Dirtbag Of The Month

The Dirtbag for the month of August is (and thank God for copy and paste because I could never have typed this name from memory alone) Naveed Afzal Haq. He opened fire into an office full of workers at some sort of Jewish Center in Seattle, claiming to be a Muslim angry at Isreal. One woman is dead and six others are injured.

Now I know that there is a special place in heaven for all good Muslims who martyr themselves (77 virgins or something stupid like that, which is way too much cherry-poppin for any one man) but is there a passage in the Koran that talks about how noble it is to sit in County for awhile until being transferred to a state penitentiary and left there to be Bubba and Ray-Ray's little special friend for the rest of your natural life?

Just asking...

And for this monstrous atrocity, Naveed Afzal Haq is my Dirtbag Of The Month!

Diamonds And Branson Are Forever!

Best Movie I Saw This Week: Syriana. And how fitting to watch this when this week there's a shit storm brewing in Lebanon. Don't ask me how they managed to make George Clooney un-sexy but they did! What I thought was the best thing about this movie is that the story of our thirst for power and cheap oil in the Middle East is a multi-faceted one and that's how it was presented to us. I need to watch this one again without interuption. It was one of those typical nites where all I wanted to do was sink deep into a good story and every five minutes it was Mom this and Mom that. Also I watched The Forty-Year Old Virgin again. I forgot how good a movie this was. Perhaps one reason why it resonated with me is because they all work in a big retail store, and us retail folks are a different breed you know. This movie had perfect casting too. Every character was immensely likable. And we all know someone just like Andy, an electronics and toys geek who has never had a girlfriend. The Asia poster in his apartment was a nice touch. Strangely enough, and I can't beleive I'm saying this, what I find the most endearing, is the fact that they wait until they get married until they actually do it!

Book I Read This Week: The Bureau. It's a book about the history of The FBI. I've read this one before and it's one of those books I dug out of a box in the basement because I'm too broke to buy a new one, and there's no new titles at Dollar Tree this week. What was truly frightening and fascinating was the emphasis that J. Edgar Hoover placed on fighting Communism and delving into the private sex lives of others, when he himself never married or had a girlfriend but had a best guy friend that he went on vacations with and had supper with every nite. Weird!

Best Album I Listened To This Week: With Teeth by Nine Inch Nails. Bite The Hand That Feeds and All The Love In The World are the standouts. We listened to this on the way up to this bar in Davenport on Saturday. The current CD playing in my car is Late Registration by Kanye West, and I just can't get enough of Diamonds Are Forever! We are going to see Korn next month and I'm very excited about that too.

Current News Story: See above when I mention Syriana. That's the current news story all wrapped into one giant ball of depravity. The Daily Show has it right when they call it Mess-O-Potamia.

I am looking forward to going on vacation next week, we will be returning to Branson and this time we will be spending more time there and hopefully we can see more fabulous things there. You know what the best thing I saw there was? Not the Oak Ridge Boys theater, or the two story Go-Kart track, or the outlet mall, but outside of town when you drive around that big huge lake you go up on a ridge and you can look out at the entire town below you. There it is all sprawled out for you in it's royal splendor! Diamnods might be Forever, but Branson is too.

Let's Talk About Sex Baby!

Oh my! Has it really been 20 days since I last posted? My life must be so exciting and busy then! Ok, not really. Everything's fine, and maybe that's why I haven't felt the need to write. We have a new addition to the family. The kids brought home a stray dog and I knew within minutes that I wanted to keep her. Her name is Nina. My son came up with it, and I approved simply on the basis that Project Runway is my all time favorite show and there is a judge on there named Nina, who's really really bitchy. Here's the irony: Out of all the stray dogs in this world, the one that comes into our lives is another JACK RUSSELL TERRIER! And I couldn't be more pleased...

My boyfriend just walked by moments ago and started making fun of me for doing what I'm doing right now, so I told him that I was going to repeat and then publish his mocking words which are as follows: "Dear Diary, last nite I had the most fabulous sex ever, I came over and over and over again, all over his big fat giant cock..." (Which is true by the way, except I only came once, and that's plenty enough for me!) See, he thinks it's stupid that I would want to keep a journal but I have been doing this since I was 16 years old and I'll neve stop, HAH!

Speaking of sex, I have a co-worker guy friend of mine who has mentioned more than once to me that he and his girlfriend never have sex anymore. Now there's a long sad story behind this relationship which I'll skip over because that's not really what I want to talk about. I want to give him some advice so bad but I'm not going to say anything unless he initiates the conversation because it might be a long one and we are at work. This poor kid is only 19 and his girfriend is only 18, they already have a baby together, he sleeps over at her house every nite to help out with the baby and just like a lot of new dads doesn't get any anymore. Because he is so young I want to tell him what I think. I want to tell him that there are 3 possible reasons why this is. The first and least likely reason is that some women (esp after pregnancy) just don't have a very big libido and that's just the way it is for them (and I'm so GLAD I have no idea what that's like, WHEW!). The second reason, and this is probably the real reason for her, is that she's just not feelin the love. This comes from unresolved conflicts and sometimes sheer boredom with your man. So they need to talk and talk and talk some more. And the boredom part? Well, I've been there too and there's not much you can do once that sets in, unless your man suddenly decides to get interesting again. I do know that if you can barely tolerate and can hardly stand to even look at him you for damn sure don't want to fuck 'em and guys don't really get this concept at all. The third reason, and the easiest to fix, is that he isn't very good at it, and she's not very satisfied. All she needs to do is tell him what she wants him to do. When I was that age, I found that very hard to do, but when you get to be my age, it suddenly becomes not a problem anymore. My fear was that the guy's ego would be bruised or something if I was so bold as to tell him what to do to me. That's not true at all. Men want to satisfy a woman and nothing and I mean nothing turns them on more than to see their girl crumple in a heap like a wilted flower on top of them after having a eye's rolling in the back of her head orgasm. Not a fake one, a REAL one, and to achieve that sometimes you gotta give him a little direction. I wish I knew that then, but thank God I figured that out now! I had heard that a woman in her thirties was in her sexual prime when I was younger but I didn't know if I believed it or not. What a shock and delight it was to find out that IT IS TOTALLY TRUE! But they'll have to discover that for themselves in another ten years.

Well, at this point I'd go into the movies I saw, the book I read, the great song I heard and the top news story, but I'm going to skip it and perhaps post that tommorrow because this is a really long post and I'm tired of typing!

When Your World Is Full Of Strange Arrangements...

Two days ago I had something that happened at work that was a little unsettling. Oh, don't worry, it wasn't real bad or anything, but it made me just a little sad that's all.

My favorite, and I do mean this, FAVORITE, teacher of all time was in my store and he asked me where he could find automatic light timers. So, I walked him to the aisle and pointed to them and quickly walked away. I wanted to say "Oh Dr. So and So, do you remember me? I had you for a couple of classes back in 1987, and you were just the best teacher I ever had! Nobody else had ever inspired me to be as creative and productive as you! I'll never forget how hard I worked on each paper or each speech I wrote for your class, I wanted it to be perfect, well, beyond perfect, outstanding even, and I had never given a shit before about what I did in school until I met you!" And why didn't I say this to him? Because I was ashamed that he saw me working at TARGET. Now let me preface this by saying that there really is no shame at working at Target. It's a job and I'm lucky to have one, living in this economically depressed town. And I can't say that I really feel any stigma about working there, at least on the surface, I mean I'm not really PROUD of it, but I don't feel embarrased either. But deep down I must really feel some sense of disesteem because I couldn't wait to get away from him.

Yet why? Is it because I was hoping he hoped that when I left his college that I would move on to bigger and better things because really, I'm that brilliant and ingenious? Surely this man must know that I'm not the first smart young woman to squander away her future with a series of bad men and bad choices, and wind up 20 years later telling people where to find things in the Hardware section in Target. As I write this, I also feel like I should just shut up about this because I'm not really that clever anyway, and why should I give a fuck about a professor who may or may not remember me from twenty years ago? It's just the idea, the remembrance of the past, that held such a bright promise for my future, and I chose a different path than the correct one, and then there I was years later tearing individual 3x5 sale signs, stuffing them into plastic holders, and rubber-banding them together by aisle so I can put them up in the most efficient manner on Sunday morning, and I have to occasionally stop this and help a "guest" (Target calls them guests, not customers).
I have a good life now. As good I think it's gonna get anyway. I have a home, not a shitty HUD approved apartment, I have great kids, I have a fabulous man who, depending on what day you ask me, is either my soul-mate or isn't, but he's still wonderful. So why am I trippin?

Because I can, right here in my diary, and I probably won't tell anybody else this at all.

Best Movie I Saw: Cinderella Man. Some movies have themes that just make you weep openly, and this was one of them. Perhaps it's because I know all about the sorrow of poverty, and the dogged determination to rise above it. In the end, I really didn't think he was going to defeat Max Baer, the heavyweight champ of the world, but that he would still get a nice payday and put some food on the table and keep the lights on for at least a couple years anyway, but he WON! He beat that fucker, and oh the feeling of joy and triumph that swells within you when you watch this, knowing that this is a true story and this was a real man who did this! There are two other movies I can recall watching this week, although I'm sure I saw more. Yesterday was one. Talk about weeping openly! Sheesh! This was a four hanky weeper. It's a story about a woman in rural South Africa who contract AIDS from her husband. Altho not a true story, you know there are millions of women like Yesterday over there. I also watched Grandma's Boy. This was just pure funny. Slacker, pothead, video game player funny. Oh wait! I almost forgot! I watched a movie called Shag last nite! And for porno, it wasn't too bad. Some porno is truly stupid and shitty but this wasn't so bad. Let's just say I had a good time, and it served it's purpose, and I slept very well last nite!

Best Song I Heard This Week: Now don't laugh, but I totally got into that old eighties classic "The Look Of Love" by ABC today while I folded clothes in the living room. "When your world is full of strange arrangements, and gravity won't pull you thru, you know you're missing out on something, well that something depends on you,All I'm saying, it takes a lot to love you..." Oh isn't that clever?

Best Book I Read: Jarhead by Anthony Swofford. Now let me just say that I LOVE THIS MOTHERFUCKING BOOK!!!!!!!!! I wrote about this movie a couple months ago because I thought this movie was great, and I'm a big Peter Saarsgard fan to boot, but this book transcends the movie in ways only a book can. Most published works are written well, and they convey the message it was intended to convey, but then there are books that put you right there in the whole damned mess, and this book expertly acomplishes that. This is why I will always pick a non-fiction book over fiction. For stories such as this one. A lot of times you'll read a book that has a great narrative but weak dialogue and characters, or the dialogue is fantastic and perfect but the narrative is lacking. Not this book. It's all there and it's all dead on right. The most amazing thing is that this book goes a long way in explaining and justifying a lot and has even changed my thinking a little. Oh, I still hate the war in Iraq and George Bush, that'll never change. You know how you hear people say all the time "I hate the war, but I support the troops"? That's easy to say. But in the back of my mind, I always thought, "How could I support cold blooded killers who would inflict such damage on a nation?" Mind you, I never said this to anyone, because that's not politically correct, but I thought it. This book has changed me and my thinking. A little. These are just guys. Guys who signed up for a government job, and then were indoctrinated and trained as killers. That's all. We have to have a military. Whether I want one or not, somebody has to do it, and I'm grateful for it.

Top News Story: There's two going on this morning. I have CNN on right now and Tony Snow (Who by the way, was the only Republican who even remotely made any sense and made a valid arguable point on Bill Maher's show and for that I have to grudgingly give a grain of salt's worth of respect to)the new White House Press Secretary is talking about missile testing in North Korea. Are they getting their panties in a bunch over nothing or should we be concerned? We'll stay tuned! Also, Ken Lay of Enron fame died last nite of an apparent heart attack. He was probably going to be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, and now he just got outta that one, lucky bastard!

I know I have sounded like a broken record in the last few journal posts when I end it by saying that I am "kickin it poolside" with various types of liqour(I already drank the cheap wine I had left from yesterday, so now it's on to the cheap beer) and my favorite tunes on my Ipod because it's my day off, but I can't tell you how pleased I am to report that I will be doing just that within a matter of minutes! For the last few days my kids have been gone. They went to Minnesota with my folks for a mini-vacation and gave us a much needed break, but a few minutes ago, they called me from my mom's cell phone and they are coming home today. I started to miss those little shits during the fireworks last nite, so it's a good thing I'm gonna see them in about (gee only) ten hours!