November 2006

Dick Cheney Totally Hates You

That shirt you’re wearing right now? Chances are, Dick Cheney hates it. That car you drive? Thinks it’s for whiny un-American pansies. The fact that you’ve probably eaten tofu and wear designer shoes and have actually had sex while standing up? Pervert heathen traitor to the real America, Dick thinks. He hates that. Some days, Dick has trouble counting all the ways in which he hates you, the world, life. Some days, he hates the fact that there are not enough hours in the day for him to count the ways in which he hates you and all you probably stand for. This makes him sad. Which he also hates.

Read MoreDick Cheney Totally Hates You

blue hole

This amazing and beautiful thing is called “Blue Hole.” It’s a diving spot near Belize, where we are headed in a couple of months. It looks like a meteor crater in the ocean, but actually it’s a limestone sinkhole that is the opening to a system of Ice Age caves. The place we’re going offers a trip out to Blue Hole to dive, but it’s way too advanced for us. Plus, it’s just scary looking!

Read Moreblue hole

more about scuba

Yesterday we completed our coursework, took our final exam (Doc and I passed with a 98 and 94), and finished up our 5 confined water dives. I’m still not sure how I feel about scuba, overall. Right now I’m giving it two thumbs sideways. We started off the morning by meeting K1 and B for breakfast at the pancake house, and I’m glad I made myself eat something at 7:45 a.m. because our instructor declined to give us a lunch break (I know, what the hell?!). We didn’t get anything else to eat until 5 p.m., after being in the pool for 6-1/2 hours with no food or water. We were so hungry that we stopped at the first place within eyeshot: a Long John Silver’s. Oh, the irony of eating fish after learning to dive. OK, maybe that’s not actually irony, but it’s something. Note to self: LJS on a completely empty stomach will make you sick later. Don’t do it. I am much more comfortable with breathing underwater now, though I’m still not 100% convinced that I will always suck in air when I take a breath. A couple of the skill tests involved our instructor turning off our air tanks while at the bottom of the pool. He looked directly at me the whole time he was explaining what would happen, which I think is called the “Look Directly At The Most Panicked Person And Speak In Soothing Tones” technique. The constant going down/coming back up is hard on my ears. I think I’m clearing them OK, but I also think that the tail end of the head/chest cold that I had was making it more difficult than it should have been. Anyway, they kind of ache today. My jaw hurts from holding in the regulator, which […]

Read Moremore about scuba

say ‘scuba’… it sounds funny!

Today, for the first time in my life, I breathed underwater. It was terrifying. I am taking scuba lessons, along with Doc, K1, and B, in preparation for our vacation in Belize in a few months. Sunny beaches, tropical drinks, lots of hot vacation sex, seafood, rainforests, hiking, snorkeling… and scuba diving. Belize is supposed to be one of the best diving spots in the world (fishies! coral reefs! crystal clear water! something called, dear god, “Blue Hole!”), and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’d probably end up regretting it if I go there and don’t know how to dive. Here’s the kicker: I’m scared to death to actually do it. I have always had regular nightmares about being trapped underwater, usually in swimming pools; sometimes when I can’t hold my breath any longer and am about to pass out, I breathe in water and I choke, and sometimes I can actually breathe underwater, which doesn’t make sense and also doesn’t make it any less scary. When I’m not dreaming, I usually do fine in swimming pools and the ocean, so I don’t have a water phobia or anything of that nature. After a lot of consideration, the thought of swimming with the fishes and coral reefs just slightly outweighed my completely unreasonable fear, so I told K1 that if she took lessons, so would I. B was kind enough to do all the research, and so now Doc and I each own a mask, snorkel, fins and wetsuit boots, know the names of all the equipment bits and pieces, and can use an incredibly complicated dive chart table thingy. We watched a 3 hour DVD and answered a whole bunch of quiz questions this past week (K1 and I both experienced heart-pounding apprehension […]

Read Moresay ‘scuba’… it sounds funny!

we did it!!

VICTORY! The Democrats are now the majority party in both the U.S. House and the Senate. As reported moments ago, Virginia, the last state to report, went Blue by a mere 7200 votes, thus confirming the Democratic majority in the Senate. The House went Democratic by a fairly wide margin, confirmed yesterday. I’m so happy that, as Arushi said, Americans show up to the polls when it’s important. And Rumsfeld resigned. !!!! (But will one evil supplant another? I don’t know much yet about his successor, Robert Gates.) If I wasn’t feeling like I’d been hit by a truck full of phlegm, I’d be dancing in the streets. Of course, here in the Giant Red State of Texas, it’s still vastly Republican/conservative. The closeted homo slick used car salesman Rick Perry won the governorship again — not that there’s anything wrong with that — the homo part, I mean — but it wasn’t by anything that you could call a “landslide.” And good old Kinky Friedman, bless his heart, took a full 13% of the vote. Not bad for a no-bullshit-taking Jewish cowboy poet. For the record, I voted a straight Democratic ticket with the exception of a vote for Kinky, and in races where there was no Dem candidate I voted for the Libertarian candidate instead, and that’s only because they frighten me just slightly less than Republicans do. The funny part is, so many of the people I talked to, both liberal and conservative alike, voted exactly the same way I did. Also for the record, I am not a member of the Democratic Party and am not of the mindset that Democrats = Good and Republicans = Evil. In fact, sometimes the shades of grey inbetween extend so far to each side that it’s hard to tell […]

Read Morewe did it!!

no news is good news, maybe

I got the results of my lab tests back from my doctor yesterday. My bloodwork is all normal. So what this means for my recent early periods, I don’t know. Stress? Hormonal fluctuation? At least I’m not pregnant (confirmed by the pee test) but my doctor did bring up the word “miscarriage” which kind of freaked me out, although that’s supposed to be accompanied by severe cramps, which I did not have. So that likely wasn’t what’s going on. I am supposed to just keep an eye on my cycles and if it happens again, they’ll look into it further. In other news, I mentioned to my doctor that I am going to Belize in a few months, and in addition to prescribing me seasickness patches and malaria drugs, she suggested I get a tetanus shot. Which, conveniently, she could give me that very day. Cool, I thought, that saves me a trip back here later. But then she mentioned that the shot also contained the pertussis vaccine (a.k.a. whooping cough), and that set off vague little warning bells in the back of my head. I didn’t get the shot, and instead called my mom, who did confirm that when I was little and got a DPT vaccine (diptheria, tetanus, pertussis), the “P” part of it made me very sick. I had to get a booster immunization for school, so the next time they gave it to me in two half-doses, which still made me sick but not as badly. Anyway, my doctor had to special-order a tetanus shot without pertussis in it for me.

Read Moreno news is good news, maybe

my latest malady

I’ve had some sort of cold for the past week and a half or so. It’s not so bad that I’m lying shivering in bed all day, but it’s enough to make me cranky and very tired. It’s not the sniffly/sneezy kind of affliction; it’s more the coughing/hard to breathe/thick-chest-feeling kind. I’ve been trying Theraflu liquid and caps, and Nyquil at night, but so far none of that seems to have had any effect. The Nyquil doesn’t even help with my insomnia, although I am quite sleepy all day. About an hour ago I took a “Bronkaid” decongestant capsule, which we have from when Doc was sick a few years ago, to see if it would have any effect. The thickness in my throat does seem a bit looser (for lack of a better word) (bingo! I thought) but I started to feel reeeeeeeeeally weird. Shaky and vibrating and weak and just strange. That’s when Doc told me that they are basically amphetamines. D’oh! I’m speed-tweaked. No wonder I feel so strange. I don’t like this. Unless the congestion magically disappears, I think I’m going to go throw the rest of the Bronkaid out.

Read Moremy latest malady

diva cupdate

If you don’t want to know details about my Diva Cup and menstrual processes, do not read any further. Seriously, I mean it! You will be sorry if you do! It took me a while to get comfortable using the Diva Cup, but overall I’d have to say that I’m pretty happy with it. I have mostly gotten the hang of proper positioning, which is harder than you might think, and it’s popping open on the first try most of the time now. I have noticed a change in my flow from when I was using conventional feminine hygiene products — the last 3-4 days of my cycle used to be a very gradual trickle-down until eventually it would end, but it was kind of a slow, lingering, annoying process. Now it’s pretty much a full-on stop, and my cycles seem a day or two shorter now. Something kind of freaky happened to me last week. On Monday, I started my period, but it had only been 16 days since the start of my last period. This is not normal. I went to the doctor Tuesday, and she said that it could be stress, or it could be a hormonal fluctuation, but she did have me go to the lab for bloodwork. I haven’t heard back yet, so I’m not sure if they found anything. The cycle I had before this one also started early, though not nearly as early as this one. Doc joked that since Yvonne is pregnant, perhaps I am having a sympathy period for her since she’s not having any now. I told him that I am not taking THAT bullet for anyone!!

Read Morediva cupdate

i’m sure this is exactly the plot of some movie…

Last night I dreamed that I lived in a little apartment in a New York style apartment building, in a row of nearly identical apartment buildings that was completely enclosed in a shell from the outside world. In the center of the neighborhood was an expanse of green space, a little park about the same footprint as an apartment building, and one end of it opened to a dock and the sea beyond, with a big industrial garage door that would open and close. Everyone was in a panic and in the process of evacuating because we had been invaded by aliens, although we never actually saw the aliens themselves and there was nowhere to evacuate to. They had landed on the rooftops of our buildings and were slowly taking over. Even though we couldn’t see them, we knew their paths because wherever they went, everything turned dark and crumbly and dead. Walls, plants, furniture. And people who’d been “infected” or whatever began to look like zombies, with tattered clothing and purple circles around their dark dead-looking eyes. I was one of the unofficial leaders trying to get the remaining people to safety, and I was lucky in that even though I was running around everywhere, through infected areas, I hadn’t been turned into a zombie yet. I wasn’t sure where we were going to take people anymore, because the park had been taken over by the aliens. I thought that maybe it was possible for us all to gather on the roofs, since the park wasn’t safe anymore and we had nowhere else to go, but then remembered that the roofs were probably where all the aliens were gathered. I noticed that Bob and someone else were up on the 3rd floor of one of the buildings, and they […]

Read Morei’m sure this is exactly the plot of some movie…