All Or Nothing

Another Episode Of Love And Hate: Why Steal It If You Don't Use It?

Hate:  I turned twenty-six on Sunday and now I feel....weird.  And old.  And not, you know. Twenty-five.  Is this normal?  Am I going through some kind of quarter-life crisis?

Hate:  Annoying little yippy dogs allowed to run free through my neighborhood who emotionally torture me and the two dogs currently penned in my backyard with their incessant barking.

Hate:  Weird stalker-y people who make me extremely nervous.

Hate:  The doorbell ringing.  I don't know why, but it sends me into a panic every single time.  I will absolutely go sit in my closet and hide.  Seriously, if you want to see me, DON'T ring the doorbell.

Hate:  Morning people.  If I could somehow not want to kill myself upon awaking each and every morning, I think I would probably be happy and successful, just like you.  I hate you.

Hate:  Thieves!  IF I FIND YOU, I WILL DESTROY YOU.

Hate:  Stupid truck radiator that leaks, or breaks, or does something completely inconvenient and forces me to rearrange my entire day and will almost certainly cost me a pretty penny in order to repair. 

Well, look at that.  It's time for me to go to work, and I don't have a single Love in there.  Guess it's the Hate Edition today!  No, no, wait.  I'll fix it.

Love:  That this entire post is devoted to me whining.  I think that's lovely.

Black Tar Heroin, Indeed

Hi!  Want to hear something super cool?  You know when I was writing that last post, the one about sitting uncomfortably and not buying Microsoft Office?  Well, at the very moment I was writing that, sitting awkwardly on the floor and everything, a thief was breaking into Cody's truck and stealing everything inside!  I know, awesome, right?

And!  It gets better.  My well-intentioned but hopelessly disorganized husband was carrying just about every single document a citizen of the United States could possibly want in order to show that they do, in fact, have an identity.  Like, for example, a drivers license.  And a social security card.  And!  A birth certificate.  And a tax ID number!  And a bank account number.  And the requisite wallet with debit and credit cards.  So, yea!  A brand new Cody is born!  Complete with $700 of new crap from Wal-Mart purchased with one of our debit cards within 15 minutes of the theft, a two-year old laptop containing absolute LOADS of personal information, and (ironically) a copy of the Microsoft Office Suite.  For PC.  If the Suite was for Macs, I would suspect myself immediately. 

We are now a strictly cash-using family, due to the fact that everything possible in our names has been canceled.  I asked Cody if he deposited my last check in our bank account and he said yes, but now that it's in there, we have no access to the money whatsoever.  It's like a savings plan, on crack!

The crediting agencies (yes, all three of them) are supposed to call us if someone tries to, you know.  Buy a house.  Or a car.  Or, like, a really expensive dog or something.  Yorkies are pricey.  And the pet stores finance!  The good thing is, though, that due to the Law of Youth which states (and I paraphrase)

"...every young person must reside in a seemingly endless state of Being Broke unless A) their parents give them money constantly B) they have a trust fund or C) they sell drugs.  Lots of drugs"

our thief is not going to be able to afford a very good car.  Maybe a Kia or something, but not anything in the Porsche or Land Rover family.  So ha!  Joke's on you, buddy.  Have fun with our laptop and your new Kia.  Or something.

Now, onto something more fun.  I have, thanks to Pixie, obtained a new site meter.  It is called SHINYSTAT!  And it must be written in all caps, with the exclamation point.  Because SHINYSTAT! is such a cute name, and it seems exciting!  And fun!  And deserving of appropriate punctuation, at the very least.  Anyway, SHINYSTAT! has a feature which allows me to see the search terms and phrases people type into Google or whatever else people might use to search (is there anything else? Really?) and somehow get directed to my site.  Now I realize that this subject, as far as blog posting, is as old as the hills, but it is no less funny or entertaining, so shut up.  And let me show you my search terms.   I will try to answer questions (yeah, that's right, Kyle, read it and weep) regarding your search queries, but in some cases might have to resort to directing you elsewhere for true answers.

"cara copeland", ballet - This one is easy.  Cara Copeland was in the class ahead of me at the prestigious Ballet Lubbock for nearly all 12 years I attended the school.  She was (by far) the best dancer in the troupe, and was my idol.  I loved her with all my little girl heart.  I think she dances professionally now.  She should, anyway.  She was like a graceful angel.

"remember me cancer" lance armstrong - Easy, again.  I once wrote about how annoying I find the commercial where ol' Lance stares at the screen and proclaims "Remember me, cancer?  You made me suffer.  My mom, too," in all his grammatical prowess.

vinny testa restaurant + testaverde - While I have never written about Vinny's restaurant, or Vinny going to a restaurant, I have, on occasion, professed my undying love for Vinny Testaverde.  Gross-sounding last name and all, I find him enormously endearing.

"relieve himself" lady humiliation bladder - Whoa.  You've really thrown me for a loop now.  Not only do I not remember writing about lady humiliation bladders, I honestly have no direct knowledge of lady humiliation bladders, relative to relieving "himself" or otherwise.  Sorry.  It sounds like you may have some kind of vendetta though.  Good luck with that.

keith richards "black tar heroin" - Um.  Was it on a list of Things I Like?  No idea.

once in a life time porn vacation porn - Yow.  You people are getting sick, now.  First you want to know about black tar heroin, and it's like, ok, but I'm not that hardcore, really, and now you're wanting porn?  And vacation porn, at that.  I'm sorry, but this is just not that kind of site.

"lesson on fairness" - You might want to talk to the lady humiliation bladder seeker, above.  It sounds like the two of you could compare problems and come up with something really vengeful.

Also, I have become famous, in a lesser-traveled sub-sector of the Internet.  I wonder if the Backyardigans fan-base is responsible for some of my stranger search keywords.  If so, you are some messed up folk, Backyardigans fans,  Messed up.

 

Maybe I'll Just Hand Address Them, If Nothing Else Works

I can't sit in a desk chair.  I mean, I CAN - you know, I can physically sit there, yes.  But I cannot stay there for any length of time in any sort of comfortable position.  My body has this strange distaste for putting both feet flat on the floor, and so I am forever pulling one leg up in the chair under the other, or sitting Indian style, or trying to somehow crouch in the chair, looking for all the world like I am preparing to pounce on something I see inside the computer monitor.

None of these positions are comfortable.  Try them.  Go ahead, I'll wait.  Yeah, try the Indian style one, too.  See?  The weird tiger pounce position is actually the most comfortable of all, unless the chair is a rolling style.  Then it's just downright dangerous.

So, you can see, I am at a loss.  How am I supposed to blog and write and do all the Internet-y things I like when I can't for the life of me get comfortable in any chair, ever?  I am currently sitting on the floor typing this out, but only because it's been an unforgivable amount of time since I've updated this site, and I'm sacrificing for the greater good.  Do I need to invest in some kind of chaise lounge in which I can, well, lounge as I type?  Because that seems awfully princessy and diva-ish to me.  Maybe a giant bean bag of sorts?  I think a hot tub would be nice, but I don't feel confident that my MacBook is 100% waterproof.

In other news, I have to buy Microsoft Office for my Mac.  For some reason (probably my total lack of knowledge on such subjects) I thought that once I needed the Office Suite, and my MacBook pre-installed test drive expired, I could just click a button and PRESTO!  The full version of Office would be installed!  Within five minutes!  And I could just pay for it online with my credit card!  But no!  You have to go to a real live store.  And talk to a real live person, and really buy it, with real money and everything.  Which is way too much of a hassle, and so I am typing about 500 addresses into my Apple Address Book, which will probably end up being a massive waste of time, as I will likely never find a way to integrate the 500 addresses into any coherent program that will print address labels for me.  Thus, I need the Microsoft Office, so that I can just type these stupid addresses into Excel and then, you know.  Use them and stuff.

But the store, and the driving, and the actual physical act of installing the software!  Not to mention having to pretend that I am either a student or a teacher of something so that I can buy the much less expensive Student/Teacher version of the Suite.  It all sounds so terrible that I am just typing away, into my Apple Address Book, knowing all the while that I am most assuredly squandering an entire evening, diligently entering addresses for nothing.

Actually, I'm not sure you can use the word "diligently" in any sentence regarding me and feel really great about it.  So never mind that last part.

What I've chosen to do, as you might have noticed, is not really think about the problem, and instead just aimlessly throw a poorly thought-out half-solution at it, hoping that somehow things will all turn out in the end.  I've found that this is a nice way to live my life, and so I am sticking with it.  We'll call it New Year's Resolution 2007: Lazier Than Ever, And Yet Still Somehow Limping Along!

I like it.  Do you like it?  Because I like it.

They Need To Pretend That The Backyard Is A Pharmacy And Prescribe Pablo Some Lithium

First of all, let me inform you all that I am now very well aware that PABLO (not Pedro, duh) is, in fact, a penguin.  I have also discovered that Pablo has absolutely no affiliation whatsoever with the Wiggles, and is instead one of the infamous Backyardigans.  Yes indeed, the big purplish-blue bird is an official member of this gang of unlikely animal friends, which includes a moose, a hippo, a kangaroo, and some sort of girl creature covered in pink polka dots.  I believe the polka-dotted one is named "Uniqua", and she kind of looks like an ant.  Or maybe an alien.  Pablo appears to be the leader of this motley crew, taking them on various adventures that all require a complete departure from reality in order to believe that the common backyard they all share is instead, say, a pirate's ship.  Or a jungle.  Or, you know.  The Nile River.

Anyway, it all seems fine, pretending that your backyard has turned into a surf camp or whatever, until Pablo starts TOTALLY FREAKING OUT.  He does this in nearly every episode, succumbing to some sort of major panic attack, which subsequently causes the other animals, namely the moose who is, I think, Pablo's best friend, to have to stop EVERYTHING they are doing in order to calm Pablo back down.  One time when I was watching, Pablo's bi-polarism reached such a high that even the moose got sucked into the manic episode, and started freaking out as well, forcing the kangaroo to intercede and restore calmness and order.  Normally the pink girl and that other hippo creature only superficially try and help diffuse these tense situations, and quickly resort to bossing each other around, completely ignoring Pablo who almost certainly needs to be on some sort of meds.

My take on the Backyardigans is this: I think the moose, who is supposed to be best friends with Pablo, is getting fed up with things.  He is pretty much ignored and devalued, because has-to-be-the-center-of-attention Pablo monopolizes the group.  I anticipate an episode in the near future where Pablo starts his typical melt-down and the moose discretely snaps his fingers at some orderlies waiting in the background with a straitjacket.  The kangaroo, oblivious as always, sings a song about being kind or something, and, while the pink thing and the hippo are distracted, the moose and orderlies shove Pablo into the back of a white van.  As the van pulls away, the moose locks eyes with Pablo, who is silently shaking his head and staring in disbelief from the rear window.  The moose flips Pablo the bird, and then trudges off to sit on the porch steps, crying silent moose tears and wondering how, exactly, it came to this.

Oh Yeah, And Happy New Year. And Stuff.

Ok, here's a scenario:  Blogger A has a website, on which she writes regularly.  Blogger A is funny and has a great way with a turn of phrase.  Everyone thinks Blogger A is fabulous.  Blogger A has lots of readers.

Blogger B also has a website.  Blogger B is entertaining, but a little monotonous and maybe not so original.  Not nearly as good of a read as Blogger A, but still browse-worthy.  Blogger B has quite a few readers.

After a while, Blogger A posts pictures of herself.  Or, maybe, someone else posts pictures featuring Blogger A.  Blogger A's entire readership discovers that she is not especially good-looking.  Still funny, still has a fantastic way with words.  Just not supermodel material, right? 

Blogger B also posts a picture or two of herself.  She turns out to be gorgeously cute, great hair, great skin - the type you want to hate, but end up begging for makeup tips.

Do you think the blogger's respective readership would change after the picture posting?  Do you think you would find yourself more interested in or more respectful towards one of the two bloggers?  Do you think that, in a mode of communication dominated entirely by words, looks would have any bearing on the success or failure of a writer?

I know what I think.  Now tell me your thoughts.

P.S. Updates on the live-in-toddler coming soon.  I promise!