Just kidding!

Just Dance is tons of fun, even when you’re all by your lonesome. :)

Maybe the Kinect will do it

The couch has been moved all the way to the back of the living room, making the space larger and, seemingly, tidier. We still don’t have room for multiple people to play Kinect at once, though, so we’re thinking of moving the couch to the side so we can use all the space in front of the TV to play Just Dance 3. (What? It’s boring to play alone.)

To that end, I need to get everything picked up off the floor of the living room. I’m being slightly side-tracked, though, by my frantic need to expand on my Les Mis tattoo before the movie comes out. I don’t want someone to try and tattoo Taylor Swift onto my leg because they think that’s what Eponine looks and sounds like. Nope nope nope.

Resuscitation: Attempt 1

So, recent events have conspired to make me want to revive this blog. However, I don’t think the strategy I was using before to keep my house clean is going to be very effective going out. It required a bit too much…what’s the word? Coordination? Yes, coordination. And memory. Those of you who know me know that I’m low on both of those.

I had to remember not only to clean, but to time it. Honestly, timing it took up a significant portion of the timed time!

So I need a new strategy. Something simple and easy, yet effective. Actually, the effectiveness of it doesn’t matter too much as long as it’s more effective than doing nothing. While I can’t go so far as to say that my bathroom hasn’t been cleaned at all since I let this blog go, the truth is slightly closer to that than I’d like to admit.

Any suggestions?

Bueller?

I’m always apologizing

I feel like I’ve been apologizing to my blog a lot lately. Sorry guys! You see, when I’m not at work, doing lots more walking with my new job than I’ve been used to for the past two years, I’m hanging out with friends drinking wine, hanging out with my honey drinking wine, or sleeping. All of that leaves little time to update.

Never fear, though. Tonight, I think, we’re going to have a night in and I will be sure to set some of it aside for you, dear hoardes.*

In the meantime, enjoy this Patton Oswalt bit, and then go buy his new album here.

*We settled on seven of you, yes?

More discussions on Peniscolony possibilities

So a little while back, I was lamenting on Peniscolony when the five of us in the car on the way home from the bar started debating on what a Peniscolony is.

Is it a commune of men?

Is it a more laid back sausage party?

Is it a slutty lady?

I open the floor. What say the hoardes*?

*I’ve been proven wrong. There’s seven of you.

Did some laundry yesterday

I did 33 minutes of laundry yesterday. Usually it takes about twice as long to fold laundry, but the Brit boy was helping me out. Yay!

Level	6
XP	291
Tidy	3
Clean	3
Organize	4
Next	315

I also spent some time sorting through piles of papers and I found the divorce papers I’d been looking for. They’re coming with me today and this week, hopefully today but we shall see, I’ll be heading to the courthouse to file them. Wahooozahs! <–That is a cheer everyone should take up. Yes.

It’s like having a new computer

So no posts yesterday. Sorry about that, oh hordes* of people who read this blog. You see, my computer was out of commission for most of the day.

It all started when I wanted to download a very small, perfectly legal file and my computer said there wasn’t space. I thunk back to a few nights before when my computer had been using some program that I didn’t know about to apparently download shit from some cloud service that I don’t use. I’d stopped that program and removed it from my computer, but who knows what other shit the ex left on here?

A lot of it, apparently. When I manually deleted everything in the Documents folder, I found that it contained over 35,000 items. Flippin’ FSM! Right?

So a coworker let me borrow a start-up disc and, after flubbing it on the first try, I finally managed to erase everything from my computer and reinstall the OS. Ahhhh… It’s so much faster now and those programs that I don’t even know what they do will stop popping up in the corner asking me to update them. Yesss….

As for housework, which is undoubtedly why you read this blog (quell your eye rolls, please), I’ve been lazy busy with, er, work and shit and haven’t done any. Pretty much all of yesterday was taken up with the reformatting of the computer, for example. I do, however, have a very large pile of laundry awaiting me in the living room as well as a messy bathroom bedroom living room office house to work on.

So expect an update soon. Maybe.

*Six. I think there are six of you.

The process of getting sterilized

I’m sterilized. Not germ-free, more-babies-free. Even with my uterus saying how it wants babies recently, I do not regret my decision. Recently I came across the saga of trying to get my tubes tied on an old blog I used to keep. I shall repost bits of it here for you.

February 6:

It just occurred to me yesterday that what I was blaming on Turkey, all these damn pimples, are probably actually the fault of my IUD. Dur. We tried when we first got here but we’re going to try again to get Robert a vasectomy. Obviously birth control for me isn’t working to my satisfaction and them saying that he, an adult, is unable to make his own decisions about his own damn body is just complete and utter bullshit.

If they tell him no then I can see about getting a tubal. I really don’t care which one happens and woe be to the healthcare provider who gets in the way of a woman’s reproductive choices!

I guess this is what started it all. Later that day I posted this:

So, Robert has wonky testicles. Because of this, the doctor said that it’s not a good idea for him to get a vasectomy while he’s here. So I just called and made an appointment to see my gynecologist about getting my tubes tied. I have an appointment in the morning.

And a month later I was sterilized. But let’s not skip over the story, shall we? After several appointments, spanning a couple of weeks, I finally got the go-ahead that I could have the procedure and my pre-procedure appointments began.

February 26:

So I went into the doctor’s office this morning and he told me that he had a patient come in who he’d given a tubal to six months ago and now she wants a reversal. He said he was unable to give her one because he’d cauterized her. So he said instead of cauterizing my tubes, he’s going to tie them off. He’s also going with minilaparotomy instead of laparoscopy.

I always found it a bit odd that the decisions of other women were used so the doctor could decide what I’d want instead of me being asked what I want. By this point, I didn’t really care which type of procedure I had, as long as I had one. I did my research and found that while just tying the tubes gives them a better chance of growing back, it’s still just a teensy tiny chance.

February 29:

I just got a call from a major at the women’s health clinic. Basically, she said, “I know you say that you don’t want anymore kids, but I think that you do and my opinion is more important than yours.” She went ahead and set me up an appointment on Monday (ON MY BIRTHDAY) to have just one more round of counseling. “But we’ll still treat it as if you’re getting the tubal on the 10th,” she says. As if. In other words, “I just know you’re going to be changing your mind after THIS round of counseling because I know what you want better than you do. I don’t know this because I’ve met you and know you, I know this because you’re only 22.”

I’m tired of reiterating all the reasons I don’t want any more kids to people. When I was on the phone with her it basically just came down to, “Look, I never wanted kids. Now I have a kid and … … I don’t want any more.” It sounds mean and unloving to finish that sentence, which is why I didn’t. Will I on Monday (MY BIRTHDAY)? You betcha.

Oh man, that bitch pissed me off so bad. I ended up going into that appointment and telling the doctor I met with that I had suffered a violation of my HIPAA rights and wanted to file a complaint against the major, since she had nothing to do with my care and shouldn’t’ve known I was getting fixed let alone called me at my home about it. Needless to say, my surgery went on (almost) as scheduled. (My anesthesiologist got sick so it had to be delayed by a week.)

March 4:

[T]here has been a trend over the course of me trying to get my tubal that has seemed rather odd to me.

Even though everybody says it’s my age that gives them pause when I’ve asked for permanent sterilization, one of the alternatives that’s ALWAYS mentioned is Robert getting a vasectomy. I get that, from a medical perspective, vasectomies are less invasive and usually safer. Fine. But offering that up as an alternative to what I want does not address the main concern: my age.

I don’t get it. There’s resistance to giving a tubal to a 23-year-old woman, but giving a vasectomy to her 22-year-old husband is all right? Or, if not all right, at least preferable?

It makes me feel … weird. Almost grimy. I’ve developed an aversion to the question. If it was posed by itself and framed in a medical context, I don’t think I would feel this way. But it is invariably asked along with a list of other alternatives to giving me a tubal. Leave my IUD in. Get a hormone-free copper IUD. Implants. NuvaRing. Vasectomy. Shots. One of these is not like the others. One of these doesn’t belong.

Unless…

No, I’m being paranoid. I *must* be paranoid. It couldn’t be that men are viewed as more capable of making such a permanent decision. It couldn’t be that there’s some misogynistic reason to keep a young woman fertile against her will. It couldn’t be. Could it?

Now, I’m not saying there’s intention here, but when this same question is posed over and over, here’s what it eventually sounds like: “I don’t mind if you don’t want to have children again as long as you are fertile.”

Oh, god damn, that was annoying. I was viewed as incapable of making such a permanent decision because of my tender age, but my younger husband was perfectly capable. What does that say?

In the end, I love my tubal. I farted a lot afterwards as the air they pumped into me escaped. And then this funny thing happened…

March 17:

And then I woke up. I had been vividly dreaming, or so it seemed, and I was awake. My glasses were on and I felt like I was having period cramps. I didn’t feel like I had gone anywhere. I said “that was weird[.]” … I asked Robert who put my glasses on me and he said he did…because I’d asked him to. I told him I didn’t remember that at all.

I just asked Robert if he could tell when I “woke up” to myself. He said I was awake when I was wheeled in the room, but I don’t remember that. I told him, “It’s when I said ‘that was weird.'” He said, “You were saying that over and over from the time you were wheeled in the room.” Hahahaha… I must have been having that same sensation of waking up over and over.

At least I know that I react the same way every time I’m faced with that particular situation. But I guess it’d be odd if I reacted differently one time, you know?

Rant from ’08

Here’s a rant I wrote in January of 2008. I find the subject matter to still be relevant. (Wish I’d saved links then. Damn.)

I like to read Feministing, a feminist blog, and today there was a post about an abstinence-only video that used duct tape as a metaphor for one’s body. The duct tape was being stuck to doors, walls, garbage cans, and a fat girl. It ended by saying “What if two clean pieces stuck together? They could stay together forever!” And that, dear friends, is the set up for a rant.

You see, when I went to WWVA, I had the pleasure of watching a speaker, Brad Henning, tell us for two or three hours how badly we need to stay virgins until we’re married. There were nine reasons and, though a Google search told me his name, I cannot find a list of the reasons. That’s okay though, right? I mean, how well a message gets through depends on how well it’s remembered, so let’s see what I remember. (Plus I have a news article and it’s refreshing my memory of his presentation a bit.)

But let’s start off with the duct tape metaphor. It is similar to the flower demonstration, where girls pull petals off a flower to symbolize how they “give away” pieces of themselves to everyone they have sex with until, when those damned dirty sluts finally get married, they have nothing but an ugly nub of a flower to give their husband. These two metaphors differ in the one key respect, however: the duct tape metaphor implies an exchange of dirtiness (the duct tape leaves behind some stickiness and picks up some dirt from the fat girl) while the flower metaphor makes no room for receiving something from your partners. Apparently, boys aren’t beautiful flowers with petals to give away.

(Andie, this reminds me, I keep meaning to ask you a favor. Will you draw me a picture of a Frankenstein Flower? I would love it very much, yes yes.)

The duct tape metaphor also has one other big point behind it, as you probably got from my synopsis of the video. Sex binds people together. Mr. Henning, in his talk to my and many other high schools, explained why. And it is so telling. So, so telling. I’m not certain I should share it, so telling it is. FINE. Sex can keep two virgins together forever because, so grateful are the two of them to be having sex, they’re willing to overlook flaws in their partner that might otherwise be a deal breaker. Yep. I guess it doesn’t matter as much if your husband beats you as long as you’re a virgin when you marry him. But, God forbid (really, he does!) one doesn’t have sex blinders on and so actually looks for someone who treats them well. [insert eye roll here]

I’m going to quote a paragraph of the news article I’m using to remind myself of his talk:

‘For example, Henning knows a now born-again Christian who claimed to have slept with more than 200 girls during one wild summer as a lifeguard. He told Henning the experience haunts him today, even though he is happily married. “He says, ‘You can’t fathom what it’s like to make love to the woman that you deeply love — and all you can see in your mind is 200 other women.”’

That was one of the biggest lies I was ever told growing up. “When you have sex, you always think of everyone else you’ve ever had sex with. Do you want a partner who is COMPARING YOU to the other people they’ve had sex with? Do you want to be thinking of OTHER PEOPLE while you’re having sex with your husband?” Talk about scaring kids. It’s a total lie, by the way, for any frightened virgins reading this. At the risk of sounding like a slut, I have trouble remembering everyone I’ve had sex with, let alone remembering THEM ALL every time I have sex with my husband. It’s complete and total bullshit.

I guess I’ll end my rant there. Shit like this just pisses me off.

My, how fashion changes

While I still love the lolita look, I’ve moved a bit more toward the classic lolita as opposed to the goth or punk lolita that I used to love. Here’s a bit of an old post of mine I found from January, 2008:

I don’t dress like I’d like to dress. I’d like to wear pretty clothes. Punky clothes. Gothy clothes. Dressy clothes. Instead, I wear jeans and t-shirts. There is actually a reason for this.

You see, if I wore the short skirts and striped stockings, I’d be cold. At least, I’d be cold in the winter. That’s not my main concern though. My main concern really shines though when I think about how much I like the lolita look.

There’s more to lolita than just fashion. Many try to do an entire lolita lifestyle, which is basically a way of living that is completely opposite of me. Trying to be/look young is a main part of that, and that really figures into the fashion. I’m mostly drawn to the short, poofy skirts. The lace is pretty too. Oh and the ribbon. LOVE the ribbon! Many of the dresses are much too country for me, especially with classic and country lolita looks. I tend to prefer the gothic/punk lolita dresses. Like the one pictured.

HOWEVER, I’m so, so scared that I’ll end up turning 30 with nothing left in my closet but either lolita dresses or short little punk mini skirts… Things much to young and inappropriate. Or, even worse, I won’t realize that I no longer have the legs to pull them off and I’ll end up looking ridiculous. Like some aging woman trying desperately to hold on to her youth.

For the record, my ideal wardrobe would consist of short and/or poofy skirts to be worn with t-shirts and stockings and fun and funky tops that I could wear with jeans when it’s a bit colder out.

So while my fashion ideal has changed slightly, I notice that my fear of being old with little girl dresses hasn’t. And while I often got away with–nay, flaunted–shorter bottoms than I do now, that’s not something that I feel is appropriate for me anymore.

And yes, I still mostly wear jeans and t-shirts.

What’s your fashion like, how does it differ from your ideal fashion, and has your style changed any over the last few years?