I'm like an adult or something now! Where's my membership card?!

I keep up with a few.

If you do as well, you may enjoy the Comic Curmudgeon's commentary. Entries are indexed by comic for your reading pleasure.

Am I getting old, or does Arbor Mist not taste as good as I thought?

I like to think of this as less TMI than Com2Kid, though. There should be degrees of TMI. This is really like 3rd or 4th degree TMI. Technolust gets a special designation of TLTMI, rated T for teens. Okay, old joke. Anyway...

The "proximity" effect can and will beat out the "ingesting hormones" effect.

[WARNING: Contains Project Runway spoilers. Yeah. Laugh. Laugh all you want!]

Laura is...

A) The biggest bitch ever.
B) Surely she's not the biggest...well, I guess she is kind of rotund.
C) No doubt about it. She is pure evil.
D) Jeffrey won! In your face, evil bitch from bitchopia!

That's me.

I hate being average, but at least I still get a raise.

[paints finger nails black]
[Applies black lipstick]
[Sprays hair black with temporary* hair dye]
[Dons torn black pants and black coat]
[looks downward]

Drowning alone, I gasp for air.
Coldness creeps over pale skin.
There is sadness so deep it pulls me down
Happiness dies in a deep, dark sea.

[*] Geez, I'm not that hardcore.

But seriously. Demonstrating science to middle school girls is my specialty. I am especially fond of the self-selected sets who are actually interested in science! And then you just hand this oppurtunity to the suck-up douche across from me without giving me a chance! Yay! Now the girls can continue to learn by example that science is for men, but isn't it cute that they're interested?

I used to think that gender inequality was dead. I mean, I truly believed that. I believed that we had won, that we were all equal. But we're not. It's just become more subtle. Maybe hypersensitively about sexual harassment is partly at fault. It's a double-edged sword, that one.

I have never felt that I was treated differently until this job. I've tried to shrug it off and blame myself for the past year. Notably, this has been the only position I've ever been in where from the moment of onset, I was the first female to the scene. It's "The Gods Must Be Crazy" all over again. I'm the Coke bottle, and they don't know what to do with me. This has been to my irreversible detriment.

I have to share this story.

So my roommate has this friend who is engaged to be married. The wedding was supposed to be in March, but she found out a few weeks ago that she is pregnant, so they have moved the wedding up to November. They just bought a house, and she started a new job last month. Very busy time. This is a total shock to them. She went off her birth control after they became engaged because she doesn't like how it makes her feel. But this is a total shock to them. Why? Who knows? Maybe the part of the brain that stores the consequences of biological functions isn't fully operational?

Yeterday I believe I found out why it was such a shock. That was the first time they had engaged in sexual activities in months. Months?!

MONTHS!!!!

No, neither of them was out of the country. They live in the same house. He's not a parapalegic, either. I thought of that one.

They haven't even been dating for all that long. Maybe a year or two.

Months. My. God.

For real. He was like "I hope I'm not overstepping my boundaries when I say this, but there are people...who can help you."

Now that's what I call a successful pre-review meeting. Or not. It was exhausting. All two hours and five minutes of it. I may have overshared, but at least I didn't tell him about the time when I was three years old and I cried and hid behind my mom's legs when I saw my very nice and friendly pre-school teacher in the grocery store. I really liked her.

Some Guy sent this to me last night. He actuallly typed it up from a book he has because he thought it was that important. I agree. So I am painstakingly copying and pasting it from my email to share with you.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

Without individuals we see only the numbers, a thousand dead, a hundrednd thousand dead, "casautlties may rise to a a million". With individual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs, will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are not doing a doing disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for flies' own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to into slide these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

So...my sister's family was in an accident on August 13. They were rear-ended. Very clearly the fault of the girl who failed to depress her break at any point before the impact. Their truck was totaled and they lost their dog. They had just put $800 worth of tires on it the week before. Her insurance company (State Farm) refused to accept liability for the accident until the first week of September.

New vehicles are released on September 1. The value of their truck (totalled in August, remember?) dropped by $525 immediately upon release of the 2007 model year trucks.

Cute, yes?

I could almost bike to work, if I were so inclined. Almost. The river crossing was closed to bike traffic in 2002. I knew I remembered crossing the river by bicycle, and now I know that I was not imagining things. Stupid safety concerns. I'm pretty sure that they will not be building a new bike bridge anytime this decade. :^(

In other bike news, the overly helpful salesperson at the bike shop to which I went helpfully suggested that I wait until their bigger big sale at the actual end of the season. I found a bike I want; it was so light I could probably lift it with one finger, which is very helpful for when you lose 9 of your fingers in a tragic machete incident. It was also almost $700. I don't think that bike's fate involves being in the trunk of my car.

EDIT:
It even has a name! Gap 76.

I bought a shelf today. I also almost caused the front page in tomorrow's newspaper to read "Area Woman Indicted in Allen Wrench Slaying."

Everytime either one of us purchases a some-assembly-required piece of furniture, we persist in thinking that it will work for "us" to put it together. And everytime we are reminded of why an odd number of pieces of furniture must never be purchased. Because we are both absolutely certain that we have the One True and Perfect method of assembling it in a timely manner.

6 or 7 fights over plastic dowels and hammers later, Some Guy finally announced that for the sake of his life and our relationship, he would be leaving the room for the 10 minutes it took to put together the shelf.

I really hope we remember this next time, but I doubt we will. Dibs on the hammer.

There were about 2 miles of slow/stopped vehicles on the road. As my brother-in-law slowed down, he noticed that the girl behind him was not slowing. He angled off to the side to prevent an x-car pile up. She hit him anyway. His angling off to the side probably saved the girl's life and their own because the collision wasn't as direct. It did, however, cause their truck to roll over 4 times and their dog to jump out and be killed. Because somebody couldn't pay enough fucking attention to the miles of stopped vehicles in front of their face.

The girl says that my brother-in-law stopped suddenly and "for no reason at all." Her insurance company is denying culpability unless they hear an eyewitness account. Witnesses so far place my brother-in-law as driving the girl's black car and my 13-year old niece as driving their large blue truck. *rolls eyes*

Dogs are considered "property" and, as Sandy was not a purebred, the insurance company will not compensate them for her death. They had her cremated.

Healthwise, they are all doing okay. They're all seeing a chiropractor, and my niece has a pretty bad gash on her leg that will probably leave a scar. She's apparently happy about this because it will be a reminder of her dog.

I have never returned from a vacation feeling more drained than I am now.

It was actually all good until yesterday. I knew I would be returning home to a not-terribly-familiar place filled with boxes, but it wasn't helped by my roommate's legs being covered in chemical burns, her leaving for the airport on business an hour after I arrived home, and my tearful sister calling to let me know that they had been in a pretty bad accident on their way home from said vacation and, while they were okay (fortunate, considering that their truck rolled 4 times and my niece was laying down in the back not wearing a seatbelt), their dog jumped out of the truck and ran into traffic. She was an 8-year old yellow lab/collie mix. They adopted her when she was 4 months old.

It's also terribly unnerving how isolated one can be made to feel without internet access.

And now I have to go do what passes for work.