look at your blog, handmaiden, and it says I'm not allowed. Is this temporary or for real? Just a curious girl asking
dammit. Ya know it's winter when the first sand truck drives by,
(hint:in snow and ice, it is impossible to drive a regular car up the hill I live on. Too steep. Hence the swearing. Now I have to go the long way every damn time.)
My thoughts today, taken from a satirical news site called The Onion, it's from late September '01, and I find it perfect and respectful. I hope that everyone I know and their families are all right.
On to the main post:
"Look, I don't know, maybe I haven't made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again," said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. "Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don't. And to be honest, I'm really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand."
Worshiped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, God said His name has been invoked countless times over the centuries as a reason to kill in what He called "an unending cycle of violence."
"I don't care how holy somebody claims to be," God said. "If a person tells you it's My will that they kill someone, they're wrong. Got it? I don't care what religion you are, or who you think your enemy is, here it is one more time: No killing, in My name or anyone else's, ever again."
The press conference came as a surprise to humankind, as God rarely intervenes in earthly affairs. As a matter of longstanding policy, He has traditionally left the task of interpreting His message and divine will to clerics, rabbis, priests, imams, and Biblical scholars. Theologians and laymen alike have been given the task of pondering His ineffable mysteries, deciding for themselves what to do as a matter of faith. His decision to manifest on the material plane was motivated by the deep sense of shock, outrage, and sorrow He felt over the Sept. 11 violence carried out in His name, and over its dire potential ramifications around the globe.
"I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so you'd get it straight, because I thought it was pretty important," said God, called Yahweh and Allah respectively in the Judaic and Muslim traditions. "I guess I figured I'd left no real room for confusion after putting it in a four-word sentence with one-syllable words, on the tablets I gave to Moses. How much more clear can I get?"
"But somehow, it all gets twisted around and, next thing you know, somebody's spouting off some nonsense about, 'God says I have to kill this guy, God wants me to kill that guy, it's God's will,'" God continued. "It's not God's will, all right? News flash: 'God's will' equals 'Don't murder people.'"
Worse yet, many of the worst violators claim that their actions are justified by passages in the Bible, Torah, and Qur'an.
"To be honest, there's some contradictory stuff in there, okay?" God said. "So I can see how it could be pretty misleading. I admit it—My bad. I did My best to inspire them, but a lot of imperfect human agents have misinterpreted My message over the millennia. Frankly, much of the material that got in there is dogmatic, doctrinal bullshit. I turn My head for a second and, suddenly, all this stuff about homosexuality gets into Leviticus, and everybody thinks it's God's will to kill gays. It absolutely drives Me up the wall."
God praised the overwhelming majority of His Muslim followers as "wonderful, pious people," calling the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks rare exceptions.
"This whole medieval concept of the jihad, or holy war, had all but vanished from the Muslim world in, like, the 10th century, and with good reason," God said. "There's no such thing as a holy war, only unholy ones. The vast majority of Muslims in this world reject the murderous actions of these radical extremists, just like the vast majority of Christians in America are pissed off over those two bigots on The 700 Club."
Continued God, "Read the book: 'Allah is kind, Allah is beautiful, Allah is merciful.' It goes on and on that way, page after page. But, no, some assholes have to come along and revive this stupid holy-war crap just to further their own hateful agenda. So now, everybody thinks Muslims are all murderous barbarians. Thanks, Taliban: 1,000 years of pan-Islamic cultural progress down the drain."
God stressed that His remarks were not directed exclusively at Islamic extremists, but rather at anyone whose ideological zealotry overrides his or her ability to comprehend the core message of all world religions.
"I don't care what faith you are, everybody's been making this same mistake since the dawn of time," God said. "The Muslims massacre the Hindus, the Hindus massacre the Muslims. The Buddhists, everybody massacres the Buddhists. The Jews, don't even get me started on the hardline, right-wing, Meir Kahane-loving Israeli nationalists, man. And the Christians? You people believe in a Messiah who says, 'Turn the other cheek,' but you've been killing everybody you can get your hands on since the Crusades."
Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: "Can't you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism... every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you're supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It's not that hard a concept to grasp."
"Why would you think I'd want anything else? Humans don't need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other—you've been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!" God said. "The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?"
"I'm talking to all of you, here!" continued God, His voice rising to a shout. "Do you hear Me? I don't want you to kill anybody. I'm against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don't kill each other anymore—ever! I'm fucking serious!"
Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God's shoulders began to shake, and He wept."Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."
-- Rene Descartes
"I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."
-Aldous Huxley
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost
"God is in the rain." - V for Vendetta
"When it gets dark enough you can see the stars." - Lee Salk
The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.
~James A. Garfield
"A little girl can be sweeter (and badder) oftener than anyone else in the world. She can jitter around, and stomp, and make funny noises that frazzle your nerves, yet just when you open your mouth she stands there demure with that special look in her eyes. A girl is Innocence playing in the mud, Beauty standing on its head, and Motherhood dragging a doll by the foot."
~Alan Marshall Beck
"Boys are found everywhere-on top of, underneath, inside of, climbing on, swinging from, running around or jumping to. Mothers love them, little girls hate them, older sisters and brothers tolerate them, adults ignore them and Heaven protects them. A boy is Truth with dirt on its face, Beauty with a cut on its finger, Wisdom with bubble gum in its hair and the Hope of the future with a frog in its pocket."
~Alan Marshall Beck
"The best way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it."
"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But, then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness."
~Woody Allen
"Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke
Little Bean, my niece, is very sick right now. She has a fever between 102 and 104, which we can occasionally control with meds (fevers over 103 can cause seizures and brain damage). She was doing ok at first, keeping the temps down and all, but then she spent a day with her father and his parents. They didn't give her any meds on the grounds that "fevers are good for you." We just spent half the night in the hospital because of that. The doctor was furious with him. I was just relieved when she said that she could tell that Little Bean was well adjusted, bright, and had a lot of love and good things in her life. Otherwise we'd probably have been talking to DHS.
Got a call from the landlady today. Crazy ex-roomie wants her security deposit back, and refuses to pay any more rent. Mostly, I want to say "fine, fuck you, I will be happier if I never see your ugly face again." But I don't wanna get financially fucked over. Sometimes I guess what I "mostly" want is to take her to the field out back of her house and kick the shit out of her. But I try not to be violent like that anymore. :)
Top it all off, my dental issues are worse than ever. My teeth are soft, because I had to take a lot of medications as a child. Their crumbling is practically inevitable. I've been dealing with the large chip nearly halving my front teeth for years, but now i have dental insurance, and can get it fixed, and get my wisdom teeth removed. They're pretty bad too. Just one problem: I'm terrified of the dentist. and stitches, gonna make it hard to get the teeth removed. So I put off calling to make an appointment. Then a chunk of one of my wisdom teeth. Dammit. Now I've gotta call.
For those who don't know, I love the new Offspring song, hence this post's title.
Second order of business, I type like crap all of a sudden. Please forgive any weird typos.
Lastly, HEY, I'M BACK!
Let's tell this story in a nice, chronologically linear manner, shall we?
I got a new job a couple weeks ago, full time stock person at American Eagle. Sweet job, sweet discount, great co-workers (my manager is a gorgeous, intelligent, funny, smart rich man who drives my favorite car. Obviously this means he is gay AND married.)
A few days after I get this job, I find out that my friend and roommate Mesa is a crazy person. I mean, damn. I'm known this girl for 8 years, I knew she had her issues, I knew she told stupid little lies all the time. But this was downright phenomenal. She's been telling us and everyone else who will listen, for 2 years now, about her fiance, Jay. I discover, she and Jay broke up 3 YEARS AGO. Like that isn't enough, she's been signing her emails to him as if they were from out other roommate Bean or from her cousin, emails about how she was in the hospital, how she broke her arm, how everyone was so bad to her and her parents abused her and so on. Not a word of it true. This girls been going as far as to buy herself and my niece gifts saying they were from him. The real hell broke loose when I told Jay what was going on (he lives several hours away). She had moved out withing three days of that.
Next thing I know, she's telling me that she's gonna take me to court for money I owe her, and for going through her room, and for opening her mail. The next day, her brother's screaming and swearing at me that they're gonna sue us for her deposit because she paid the whole thing, and that they're taking the water filter (they took the doorknob to her room and the curtain rod that wasn't even hers). To put those statements into perspective, I owed her no money, she may still owe me money; I caught her going through my room, but never went through hers; I did not open her mail, and even if I had I was secondary on the account she was referring to and therefore had a legal right to it to my understanding; sue me all you want, I have the bank records to prove that I paid her back for anything beyond her share of the deposit, and I can probably prove the damn water filter is ours too, you useless bastard.
I actually had to call my father to oversee the move, because it was that and hope it shut her brother up that he was there, or call the cops and have him removed. I will not be threatened and insulted in my own home thank you, and my defenses are my father, police, or lead pipe and pepper spray (girl's gotta know how to fend for herself), take your pick.
Well, with the way the whole thing's gone down, we've decided not to let her out of the lease. She remains responsible for a third of the remaining lease, and has actually agreed to pay it. I have not been sued, either. Good thing, considering I can prove she was using my name and birthday to open 'rewards' and 'points' type accounts. Hint, dumbass: that's identity theft, and illegal.
Now we just need to get her to pay her damn share of the rent.
THEN MY COMPUTER BROKE.
BECAUSE I REALLY NEEDED THAT ONE MORE THING
ok, I'm better.
Happy belated birthday to me.
At least tonight I can take my meds for it.
Speaking of, I'm back on my lexapro. It feels like a defeat, but I know it's really a victory because I saw what was happening and took care of myself before it got out of control.
Or something like that.
So, I'm having a bit of a time finding pictures for the Local Adventure that I'm planning, so I figured in the mean time, I'll supply you (you know who you are ;) ) with pics from previous local adventures (More on my flickr account, see link at right, look under sets 3/6 and beachy) -
If you do swing by my flickr account, just be warned that nature isn't the only 'local beauty' (apparently I feel witty tonight) featured on there...
I may be the only one on there to never appear in my underwear or swimsuit...
always comes back to Dr. Who and Harry Potter.
frequently Joss Whedon, occasionally some popular anime.
But ALWAYS HP and DW.
Icon examples to follow. LOTS and LOTS and BUNCHES of icons.
Just a sample of my nerd-icon collection.
Squee.
PS - bonus points if you can identify (1)the icon that's only related to this subject in my head, (2) The crossover icons
