Gay Marriage

Stupid people shouldn't be allowed to speak, much less run the country.

David Grenier has written a great blog about this topic. Go read his stuff and save me the effort required to put the same thoughts into words. Besides, it makes me angry. And you won't like me when I'm angry.

Aftermath

I didn't even really want the cake by the time I got to those last few bites. But I couldn't resist...the tang of sugar on my tongue, the mouth-feel of the fat in the buttercream frosting, the taste....

I ate it anyway. Finished off the piece. Now I'm sitting here in my cubicle looking at a styrofoam plate smeared with brown and white and flecks of blue, with a plastic fork smeared with the same colors resting on top.

And I feel slightly ill, and completely not in control, and more than a little bit embarrassed.

And it wasn't worth it, not really. Not really at all.

And Why AGAIN Do They Act That Way?

I came across this earlier today--it's really pretty funny. Check it out and find out why, as of 1956 anyway, women "act the way they do".

Let's Talk About Redpanda's ASS for a Minute

Got your attention there, huh?

Before I explain why thoughts are turning to my ass, let me give you a wee bit of background story. It's really Sean's story, and some of you may have heard it already. Hell, he may even raise objections to my retelling of it. This is why I rarely consult Sean on my blog postings.

So, while Sean was in Australia, he found himself in need of some new undergarments. (Why this occurred, I'm not entirely certain, but I think it may have had to do with acute laziness and a lot of dirty underwear...) Being unfamiliar with either the Australian Underwear Sizing System, or the Metric System, or maybe even both; Sean ended up with the wrong size undies. I mean really wrong sized. These things would have been banana-hammocks at BEST, and I'm still not sure how he stretched them over the vast expanse that is his manly physique.

Anyway, cut to today. He still has all his pairs of "Underdaks", as they're called. He won't wear them, but they lurk in the underwear drawer, ready to taunt him with their mirage of actual, wearable clean undies.

I took at good look at them once, and decided they kind of resembled some of my more generously-cut (READ: not as skimpy as usual) sporty cotton panties. Upon trying them on, I found that they fit.

I remembered that incident this morning, as I leafed through my own panty drawer and was left wanting. I was going to the gym, and the scraps of silky material and lace just wouldn't be, er, appropriate. But there were the Underdaks...

I wore 'em, I wore a pair. And guess what? They are DAMN comfortable. I mean, DAMN comfortable. Mens underwear have much more material in the crotch, I'm assuming for the keeping of the penie-weinie, and that worked for me. No riding up, no bunching, no irritating me in any way, shape, or form. Just soft, comfy cotton. Now I ask you, why is it that women's underwear is designed with a scant inch and a half of material to cover the entire width of crotch? More material was so much better!

I want answers, dammit. Answers! And I won't rest till I find them. My bum deserves comfort and loving care!

FQA

(That's Frequently Questioned Answers)


No, I did not ask for an iPod mini for Valentine's Day. I've never asked for anything like that, really. Sean just wanted to get me one so we'd match or something cute like that.

I certainly didn't demand one.

No, my car is not brand-spankin' new. I couldn't have afforded a new one. Well, I COULD have, but it would have been a considerably higher cash outlay. But it's new to ME!

My car's name is Gustav because Sean's car's name is Gunther. So we have Gunther and Gustav. Isn't that cute?

I paid the down payment. With cash from my savings account. Yes, I have a savings account. Most grown-ups do.

I didn't really want to buy a car. I had to because my hours changed when I got the new job, and public transit just wouldn't work out for me anymore. I kind of miss the "T", really.

My hair is red in spirit. It's currently more blond than red in real life. This is because I haven't felt like paying the cash it takes to keep it red. But really, humor me and call it red.

My boyfriend makes a lot more money than I do. Like, almost twice as much. This is because I am in disease management and he is in IT. As a society, we value machines more than people. It also doesn't hurt that he has been in his industry for 10 years and is utterly brilliant. I have been in mine for 1/10th of that. So I'm not concerned. Are you?

I have never asked anyone, excluding my parents of course, for money. The last time I asked my parents for money was 2 years ago, when I couldn't find a job and had no money for food. I paid them back the $100 they lent me a few months later.

I really, really like my job. I mean, I still grumble and hit the snooze button in the morning, but once I get there I'm pretty darn content.

I do tire of the looooong days it requires.

I miss my friends. Even the ones who live near me. We're all so busy with our lives, we hardly ever get to see each other.

I miss my family. I only see them once or twice a year. But that's still pretty good--I have relatives in Colorado who only make it out to Maryland once every few years.

I would love to buy a house. But I can't right now, for quite a few different reasons. So I'm a renter.

I would love to have a dog. But I can't right now, mostly because I don't own a house. So I love my kitties instead.

I still haven't decided if I want to have kids or not. Or, I should say, we haven't decided if we want to have kids or not. Because that's kind of a "we" thing, n'cest pas?

Most things in life are "we" things when you are in a serious relationship, I would think.

I've never had a professional manicure or pedicure. I hear I'm missing out.

I'm liberal. Very, very liberal.

A woodchuck would chuck all the wood it could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

And lastly...I live with him because I love him. Because he's my best friend, my very favorite person in the world. Because I wouldn't want to wake up and not have him there, flailing around to make the alarm stop. Because we are planning a life together. And because he wanted to, and I wanted to. And really, that's reason enough.

If there's anything else I can answer for anyone, please don't hesitate to ask.

iMob

My Valentines Day present from Sean was an iPod Mini. Or, rather, the promise of an iPod Mini, since they had not yet been released on Valentines Day.

The actual release date was yesterday, February 20th. I had heard all the crapola surrounding it, you know; demand is expected to exceed supply, blah blah blah.... WhatEVER. I was SO getting my iPod yesterday. No need to reserve it! I wanted to play with one in my own grubby little paws, see how I liked the snazzy green color, compare it with the regular iPod before I made the commitment.

Well, I got to do that much. But that was about it. The lines at the Cambridge Galleria Mac store wound around and around, queued up like there was some sort of unmissable roller coaster at the end.

"Do you have any more green Minis?" I asked timidly.

The Mac worker threw me an expression of preparedness to burst into resounding guffaws, then quickly composed herself and shook her head sympathetically. "No, I'm sorry, we only have silver left," she apologized, "but we can take your name and phone number and call if we get any in."

I left her my name and number, fully expecting to have one WAY before she'd need to call me.

"Let's call the one at the North Shore Mall", Sean suggested. Great idea! No one in Peabody is plugged in, for god's sakes! They probably have scads of Minis just lying around taking up space.

A phone call confirmed that yes, indeed, I am a giant ass. They, too; were out of green ones. But if we got there just before they closed at 10:00, they might be willing to part with a reserved one that hadn't been picked up.

Silly folk. We can just order one from Mac's online store!

Except the expected shipping date was "1-3 weeks". 1-3 weeks?!? That's a bit of a gap, dontcha think? I mean, 1 week; that's fine. But 3? I could probably have one from the mocking mac store chick by THEN.

I have no iPod Mini. None at all. I am iEmpty-handed.

On the bright side, I DID pick up the purple VW BeetleBugCar yesterday. His name is Gustav.

Nirvana

I heard Smells Like Teen Spririt on FNX yesterday. I was doing my ADD-radio-dance thing, where I flip through all 18 saved stations until I find the one with the very BEST song; so I nearly scrolled right past it. It's just a song like any other, a song I must have heard a hundred times by now, a song I own in several different formats. So why bother to listen?

For some reason I stayed. And started to think back to the very first time I heard the song. (Insert Wayne's World-style "Do--diddle-ooo! Doo--diddle--ooo!!!" here...)
It was my junior year of high school, and it was one of the cold, grim months (much like this one...of course, cold and grim in southern Maryland is usually mid-40's weather, but I digress...). I grew up in a small, just-two-shops-short-of-rural town, and there wasn't much to do if you were under 21, not in prison, and not into cow-tipping (which I HAVE witnessed, by the way, but that's another story...). So one thing we'd do was to drive. Just drive. Drive till we got 20 minutes away, to a different just-two-shops-short-of-rural town that seemed really, REALLY different from our own. And there, in the parking lots of strip malls, teenagers would converge to do some serious hanging out.

That night I was with my insufferably preppy friend, Lisa, who was probably wearing khakis with the pegged legs and had her bangs curled up in some fluffy way. I know the gist of what I was wearing--my trademark (through high school, anyway...) black tights with ripped-up jeans shorts, a black velvet top, and some sort of combat-boot-esque footwear. We looked as different as night and day, I'm sure. (And before you laugh at my description of our fashion, bear in mind that it was the early 90's--we were hip, man, hip.) And we just happened to hit the parking lot at the same time as carloads of students from a neighboring high school. They spilled out of station wagons and rebuilt "classic" cars, wearing different uniforms of punk. There was the guy with the faded-out and ripped-up jeans that had small stuffed animals pinned all over them. There was the guy in all black, with the blue mohawk (remember, NO ONE had hair in colors back then...). There were more that I can't remember, most of them wearing stuff that would later be attributed to the "grunge" movement. We were pretty much the only chicks, which entitled us to an immediate party invite despite Lisa's decidedly UN-punk outfit. Woohoo!

The only problem was, Lisa didn't want to go. I had to do some serious arm-twisting. But my powers of persuasion won out, and we drove down to a place called Timber Tides for the "party". It looked like something out of a bad movie--a bunch of people on the beach, in the woods, in the winter; spindly dead trees and fires in trash cans. The teenagers of the apocalypse. But they were playing Nirvana--playing it loud, and moshing along. I stood transfixed, watching the fire, watching the moshers, feeling the sand blow against my legs and scrape the skin through my tights. And I realized, at that very moment, that life was bigger than I had thought it was. That there was going to be room somewhere in the world for me, the small-town girl with the big ideas who didn't dress like any of the other preppies in College Prep English. There were other people "like" me, people who didn't have the time for sports or mixers or being like everyone else.

It was a few more years before I left the small-town life, and Kurt Cobain was long dead by then. I heard that news while I was driving along in my green Beretta, driving home from work at Wal-Mart, wishing my life was different.

Eventually, it was.

In a way, I feel like it started to be that first night. The night that we sat at a late-night Wendy's with some guys we went to high school with who were at the party, guys we never would have talked to in the hallways, and sipped diet cokes while they ate Junior Bacon burgers. Sipped diet cokes and wondered what other surprises life had in store for us.

Car Caveats

Buying a car is never, ever a simple process. But here in Massachusetts, it's doubly annoying. In most states, you can feasibly: A) Drive into a dealership's lot, B) Test drive and select a likely automobile candidate, C) Fill out financial paperwork, and D) Drive away the owner of said car--all in the same day.

Not so in Massachusetts. Here, you have to take one day to select and drive the car, fill out paperwork to finance the car, and go home with the intention of eventually being the owner of the car. A few days, or whatever the Powers That Be deem to be a sufficiently annoying time later, the dealership will call to inform you that yes, you are indeed "lucky" enough to have qualified for whatever ridiculous financing option they have signed you up for. So now, you get to make the trek back to the dealership to sign papers and become, in the eyes of Massachusetts, the "actual" owner of the car. Then you go home again. Empty-handed. Unless the dealer gives you dum-dum pop or something.

Now, why would you go home without the car you have effectively purchased? Well, boys and girls, that is because the state of Massachusetts does not issue temporary license plates. So the dealership cannot get plates for the car until you actually own it. (The good part is that they jump through this hoop for you...which also means you don't have to whip out the screwdriver to affix the damn thing, I suppose...)

So, in essence, I'm quite sure that Massachusetts automotive dealers lose quite a few customers to Buyer's Remorse. I mean, really; you don't entirely legally own the car till you "take delivery"--drive off in the thing. So you've got some pondering time there between the initial titillation and the legally-bound state.

Anyway, long story short, I bought a car the other day and I STILL don't have it in my possession. That's the only reason I care, really. I'm self-centered like that. We're supposed to be picking it up tomorrow, though...so if you see a girl pushing a purple VW Beetle Turbo to impossible speeds on I-93, you can rest assured that you've likely seen the infamous Redpanda, in the flesh.

Woohoo!

I'm Tired

I'm tired of winter. I'm tired of the bleak, empty landscape and the air that doesn't quite make good on its threats of impending snow. I'm sick to death of the grey sky and the black shriveled trees and the sun that never quite comes out all the way. I'm sick of staring blankly at the TV on the elliptical machine, running and running and never really getting anywhere. I'm tired of saying to friends "Yeah, I can't wait till it warms up and you come out for a visit...".

Fuck winter. I refuse to acknowledge its presence any longer.

Good Things Come to Those...

Who wait!!!

I got my new computer at work! Yay!!! It's a sexy little number, all silver and black. And it has both internal and external speakers. Oh yeah, baby!!!

Too bad I have a monitor from like 1994.

What's the Worst That Could Happen?

As many of you who know me IRL may know, my illustrious "other half", Sean, is an enthusiastic aquarist. (That's a nice way of saying "There is a really big fish tank in our apartment".) I enjoy the fish. They are quite neat. And I've learned to deal with such inconveniences as Sean using a 50-ft length of plastic tubing to suck out and replace aquarium water (meaning the sink neads a THOROUGH disinfecting after...), or walking around with little test strips and imploring "What color is this?"

But, today's incident took the cake.

One of our fish is this really cool big giant eel-like thing called a Ghost Knife. His name is Mack. (I named him, thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week...) Now, Mack, being a fish of the large, honkin' variety, likes to eat other things that have some semblance of a face. So today; less than an hour ago in fact, Sean was sold on a batch of some sort of little wriggly black worm by a tropical fish dealer. Sounds fine, right? No biggee there. Except for one thing.

It was on the way home from the shop that Sean informed me that these guys would nead to live in the refridgerator. (AYFKM? "Would you pass me the hummus, honey? It's right next to the LIVING BREATHING WIGGLY LITTLE FREAKING WORMS.")

Now, that's bad enough.

But a second ago I heard a telltale *sploosh* come from the kitchen. It was followed by a telltale "Oh, SHIT.", and a telltale "Er...honey? Don't come into the kitchen."

Asking me not to do something is a wonderful way to ensure that I will, in fact, do that said something. So I peeked around the kitchen door to see---you guessed it, a floor with a rapidly-expanding puddle of water and little black wriggling worms. He's scooping them up using cardboard boxes, paper towels, and a dustpan as we speak. And every now and then, he yells out: "You are NOT blogging that!!!! You are NOT blogging that!!!"

Rest assured, folks, I am blogging that. And this is the very last time any sort of worm purchase will occur. Unless of course, we're doing some fishing or something...

A Tale of bureaucracy

Let's begin by explaining that I work for a behemoth company. Really, quite behemoth. If you search back through my archives, you can probably find out who it is and will agree with me on the behemothacity of said company.

But really, is being a behemoth company an excuse for being an asshole?

Let me explain. You see, the department I work for is a brand, spankin' new department. It's so new that it's the very first time the company has attempted to do what my department does internally, instead of outsourcing. It's so new that no other state's version of my company has attempted it before. We're the very first. We've got a big budget, top recruits, and a lot of eyes on us. And we're designing and reworking everything that we're doing. We JUST launched on Jan. 1st, and we're slowly taking over stuff from a vendor.

In celebration of this incredible endeavor, the company is throwing a "Kickoff Celebration" next Friday. It was so important that we all be there that the company was offering to pay overtime to anyone who was scheduled to be off that day, just to be sure everyone was there.

"WAS" being the key word here.

You see, we just received an announcement yesterday--we're not all welcome at the party, after all. "Just the associates who already were working for the department on January 1st when in launched may attend".

Yeah. That's like 5 people. Out of a team of nearly 40 cutting-edge recruits, most of whom were wooed away from high-paying jobs in other industries.

Way to treat us like a bunch of stepkids. So who IS invited? I already know the answer, without even asking. The President, who most of us never see in the flesh. A bunch of corporate bigwigs. A bunch of bigwigs from OTHER corporations. But not the actual team who will be responsible for implementing the program, who will make the department sink or swim.

I fucking hate bureaucracy.

Definitions

How do you define your sexuality? Your sexual orientation? At what point on the Kinsey Scale does one cease to be "straight" and start to be "bisexual"? At what point does one cease to be "bisexual" and start to be just plain "gay"?

I had a conversation about this very topic the other day. The example we used was the one of the classic "College Experimenter". You know her, the girl who sleeps with a bunch of chicks in college, but then doesn't any more. Is she bisexual? What if the only reason she stopped sleeping with other girls was because she became involved in a monogamous relationship with someone who happened to be a guy? Is she still a "bisexual" then?

OK, or what about the guy who always has harbored secret fantasies about other men, but never acts on them? Is he a bisexual? My first answer is 'no', but consider this--a guy who identifies as "straight", but never actually gets any action with a woman is still straight if he dies a virgin, isn't he? So why discount the other guys' desires?

I guess, the key here for me is the extent of the 'desire'. For instance, it was said that our gal in example 1 should not be considered "bisexual" because she had never been involved in a relationship with another woman. But come on, if that was what we used to define a person's sexual orientation, there would be plenty of people out there without any orientation to speak of. That is, there are plenty of people out there who have never been in a real "relationship". If they still feel desire for a person of the opposite sex, we deem them "straight". So what if someone is harboring desire for people of the same sex, yet engaging only in opposite-sex relationships? Are they any less bisexual because of this?

And again with the extent of the desires thing, having a single fantasy doesn't make one a bisexual. But having one day after day after day...wouldn't that be a different story? Even if our guy in example 2 never acted on his fantasies? Is he really any different from the guy in Heavy who fantasizes about Liv Tyler but never consummates a single relationship? I mean, you're still a straight guy if you jerk off to Playboy, even if you never get laid, right?

Any thoughts?

People are Morons

OMG! During the short reprieve from the overpaid athletes knocking each other down and beating each other senseless last night, someone had the audacity to show the world a portion of her breast! Of her breast!!! Horrors!

If you were offended by seeing a bit o' boob, methinks you need a beatdown courtesy of my own double-D's.

Don't laugh. It would hurt. It would.

If I could lactate, I would squirt you as well. A lot. You would be soaking in breast milk. It would be funny.