Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Catch and release for cameras
Catch and release for books
Catch and release for money
Nude skydiving. Just bizarre. Makes my boobs hurt.

There’s something foul brewing. Something having to do with girdles.

I wore girdles occasionally when donning fancy dresses, and found them to be horribly uncomfortable, hot, constricting, and generally awful. My mom said she wore girdles when she was pregnant with me and swore she’d never wear them again after giving birth. I decided the same thing. Hell, I don’t even wear control top pantyhose anymore. I’m tired of trying to squeeze myself into someone else’s perceptions of how I should look.

But I digress. This girdle thing is really starting to scare me. In the past two days, I’ve gotten hits on my blog for:

€ retro porn girdles – #1 result
€ “men in girdles” – #8 result
€ “men in girdles” – another one, #8 again
€ men in girdles – #25 or so

Now it looks like most searches are looking for guys in girdles, which is fine with me. I just want it known cateorically that I refuse to don a girdle, even if they are the fashion trend of the 00’s.

Monday Memories – the question is this:

Do you have a memory of being sick as a child? It might not have been anything more serious than a bad cold, or you may have had your tonsils out.. it could be anything. What do you remember?

I was always sick as a kid. I had bad tonsils and was poised to get them taken out (and man was I excited about the ice cream… little did I know it’s not worth it!) but it was right at the time when “they” decided that too many kids were getting their tonsils out unnecessarily so they canned my surgery. I ended up having them out when I was 19, which was no fun at all.

Whenever I got sick, my mom would bring me tomato soup made with milk, and Ritz crackers. She’d put it on a tray and bring it to me in my room. To this day, cream of tomato soup makes me feel better, even if I didn’t feel badly to begin with.

I would always have weird dreams when I had a fever. One I remember quite clearly, although I was probably only 4 when I had it. I was lying in bed and watching a bunch of animals having a banquet on my ceiling. I watched them for what seemed quite a while, then ran to the bathroom to throw up. I didn’t make it, much to the chagrin of my mother. Looking back, I was pretty sick – I wonder if I was hallucinating. I certainly didn’t think I was asleep at the time. I’m not sure if that was the same illness when my fever was so high that I had to have an icewater bath.

I was home sick the day that Reagan got shot. I was only 10 at the time, so I didn’t understand the full import of what happened, but Mom did. She brought out all the things she had saved from when Kennedy got shot and told me about that time in her life and what it meant to her. She said that what she remembered most clearly was the funeral drums.

I miss being cared for and fussed over so much when I’m sick. I’m the mommy now, so it’s my turn to create lasting memories.

Good grief. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. This is a sordid mess of a poor guy who was completely duped by someone who claimed to be dying of cancer. In the last 10 years that I’ve been around the internet, I’ve seen:

€ a man who created a fictitious wife for himself
€ a few guys pretending to be girls and having ‘mudsex’ with hapless guys
€ a guy who pretended to be a girl who eventually faked suicide
€ a pregnancy newsgroup troll who pretended to die from childbirth complications
€ a pregnancy newsgroup troll who pretended her child died from complications
€ a woman pretending to be a man who had a cyber-romance with an unknowing woman

My oh my, the list goes on.

And there always has to be drama, conflict, a soap opera. I’ve seen 2 bigass uproars on 2 different webrings lately and I find myself tuning in for today’s helping of pain. Sorry to be so crass, because I know I’m feeding on someone else’s anguish, but it’s like slowing down to watch a car wreck. I worry about being so dehumanized that I don’t care enough about my fellow man, I worry about the internet turning us all into automatons, but then I remember the case in NYC in the sixties where a woman was screaming for help as she was being killed and none of her neighbors did anything because they “didn’t want to get involved”.

Sorry to be such a downer tonight. It’s not like I’m in a bad mood or anything. Just ponderous.

I hate to admit this. I really do. I’m starting to like the Apple keyboard.

There, I said it. Oh lord, what’s next for me – I’ll want one of those stupid-ass mice that don’t have any buttons?

Save me.

Well, the mystery bug bite, whatever it was, is almost gone. I guess I will never know what it was that got me. I think I halfway expected the doctor to say “Oh yes, that’s an arpanthicara mystopheres bite, very rare, and how strong you must be to have lived through it.”

Did you know that when you join a RingSurf ring, your password gets mailed to the ringmaster? I think it’s a basic case of laziness; they just CC the confirmation letter to both joinee and ringmaster. I wrote them a Strongly Worded Letter telling them if they don’t change it, I’m going to take my toys and go home.

Everything seems rosier in hindsight. Thinking back to those days when we’d have Spades tournaments all day long and play Nintendo Monopoly and hang out it seems like… dunno… ideal? But I know it wasn’t a bed of roses. I was supposed to be going to school but was skipping all my classes and I felt terribly guilty about it. I still have nightmares about skipping classes but not being able to stop doing it, or forgetting when classes were.

My relationship with my family was very strained at that time. Two of my family members even came to town to stage a sort of mini-intervention with me to get my ass on the right track. I was so defensive at that point that their visit did absolutely nothing for me but make me utterly resentful.

My brother wrote me a very frustrated and angry letter then, basically telling me to grow up and take some responsibility. It shocked me, but furthered me on the road of resentment. A couple of years ago, during a quiet moment while I was visiting him, he pulled me aside and said “I wrote you an angry letter a few years ago. I want you to know how proud of you I am now, for coming so far in your life from where you were then.” I think that was the best moment I’ve ever had with him, and it meant so much to me for him to say that, and I’ve never been able to tell him that.

Looking back on that time now is like looking at a movie of someone else’s life. Now I’m the (mostly) responsible one, with a husband and a house and 2 little girls and a dog and three cats. And nothing else seems to piss me off more than to look at a friend who can’t turn herself around the way I did. I would write more about her, but it’s not my story to tell. A very sad story at that. I miss her a lot and wish that we were still on the same page of life. I don’ t know if we ever will be again, and that breaks my heart.

Well I’m depressed now.

Free messages to any phone in the lower 48. Just think of the fun and naughtiness you could get into with this.
Top 25 sexiest movie moments of all time
India keeping its soldiers up all night to watch for Pakistani aggressions
Remind me not to send my kids to public school in New York… now if they could just sanitize NYC taxis this well, that’d be something.
Kiss Kondoms – Rock ‘n’ Rubbers!

Well, I wasn’t satiated with the 5 rings I already belonged to and went hunting for more, which brought me to the realization that there aren’t any webrings for Austin bloggers. Seeing as how this town is insanely cutting edge, I felt there were hundreds if not thousands out there, dying to be represented in such a way. *cough*

Anyway, I started the Austin Bloggers web ring. You don’t have to live in Austin to join it. You can join it if you’d like to live in Austin, or used to live here and don’t anymore, or if it’s a day that ends in ‘Y’.

Good heavens, I’m terribly sorry – nature’s way of telling you to open the window
Poor Ronald McDonald seems to have met up with a necktie party