Here’s to You!!!!

So I raise my glass and say, “Here’s to you, college protesters!”

Today, March 4th (”march forth”, get it?! ha ha ha), at a fuckton of colleges around this country students are occupying their school buildings and even interstates! It’s a beautiful thing!

What for? What else? Tuition keeps going up, yet there are constant layoffs, lower quality education, cut programs, and all kinds of other ways the students are getting the royal screw job. So GOOD FOR THEM for all their activities today, standing up for themselves! I’m at awe at all that has gone on!

Look at this! A map of all the day’s student protests and occupations. Look at that! Holy crap!

Look at all that has happened! Mostly in California, but also stuff right around here at good old College Park.

Go here for more info on everything.

Yay, students! Kick some ass!

Alright, for this fifth installment, what else is stupid about relationships?

Couples who seem to think they have a monopoly on each other’s personal relationships with anyone. Like a guy who is talking to a girl, and the girl’s boyfriend comes up to him all like “hey, what the fuck are you doing talking to my girlfriend?” Even if the conversation couldn’t be less about sex or any other “incriminating” topic.

Though of course it’s just a TV show, just like on House when he’s having all those hallucinations about Amber, and at first he lied to Wilson about it to say he was imagining Kutner instead, until he accidentally lets slip that it’s really Amber, and Wilson is all like “why are you hallucinating about my dead girlfriend?” Yeah, right, Wilson, not like House knew Amber as anything else. Not like she was the last person removed from his reality show-esque competition for his new diagnostic team. Not like she was already in his life before you were ever with her. Nope, she became your girlfriend and suddenly everything about her had to go through you. :rolleyes:

Listen up, couple people. Your significant other’s social life is not your property. If your girlfriend is hanging out some evening with her friends, even if some or all of them are male, so fucking what? If your boyfriend is at a strip club with his buddies, and even if some of those buddies are female, so fucking what? Do you really have such a low opinion of yourself as this person’s boyfriend or girlfriend that you think he or she will run off with the first person who gives him or her a kind smile? Of course, if you’re this paranoid and controlling, you probably are.

And, honestly, if your significant other does leave you for the one who supplies a kind smile, well, good riddance. The person was never very loyal or committed to begin with then, so hold out for someone more stable. If you’ve got a stable person, and if you are one, there’s no need to get all pissy if someone of your gender is friends with him/her.

While I’m hovering around the topic, I also want to blast the idiots who think they can break up a couple because they want one of them for their own. Probably goes without saying, but that is an extremely shitty, pathetic thing to do. I mean, what they’re after, if they actually think they’d be successful, is to break up a relationship, causing heartbreak and sadness. It’s cruel, selfish, and doesn’t really make a lot of sense. If successful, you’re just proving the person can be pulled away from an otherwise good relationship, thus not a very prize catch there. You’re also showing profound disregard for your apparent loved one’s judgment, believing you know better than he or she does about whom to choose for his/her own lover. Of course, no one except the people in the relationship can actually break it up, which makes you all that much more arrogant. So, seriously, if you’re looking at a couple and wanting to somehow lure the one of them you like away from the other person and into your somehow superior arms, fuck you.

So quit the jealous asshattery already. It only leads to fail.

*eats more candy hearts*

SHUT THE HELL UP!!!!

People who say shit like “OMG, look at you, you’re so skinny!” Sounding like they’re jealous. Sounding like they’re cheering for you. Sounding like both. They’re so sure they just made your day! After all, so long as you’re as skinny as humanly possible, your feminine life is a success.

Except it’s seriously fucking annoying! Hell, my sister even takes offense to that, finding it no different from commenting on how fat someone is, not to mention that being skinny often isn’t a matter of proper dieting or whatever to maintain an acceptable appearance but often a sign of sickness or being underweight (that’s right, folks, that’s a real thing!) when you’re trying to get UP to a healthy weight.

It’s also yet another thing about being female where you’re considered a “success” without having actually done anything worthwhile. “OMG! Look how skinny you are!” is the expression and concern that comes first, while things like your promotion, your new house, your charity work, or anything else that, you know, matters takes a back seat, if not taking the damn caboose. Whereas a skinny woman who hasn’t accomplished anything real or good is seen as a winner, while a bigger woman is seen as a failure no matter how much good she accomplishes. Basically, if you’re not eye candy, you’re worthless.

Or there’s the other little gem of where accomplished women are thought to be unattractive, and because of this, all their accomplishments are summed up as “well, of course she has to do all that, she’s not much to look at”. As if an average or overweight woman engaged in political activism or working on cures for dangerous diseases is not seen as doing real good in the world as just making up for her unforgivable sin of not being rail-thin. Hell, it’s sort of a stereotype that women involved in any kind of activism are assumed to be fat and ugly, that they’re only activists because they’re dead inside from being unattractive, that the good skinny pretty little women are doing well and don’t need to worry about that sort of thing. Or maybe it goes hand in hand with other age-old expectations of women, that we’re supposed to be seen and not heard, therefore must be good-looking and passive, while those bad not-so-good-looking women must of course exhibit the other “anti-feminine” trait of, you know, talking and caring about something.

I’m not going to place any gender-based blame for this, as both men and women are responsible for perpetuating this. The underlying idea is that women exist only to be pleasing to men, and that if they aren’t they should remain out of sight or be ridiculed endlessly, yet that doesn’t mean men themselves are to blame. That’s an important difference. After all, just about everyone I’ve heard comment on how skinny someone is has been female, as we often accept the misogynistic ideals of weight and appearance without question and believe that to just be how the world is, what we’re supposed to strive for. While plenty of men who aren’t exactly swimsuit magazine material themselves can verbally abuse a girl who unwittingly winds up in their eyeshot for being “a tub”. So, if you’re reading this thinking that one gender is more guilty or innocent of this than the other, just save it.

So next time you find yourself looking at a girl, is your first or only thought whether men would want to fuck her? Haven’t you thought that maybe, just maybe, there’s more to people and to life than that?

Abortions are still going to happen, as are regular miscarriages for that matter, so the embryos aren’t going to turn into people anyway. But their stem cells are a gold mine of medical innovation! It’s like the little guys didn’t make it to post-uterine life, yet they still get to do some good in the world by giving their cells to help save lives.

Yet, to crazy anti-choice assholes, this isn’t good enough. And I call them anti-choice and not pro-life in this case because they really have no business calling themselves that when this is how their morals manifest, in railing against something that will preserve life. To them, because abortion is wrong, that means using stem cells is wrong.

Yeah, because women totally only get abortions to donate stem cells! Didn’t you know? Not because of life circumstances that make carrying the pregnancy to term extremely unfeasible, but because they want to contribute to DEATH SCIENCE!!! Right…

I mean, if someone is shot to death, but some of their organs are viable enough to donate, would you protest the transplant because the organs only became available because of the sin of murder? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Oh, what, you think because you can see the road pretty well you don’t need to turn them on? If it’s a bright sunny day, sure. Oh, but you think that even though it’s dawn or dusk and it’s not very light out, you can still see the road alright? Maybe so. Oh, you can still see the road alright even though it’s overcast? Perhaps you can.

Just one problem. Headlights exist for two reasons. Sure, you may figure you don’t have to be bothered to turn them on if magnificent you can see the road. But you still need them on, because, what you fail to comprehend… nobody else can see YOU!

So don’t bitch if someone from the other direction making a left turn in front of you may do it without leaving you ample room. Because, chances are, that driver did not even see you approaching! You’re lucky it was only a close-call, dumbass. And the myriad of other situations on the road where it’s helpful for the preservation of one’s life to be able to, you know, see the other cars. If I get into an accident because I can’t see one of you assholes trying to preserve your headlights or whatever, I’m going to punch you in the face. And, hey, I just might find a blunt object and break your precious headlights!

So turn on the headlights, jerkass!

And then I wondered… why the hell aren’t the McDonald’s fries, or at least the Happy Meal ones, shaped like smilie faces? Wouldn’t that make more sense? The things clearly exist. Or would that be a bit too much happy? Is there a such thing as too much happy?

January: Fort Belvoir

-Me to fye: You can’t ban unaccompanied under-15s from the store.
-Cedric?! Why… why aren’t you moving? And lying on the bottom of the tank…?
-LOL my boss set the dumpster on fire with his cigarette
-Holy shit, it’s Vicky!
-The Youngest Candidate viewing at GWU = win!
-Whoa! Slumdog Millionaire is… whoa!
-Vicky, Alexandria is a big place. Where exactly do you need to go?
-Okay, it’s “Fort Belvoir” not “Fort Belvick”. And Fort Belvoir is not in Alexandria.
-Obama! Obama! Obama!
-Screw work, let’s all just watch the inauguration.
-Uh, oh, acetonitrile shortage! If we run out, we’re screwed!
-ZOMG! Case Closed on Funimation channel!!!
-Yeah, great, ski lift, try to rip my arm off!

February: Cookies ‘n’ Cream

-I need to right a two-year-old wrong…
-WHO WANTS COOKIES???
-I just can’t come away from Alex’s Superbowl party without a new meme!
-#24: Mr. Brightside!!!
-WHO WANTS COOKIES???
-For my polyamorist friends.
-With some Cool Whip for the cookies.
-Oh my! I got Cool Whip on my lip. This like totally looks wrong!… *crickets* Meh.
-I want marzipan!
-Maybe this year for Lent, instead of giving something up, I’ll commit to doing something inspiring or worthwhile.
-Wow, the county sure has a lot of parks!
-Good, I have lots of choices for Lent walks.
-I’ll start with Lake Needwood.
-OMG! We got more acetonitrile! We’re saved!!!
-Yay, Baltimore Aquarium! And adorable stuffed seal!

March: Pane

-Brookside Gardens in ice: winter wonderland!
-Moar marzipan!
-Following wintry icy weekend is a 70 degree weekend.
-Smithsonian Museum of Natural History = epic win
-Bah! Closed right as I was entering room with rocks.
-Smithsonian National Gallery of Art = epic win
-Whoa, winding maze of identical Renaissance paintings is winding!
-These painters seemed to really enjoy painting naked children.
-So us board members are supposed to pool our money for Facebook ads done by Alex and Jason, who seem to not know a damn thing about running ads? Hell no.
-Meadowside: OMG! It’s a tree that is four trees!
-Smithsonian Museum of American History: LOL there’s an exhibit for the Pill! Win!
-Natural History Museum giant amethysts demand a lower drinking age!
-Seneca Greenway: Uh, this big dog seems to be following me… is now racing toward me… and the second he got to me, turned around and ran the other direction! Whoa!
-Cross has had its run. Think I want something else around my neck.
-Perfect! A little fluorite kitty from the Natural History Museum, with a little smile as if to say “Yes, I just stole a fish off your plate, what of it?”
-Okay, Jason, enough badgering, I’ll get on Twitter.
-I wonder if Alex and/or Jason are ever planning on saying what became of those Facebook ads we pooled money for… or if any board members will say anything at all for that matter.
-I’m thinking Secular Humanism is more up my alley.
-Mmmm, seafood buffet at Phillips Flagship

April: Hit It with a Big Rock

-Annoying silent board needs to look at my kingdom, I was finally there, to sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel-Air!
-A conspicuously absent from my Lenten activities God is tired of me ignoring him and finally reveals the meaning of life during my walk at Blue Mash.
-Holy week walks seem to agree.
-Weird activity for Holy Saturday/my Palestinian mom’s birthday: Visiting the US Holocaust Museum!
-Eh, I’m not going to church on Easter Sunday. I think a blooming spring time visit to Brookside Gardens will represent the day much better!
-Doesn’t it make more sense and perhaps one truly more godly to enjoy the pleasurable fruits of life instead of inflicting shame about them?
-Drastically lower donations = NYRA doesn’t have long to live?

May: In Vain

-Ugh, why is my birthday Teen Pregnancy Prevention Day?
-Yay, my birthday is a day for wishing I, having been born to a 19-year-old mother, did not exist!
-Alright, I’m 26, why the hell haven’t I been to Europe yet?
-Paris looks nice! Not sure my French is good enough for the language barrier.
-Okay, I’ll do London then. London looks nice too!
-I’d better get a passport at some point.
-Game Day: WTF?! They hit their son?!
-Not sure I can go back.
-Justin proposes NYRA take position against corporal punishment in school, but fails because Alex abstains and too many others are absent.
-Canoeing: LOL, some other people capsized.
-Gettysburg: Historically relevant rocks are historically relevant!
-Mmmm, yummy delicious dumplings.

June: Woyaya

-Youth Blog Tuesday!
-Up!!!
-Smile! It’s a passport photo!
-WTF?! A tiny bunny keeps jumping at my sliding glass door and bumping his little head!
-Think I’ll visit the Washington Ethical Society… neat!
-Justin proposes corporal punishment amendment again: Alex still abstains like a douche, and we wait several hours for Chip to show up and vote, thus at long last approving it.
-Eric and Jacqueline? Fuck them. Let’s vote them out for attendance violation.
-Jeff and Steve >>>> Eric and Jacqueline
-I think I’ll go to WES again.
-Stefan: “We’ve decided to hire a development director. Need lots of money to do it but would save NYRA.”
-Okay, this WES thing seems to be shaking NYRA up!
-NYRA-SEFL vs. West Palm Beach: It’s ON!
-Savana Redding wins!!!
-ZOMG, Mission to Marzipan!!!

July: The Allergy Test

-Alex’s birthday present: A fuckload of donations for the new dev director.
-I got my passport!
-Kickball!!!
-Damn it, dentist, stop bugging me about the wisdom teeth!
-Mmmm, sushi with brown rice.
-Ow, that fucking dog bit me!
-Oh, shit, do I need a rabies shot?
-Nah, there he is again, still alive and thus not rabid.
-w00t, Half Blood Prince
-STP!!!
-Tubing on the river with WES… owww, sunburn!!!
-Salad.

August: Skeleton in the Closet

-ZOMG!!! Annual meeting!
-I have to feed everybody!
-LOL flip cams
-I has another summer cold!
-LOL I’m NYRA Secretary again.
-I… reserved it.
-Am I really seeing the Turtles live performing “Happy Together”? Why, yes I do believe that is what I’m seeing here.
-NYRA-DC revival!
-Yay, Collective Soul concert for the 4th time!
-And now the Killers!

September: Cockfosters

-Middle Eastern Bazaar is a veritable smorgasbord-orgasbord-orgasbord.
-Ugh, nasty NYRA chats are nasty
-OMG, almost time!
-LONDON!!!!
-I’m in the Western Hemisphere and the Eastern Hemisphere at the same time!!!
-Customs is rather painless actually.
-#25: Speed of Sound!!!
-No, Redskins, you’d better fucking NOT lose to the Lions!
-Okay, Redskins, you are so dead to me now. -_-
-Yet another concert: U2!!!
-Mom: “YOU WENT TO LONDON?! No, no, you did NOT go to London!”
-Me: “I totally went to London!”

October: The Alchemist

-To fix the nasty algae problem in my fish tank… got me a little algae eater named Stripe!
-Drinking age fails so let’s try student rights for the Giving Challenge.
-Alex: “Or, fuck you, I’m the executive director and I want to do drinking age, and if you complain, I’ll remove you from the board.”
-NYRA-DC meeting: Alex to Scott: “Why is Katrina not talking to me?”
-Go CAFETY!
-Invited to a play? Sure, okay.
-ZOMG! Cute trick-or-treaters!

November: Pure Potato Pleasure

-Heather: “Fuck the school adminstrators! I’m having a student party at my house anyway.”
-CROATAN
-If the spotlight beam is within my reach, I’ll stick my hand into it for teh lulz.
-I don’t care if you are Don Henley, I’m still screwing with your spotlight beam!
-Met with awesome new NYRA dev director. Holy crap, our org has a future!
-Another meeting at Heather’s house. I brought pizza!
-Ordered NYRA holiday cards finally! Five hundred of them!
-Think I’ll stuff myself with Indian food day before Thanksgiving.
-Bad idea was bad. I threw up on myself in the car.
-After having it 11 months, finally started playing Kingdom Hearts.
-And don’t seem to be stopping any time soon!

December: 1000 #9 Envelopes

-I really need to start sending holiday cards.
-Ooh, we have to work on winning the Chase contest.
-Yet I’m more interested in Kingdom Hearts.
-Okay, put that way, send out first bunch of cards and wait for rest of addresses from board.
-Did I really just have to ship two empty boxes to Canada?
-Jeffrey Nadel = extremely awesome, since even with working very hard for us to win Chase contest, still found time to supply me with card recipients!
-Sent first 300 cards.
-Oh no! Out of envelopes!
-Send me more, printer! I’m missing 200.
-Okay, the email says they’re sending 500.
-Okay, I opened the box, and there’s actually 1000!
-Weezer got in car accident so I don’t get to see them as last concert of the year.
-It’s okay. That night I went to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra instead!
-Alright, Chase contest is over. Now we wait…
-NYRA WON $25,000!!!
-Except they screwed over SSDP. Still, though…
-NYRA WON $25,000!!!
-Finishing off last bit of holiday cards.
-Done with holiday cards!
-Alex, you gave me addresses too late! Sorry!
-Holy shit, two feet of snow!
-I totally wrote another Christmas NYRA Tale.
-Yay, got Christmas Eve off!
-Christmas Day chat!
-Fucking hell, I forgot to pay my car insurance.
-Okay, seems even though it was late, they accepted it as if on time. Lucky?
-Finished Kingdom Hearts… WTF?
-Ah, Rule 34.
-I have an old story I have to restart.
-WTF? My coworker’s wife died?!
-Go for New Year’s Eve skiing again even though it’s raining?
-Yeah, I totally did.
-Got totally wet.
-And with 12 minutes to spare, recapped the year, making it yet another December in which I posted every day!

So farewell, 2009! You gave the lulz that was expected, and killed a fuckton of celebrities in the process. Best of all, you brought not just the lulz but potential for lulz to be created. Lulz and win we made ourselves!

Alright, 2010, I see you sitting up there in Times Square. On TV. Bring it on!

Boy is left to watch over some sheep or villagers or whatever, to alert them if a hungry wolf comes by intending to eat them all up. Well, being a smartass, he cries “Wolf!” one night just to troll the villagers, and they figure how he’s screwing with them and kick his ass. The next night, he’s patrolling once more, and again trolls the villagers by screaming that there is a wolf coming, only for them to find no wolf and get pissed again. On the third night, because it’s always the third time in any of these stories that the interesting thing happens, he is out patrolling again and he actually does see a wolf. Oh shit! So he cries “Wolf!” to the villagers, who tell him to STFU and that they’re not falling for it again. So the wolf eats the boy and all the villagers. The end.

The moral of the story? Well, there are two. No, neither is the one you’ve always been taught is the moral. In the two possible real morals to this story, those villagers are fucking stupid.

First moral: If you cannot trust your alarm system, get a different one. Otherwise, if you’re going to ignore it anyway, what good is it? So the idiot villagers should have sent someone else to watch for the wolf.

Second moral: Even a liar sometimes tells the truth!

As demonstrated so nicely in the US Acres segment “The Wolf Who Cried Boy”.

It was eight years ago today that my family took a little 2-day trip to New York City, our first time there after the September 11th attacks, only about three and a half months after. And we saw with our own eyes that it was all true, that those enormous Twin Towers were in fact gone.

We all heard a lot about the impact the attack had on, well, everyone. Especially the friends and families of the victims, and of course the people who were in the buildings and managed to escape with their lives.

You also have to wonder about the people who built those Towers in the first place. They had only been up for about 28 years when the planes hit them, only four times the amount of time it took to complete their construction! And it’s probably safe to assume, seeing as how new the Towers were, that most of the construction workers and architects were still alive with the attack happened.

Up until then, they could look at the Manhattan skyline so proudly! Those twins they constructed over so many years overtook the Empire State Building as the tallest structures in the big city, were such an important landmark of the city. People flocked from far and near to visit it, to go to the top. Homer Simpson’s car was parked and booted on the ground beneath them, and he had to use the bathroom and raced to the top of one tower, found the bathroom out of order with a sign saying to use the other tower!

Then some asshole terrorists hijacked some planes and knocked them the fuck down. Suddenly those Towers which the builders were so proud of were now the site of people burned alive in the crashing planes, of people leaping off the higher floors to go splat on the pavement below to avoid the fire death, people being crushed horribly when the buildings came down. Those who built them saw as this gigantic atrocity turned these two majestic buildings into a horrible death trap for a couple thousand people.

Reminds me of in Titanic where the guy who designed and built the ship was absolutely devastated that all around him, his creation had the rather serious fuck-up of that little iceberg vulnerability and had now caused all the screaming and freezing and drowning and death all around him.

Of course, it wasn’t the Towers’ builders’ fuck-up that caused 9/11. Or maybe it was. Should have made them airplane-resistant maybe? That’s possible, right?

They won’t shut up. Chatting away on their cell phones, even while they’re driving. I try to talk to one of them, yet they keep yakking away on the phone. So rude.

Even when I invite them to dinner, they take their places at the dining table, yet they keep talking and talking on their phones, while I’m just sitting there awkwardly, as if in another world. Lame.

Eventually, the four calling birds went away, still running their mouths to the unknown being on the other end of their calls. Oh, well. Best of luck to them.

Happy 4th Anniversary, Eight Mine Fortress!!!