idk my bff dave?

Oh my god, this is so exciting! Today I went to the store and I noticed that the little section for organic produce got bigger! And they now sell organic apples, lemons, mangos, and mushrooms!

Is anyone else excited by this? Anyone?

Ok, well anyway, David and I have been in need of new phones since about November, and for obvious reasons we didn't get them, we just dealt with the issues that our one year old phones were having. His would turn its self off after every call, and mine wasn't charging anymore. It would only charge to one bar, which is not enough bars. More bars! MORE BARS!

How can you use your cell phone if you haven't any bars? Exactly. So we finally got new phones, and they are nifty (see post below for an example of their coolness.)

We stuck with Virgin Mobile, because other than their $40 phones not working very well, we like their service, and we also have to take into account that David has crashed his bike twice and sent his phone flying to the pavement, plus the time that Wade flushed mine. It's not like the phones just stopped working on their own, I mean, we might have played a part in it, but as I said, we like their service. I was a Cingular customer for four years and it sucked, and we had Tracfone for a while and it blew. Tracfone's rates are alright, but their service and their phones are for shit. Virgin has nicer phones that do more things, which not everyone needs. My sister finally got a new phone after like eight years with the old ones (they told her that her contract actually expired in 2005!) and she got something very basic because she doesn't need it to do anything but be a phone. But if you want a "cool" cell phone, and you like the idea of prepaid, I'm going to go ahead and recommend Virgin, it's pretty decent.

They have qwerty keypads, and we got that kind because it's actually just cheaper for us to text each other throughout the day rather than call. The plan that we use is $6.99 a month and 10 cents a minute. For us, this makes sense, because the plans with the anytime minutes are sometimes not enough minutes, and then you end up on a commercial on the radio saying "OMG I went over my minutes and now I owe a bunch of monies!!!1!!" Our text plan is $10 a month for 1,000 texts, which should do us just fine. We aren't obsessive texters, like some people.

Long time readers might remember my ex friend Sara and her creepy boyfriend who would text message her from the bathroom.

You have to also keep in mind that we don't use a landline phone, so this is essentially our phone bill. Cell phones are more versatile and they don't get sales calls, and since nobody calls us but us, why deal with the fucking Press Enterprise trying to sell me subscriptions every week? Why listen to them butcher my name over and over just to hang up on them?

Mrs. Terwinger?

Mrs. Ter-ill..Jessie?

Mrs. Tedlinger?

Mrs. Gonzales?

Mrs. Terliliwililiger?

By the way, it was a sales call that gave me the handle for my old Yahoo Mail account, "Willtilligers."

Best of all, my phone has better internets than my old one, which had little to none. I can now post to my blog through email. I can view my blog, but I cant get to my dashboard, then again I wont need it because I have set up the email comment publishing too. This is what they call "moblogging," or mobile blogging. Fantastic. I can send you lulzy pictures from the road! I can be like "look at this person...parked all crooked, just look at it."

I promise not to clog my blog with too much of that.

The problem is that I've now lost all of my various bells and whistles that I've collected since I got the phone in November of 06. I ended up putting some interesting ringtones on my new phone. Do you care about ringtones? Because I do. I can assign ringers to my text alerts, and I couldn't do that before. My text alert is The Cure "Just Like Heaven" and I stuck with David's old ringer of "Maybe I'm Amazed" because McCartney belongs on my damn phone. Then I went out on a crazy new limb and got Red Hot Chili Pepper's "Soul To Squeeze" as my main ringer. Don't forget the Dolls, I still have Coin Operated Boy on there.

I don't really buy into the hype of the razor thin phones, or the "special pink" or "limited edition red," and I especially don't buy into the iPhone. And I never liked those damn walkie talkies. "Where u at?" I hate that shit. Though it is fun to abuse them.

Wait till your friend is at the store, and then "chirp" them or whatever they call it, and say something like "Hey man, you really should pick up some medicine or something for that nasty diarrhea you've been having. It's like you're not even aiming for the toilet anymore, it's not cool. It's all over the carpet and shit, you might want to rent one of those Rug Doctors too."

Better yet, wait till they go to their parent's house and say something like "Yeah man, you uh...left your um...'friend' here last night, and I cant figure out how to turn it off. Do I turn it counter clockwise or is there a button? Because the shit's been vibrating on the floor since we passed out and I think the downstairs neighbors are going to think that we have a jackhammer up here or something."

Chirpy phones only lead to trouble, people. Trouble caused by assholes like me.

Hey guys i am writing this on my nifty new phone. Just testing out bloggers email publishing.

Usurped By Crack Heads

Our big tax return purchase this year was going to be a bed. I've mentioned many times our current situation with the grandma died on bed/crater of hell. We didn't think that we would get much back because oddly enough we weren't paying anything in. But we ended up in over $5,000 in earned income credit, or however that shit works. (Don't ask me, I'm just a girl! Tee hee! Tee hee! What's that from?)

But no, we had to buy a car, because crack heads raped my car for crack money.

My new car, by the way, Nancy the crack whore as you know her, went to rehab and it turns out that her smoker's hack was caused by one tiny little rotted out tube, which was replaced, and now she's running fine.

And no, I dont use the term "crack head" like everyone else with a blog who thinks that adding "crack head" or "on crack" to something will make it funny, with the exception of Crackberry. ("My kookie brother is a such a crack head," or "they have sex like rabbits on crack") I am being downright serious.

Though the only really thing funny here is the fact that I called my car a crack whore, and today I noticed what brand of tires are on it...Kum-ho. Isnt that something?

If you are a drug user in this area, you either smoke pot in your Corolla in parking lots, have a meth lab, or you do crack, because crack is cheap and most drug users around here are very poor, and as Whitney Houston said "crack is for poor people." People who smoke "better" and more expensive drugs wont steal your car in the night to pay for it, they'll just cheat on their taxes or something high class like that.

So anyway, David's dad informs us that there is a brand new queen sized bed just waiting for us to take it. It's at David's brother Fred's trailer. Long story short, the guy split with his wife, bought a trailer in one of those "we're trying to clean it up" trailer parks in Yucaipa (yeah right, church run or not it's still a dump) and a bunch of people, or one person, donated a shitload of brand new furniture to him because he had nothing. (Fred by the way is the only non crazy brother that David has, he's not like my favorite person on the planet, but at this point in his life I believe that he has good intentions.) Ok, but then Fred found a "lady friend" and moved out of that trailer over to hers. Typical Yucaipa sort of thing, anyway, from what I understand, he left all of the furniture over at his old place, and David's insane brother who sleeps with a doll, thinks that the ground is covered in rattlesnakes, and claims to be the angel of death, and his moochy mooch fuckup uncle are living there and using it.

I swear to god, I am not making this up. There is more to that family than any of them will ever admit. Not that mine is much better.

The only piece of furniture that his brother and uncle weren't using was the brand new queen sized bed with the new mattress and headboard and footboard and everything, because they like to sleep on the couches, because they're crack heads. Literally. So his dad thought that we could use it, because I've probably made it clear that the one that we have is in really bad shape on my blog a couple hundred times. He's an avid reader of the blog, so he knew. That was nice of him.

At first when David told me, I was worried about taking it. Would it smell like cigarettes and ass? The answer was probably, but we would buy a lot of Febreeze for it. But most importantly, I was worried that Steve had slept on it, because I wouldn't take it then. This guy is...well, he doesn't shower for weeks at a time, he's covered in growths, and he's a crack head! I did not want the crack bed from the crack head. But I was assured that Steve preferred the couch, and so did Garry (who I've never met and dont plan to) and that if I wanted to I could buy a mattress pad for it if I was still worried. It was going to take a hell of a lot of Lysol, but I wanted that bed. I wanted it more than my next breath...well, that's extreme. I wanted the bed more than I wanted more yarn. (Knitters out there will understand how badly that is.) Sort of like saying "I'm so hungry that I could eat at Applebee's."

So his dad calls to pick up the mattress, and Steve tells him that he wants it after all.

No new bed for us, because we were usurped by a crack head, for the second time in a month. First the crack heads got my car, then crack head relatives took my bed.

Crack heads EVERYWHERE, ruining everything, EVERYTHING!

We try to live our lives as well as we can, by keeping our apartment nice, and not drinking, and having a nice family life and all even though we're poor, but that is really REALLY hard to do when you're fighting with crack heads over your things. We try to stay one step ahead of them, but no. They still know how to hotwire cars and ruin a perfectly good bed.

Crack heads...fuck, fucking, fucker. Crack heads.

Negative Apples

It's difficult to put this into words.

I am a little bit intimidated by Ty's questions because of how smart he is. If you recall to a couple few posts back, the school tested Ty for autism and it turned out that he actually has an iq of 132. And yes, every four year old asks random questions, but his questions are getting harder to answer. I'm not sure if he's asking tougher questions because he's bored or if he's absorbing his environment and storing all of this information for later. Some of them just seem way too advanced, but then again Ty is advanced, so I really struggle with the kind of answers to give him. Should I give him age appropriate answers or should I appease his superior learning skills and hit the books and the internet to find real answers?

Examples of his recent questions:

"Why do I have a head?"

I said, "Because you need something to hold your brain and you also need a face." He knows what a brain is now, we told him that's where he thinks. Then he asked what thinking is, which I couldn't explain to him, so I think David did, and I'm not sure what he said.

"What is poop?" is one that he asked at the store the other day.

"Poop is your food, you eat it, then your stomach makes sure that your body gets the vitamins from the good food that you eat, and then it goes out of your stomach, and turns into poop." I thought this was sufficient, considering that we were grocery shopping at the time.

"Where is my body?"

"Your body is you, the whole you...I guess your body is what you are, you are a body, but we call you a person."

And then he gets into math equations, which is really interesting. It brings me back to something that one of my English teachers once said to me, he says "You're a writer, you aren't good at math because you don't try to figure out that x = 3, but why x wants to BE 3."

"If I have six apples, and we take two away, I have four apples, right mama?"

"Yes, very good."

"But why are we taking the apples?"

"I don't know, to eat them."

"But you didn't eat them, you just took them, like stealing."

"Pretend that we are sharing the apples Ty."

He's quiet for a few minutes. Then he asks,

"What if you only have six apples, and you want to take 12?"

"Well then you'd have negative apples," I said off handedly while examining some sugar snap peas.

"But you always buy 12 apples when we go to the store. What if there were only six apples? How could we take 12 if there were only six?"

First of all, how does he know that I always buy 12 apples? I don't even count them! I just fill up a bag! I counted what was in my bag though, and he was right, and I suppose I do buy about the same amount every week, so maybe I do. And second, when did he get all hypothetical with the "what if's?"

"I could only buy six apples if there were only six apples," but wanting to explain a little more I continued. "If I took all six apples, then the store would have zero apples, and if the next person wanted to take six apples, and they weren't there, then...well no matter what there would be zero apples, and they couldn't take six."

"What does zero mean?"

"Zero means nothing, like there aren't any, like you are holding zero apples right now."

"Six apples that aren't there..." he says mysteriously to himself. I'm lost and confused at this point, and hoping that his mind is at ease. But it's not.

"If zero is nothing, then six more apples that aren't there would be nothing nothing. It would be nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," he says as he counts out six "nothings" on his fingers.

"Yes, there would be six nothings less than zero. You would count six imaginary apples, then get to zero, and then count the six apples that are in my cart starting with one, two, three."

"So there are nothing numbers before zero, before one. Oh look! A balloon! I want a balloon!"

"No Ty, you always get too emotional when they pop. Last time you woke up crying three nights in a row sobbing that your balloon popped. But I will let you pick out a Hot Wheel for being smart."

"Oooh yay! Hot Wheels!"

Yeah, my four year old just figured out 5th grade math on his own while shopping.

Chairman Mao And The Korean Melon

If you've been reading here for a while, you might remember back when I first started doing v-logs. They were mostly about cooking and eating weird food that we found at the store, like yellow carrots, red bananas, dragonfruit, and lychees. I did them to encourage people to try new things, because I am always trying new things, and so should you. I stopped doing the cooking videos because almost all of my recipes are trash now that I cant have milk. Since then I've been rather uninspired, and around the same time, the store stopped introducing new fruit into the selection. I would check every week, and nothing really happened, just new breeds of apples or something. But what's the excitement of eating an apple? Apples have the same flavor for the most part, some sweeter, some more tart, but it's still an apple. That doesn't make for good video blogging, so I ditched the idea and moved on to talkie vlogs, rants, and stop motion animation.

But then yesterday at the store, I found a Korean Melon, and I was excited by its presence. David yelled "We have to do a video!" and we purchased the melon, which is oval and ribbed, like an acorn squash, but sweet smelling like a cantaloupe. We ate it, and made a video, which is several minutes of us talking and laughing about eating it and discussing the origin of the fruit, and why it is only found in Korea.

Now, there's an ending to this video that is odd of sorts. It involves David calling Staters to ask a question, and the guy who answers the phone is who we call "Chairman Mao," which is one of a group of very strange people that the store has recently hired, along with Starring Girl and Buick-tard. (Buick-tard has not previously been mentioned because there are just no words to describe her, except that she's a sixteen year old girl who is just a less creepy staring girl with weird hair and 80's makeup. Also she drives and parks her Buick into things. Yes, she parks it into things.)

Also, you will see in this video why my sides hurt every Tuesday. We spend just about every minute together on his two days off, and it results in much loling.

Religious Inspiration: Yucaipa Style

Packages have been sent out to the following people: Stacey, Sara, and Mrs. Flax. To Alexandra Bitchford and Solomon, I'm going as fast as I can, but your stuff isn't ready, sorry. Peggy, yours is 99% done. If there's anyone I missed, let me know. Or, if you feel like you deserve something, make your argument and I shall hear it out.

There is this church on Yucaipa Blvd that puts inspirational and lulzy quotes on its marquee board every week. I don't know the name of the church, but it is by 6th and 7th street and it is right next to the nursery. I have to be specific here because Yucaipa has hundreds of churches. Churches, chickens, meth houses, McMansions, and empty fields.

I've been enjoying their messages for years now. Let me inspire you with some good old hometown Christian church marquee advice, as I recall a few of the good ones.

This one is simple: "Light the fire."

In a city with nothing but dry brushy fields and a housing boom, I thought that this advice was rather smart on their part at the time. That's right Billy, that voice that you hear that tells you to burn things isn't just any voice, but the voice of GOD himself. Yes, burn it. BURN THEM ALL!

Here's one that I saw a few weeks ago: "I'm not homeless, I'm not hungry, I have the Lord in my heart."

Yeah, tell that to the starving children all over the world. I mean, whatever gets you through rough times, that's all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that a man still needs food to survive. Isn't there a song that says "all I really need is a lord in my heart, food in my belly, and love in my family?" See, even there God isn't replacing the food, he just comes before it...which I find rather bemusing but whatever, we all have our priorities I suppose. My point is that I find it just a little wrong for a person with a job (you know, the dude who gets paid to put up lulzy marquees at the church) to assume that you can go without food and shelter so long as there is God in your life. Sounds a bit like the Scientologists, who actually encourage members to go without food and such so that they can afford their schooling (which is hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's not your average collection plate amount of cash.)

So I was in Yucaipa tonight, and I saw a pretty good one that taught me something that I didn't know. You know, about how Christians apparently believe in reincarnation.

It said: "Need a new life? God takes trade ins!"

I don't know what this means to you, but to me it says "Off yourself. Do it now, and you might just end up being breast fed by Angelina Jolie. Oh, but hurry, those twins come early lots of times!" Have a shitty life? Kill yourself, and you'll be sent back to try again! What a message for a Christian church to send, am I right?

I might be misinterpreting these quotes here, but seriously? That last one is like that movie Logan's Run. RENEW! RENEW!

THERE IS NO SANCTUARY!

You know who could come up with good things to put up on a marquee is David. He's full of wisdom and good ideas. Want to hear his latest? Ill tell you!

"Lets fart into my guitar."

Amen.

Again, You Don't Have To Support It

I heard that another car got stolen from here, from the area where we park.

The house of the people who we think stole our car is looking very suspicious these days. Right now they have some kind of SUV parked out front in such a way that you cant see the plates, and what a coincidence, one of the windows had been bashed out and replaced with duct tape and trash bags.

I really really want to draw the police's attention to this house but I have no idea how. You cant call in tips unless you have some kind of evidence to back it up, am I right? Would it maybe be best if he talks to that officer here in town that I went to school with? Just sort of casually mention "hey there's this house that I think you should check out because we think they run a car theft operation?"

Or would the cop just say "Yeah, ok" and then make obscene gestures with his hands as he walks away?

Something has to be done here, and it pisses me off. I swear, when David is a cop, I am having everyone arrested. Everyone. Staring Girl, the neighbors, YOU...I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Speaking of David and the cop thing, I had an interesting conversation with my sister in law today about it. Ok, conversation isn't the right word, it was more like her saying "There's a warehouse job that you should get into David," which is all well and good, except that we only have one car, and the job is in Ontario, which is something like 45 miles out. I need to be able to take Ty to school, so until he moves on to bigger and brighter things with his career in law enforcement, he's going to have to work here in town.

She asks how far Ty's school is, and I tell her that it's about four miles.

"What? You cant walk four miles?"

Um...can YOU walk four miles?

It would be absurd, is what I'm saying. And I understand that she was trying to help out, I appreciate that, I really do. She said that he should get the job so that we aren't living paycheck to paycheck, but here's the thing, that warehouse job would have been something to seriously look into back a few years ago. Right now we're in this perfect groove of having just enough, which is a little dangerous as we found out with the Double Whammy Winter of 07-08, but you know, David's our provider, and he's 20. What we DO have is remarkable, and that you cannot argue with.

The thing is that he's starting his testing and stuff like next month. A big change in plans like a new job that he knows nothing about, and that happens to be really far away, it wont work right now. You start a job, then start asking for days off to go do tests for another job two weeks in, and they dont fucking like that. The places he's with now have been aware of his intentions since day one, and he's already built such a strong reputation for being such an excellent worker, that starting over again just to have to leave would be moot.

I respect my sister in law and everything, which I know this will be read and then blown up into me talking shit, because it's way different writing something down than it is to talk shit about people when you're just having a regular conversation at the water cooler or a family reunion or something. Believe me, I've been through this numerous times. And I am not talking shit, if I was then you would know. But when I said that David is heading into the career that he is, she went off on a tangent about inside workings and corruption, and people in the department treating you like shit, and it not being much money, and it's not worth your life.

Avoiding conflict at the time, I just sort of said nothing. She's one of the people who will win the argument no matter what, even if she loses she will win because she yells, and we were at my sister's house and my sister, yeah, she wouldn't back me up for shit, but here's the thing. In ANY job there are politics, and inside workings, and conspiracies. Who doesn't have some kind of co worker drama? Who's never had a boss who pissed them off? Who can say that their work has never dicked around with scheduling or promotions, or anything of the sort?

Another thing? People die all of the time. In car accidents, in drive by shootings, work accidents...who is to say that he's even going to die while on the job as a police officer? He could be hit head on by an SUV going the wrong way on the 10 while driving out to the warehouse job in Ontario and die on the scene. He could die eating a cookie. He could be shot while delivering pizzas. There are occupational hazards everywhere! People die doing their jobs all of the time, and I think that it's a little fucked up when people say "oh well you could die doing that" rather than just saying something positive like "oh well that would be nice, you could get drunk drivers off the road, and drug dealers off the street." No, it always has to be something negative. And I'm not just talking about what my sister in law here, I mean everyone he's ever told.

Am I concerned? Of course I am. Hell, I fear for his safety every night he leaves for work at the pizza place. No, I obviously dont want him to die, but I dont think that it helps to assume that he will, does any of this make sense? If you live your life thinking that you're going to die every day, or you're so terrified that your children wont wake up, or that your spouse is going to up and die, then...what kind of life is that?

He's going to do it whether he has the support or not. He's done that before! Remember the whole teenage parenthood thing? He had no support on that one, and yet he did it, because it's what he wanted to do. He has wanted to be an officer since he was a kid, and I mean, what, would you tell a person who wants to go to medical school not to because of the debt and the stress and the long hours?

Maybe you would, but would they listen?

Some people have callings.

Maybe I haven't made myself clear about this, I thought I did, but maybe I am being misunderstood. Once again, David is aware of the dangers, he is aware of what may happen in the line of duty, and he is also willing to take the risk because of the amount of good that he intends to do, like keeping your kids safe and mine. David is 20, he doesn't want to deliver pizzas and tumble cans for the rest of his life. He doesn't want to end up working in a warehouse for the next 40 years. He has a plan, and I for one support him. You dont have to, and you can be upset with it, that is your right and I wont try to take that away from you.

But David is peaceful, and out to do good, like it or lump it.

The Big Wet Rainstorm's Over!

Or...not really, because it will probably rain again tonight, but I have my internets back so that's a good sign. I don't know why some storms knock out my connection but I don't pay for it, so there's really not much I can do.

And by the way, with internet access comes the ability to select the winner of the Sex Box, which was not as deeply wanted as I thought it would be. Anyway, using this random number generator, it has been determined that Miss is the winner.

Miss, do you want it mailed, or do you want to just come get it, because you live like 20 minutes from my house. Up to you.

That new novel I've been working on, it's up to 26,000 words. That's about 24,000 words short of it being a novel! I'm half way done with it, and it's coming out at an alarming rate. I almost feel like I'm rushing to finish it because David loves it so much. He doesn't really like Golden Dawn, he says that it's not that interesting to him because he knows how it ends. This new one is literally just off the top of my head, with a few facts and real people thrown in to a Jessie-style storyline.

Even though my internet is back, I do intend to work on it until my other manuscript comes back to me, hopefully this weekend I am told. Because then I have work to do.

And having the internet back means that I finally got to read about what a yeast infection is. The reason I was wondering the other day is because I was remembering a funny story involving yeast infections, (only I've read about them and I've found out that there is NOTHING funny about yeast infections.) I was spending the night at my ex best friend Sara's house, and for some reason she said something to the effect of "I don't even know what a yeast infection is," and I said "I don't either." So we went to go ask her mom, who was kind of the cool mom who everyone talked to...up until she went all menopausal and accused everyone of stealing her money.

Anyway, so we go out into the living room and sit crosslegged on the floor and ask her mom "What's a yeast infection."

The bitch ended up turning it around on us and said that you only get those if you are sexually active (which is not true,) and then she demanded to know why we needed to know so bad. Was it because we were sleeping around? Hmm? Is that it?

No, we're just young girls who are coming of age, and we just want to know what they are.

It pisses me off when adults cant just be reasonable and give straight answers to questions when they are asked. And because she didn't answer me, I never found out! And from what I've come to understand I don't want to find out. I mean I know what they are now, kinda, but you know, I don't want to find out the hard way.

When I am not reading blogs, typing blogs, knitting to Youtube videos, or pursuing lulz, I am reading up on random things that pop into my brain. Bloggers sometimes post the funny things that people Google that leads them to their blog, in fact I've done this too, but you should see MY Google history.

Here's some of the random shit that I've googled some time in the past two weeks.

• 419 scam
• Basal
• Golden Era Productions in San Jacinto (which happens to be a Scientology compound near my house)
• Jordan Van Der Sloot confession (yeah, he finally confessed, the douche bag...)
• A guy who calls himself Dagger
• Annoying red
• Anonymous Scientology raids San Diego
• Bullbaiting
• Car alarm that shoots 10 foot flames
• Goth face paint
• Grapple
• Holistic renewal
• Jessica Seinfeld gets sued
• Mormon underwear
• Plutonic relationships
• Rhesus monkey
• Suffragette
• Tao Ti Tsing by Lou Tsu
• The Xenu story
• Train wreck bloggers (I like drama, so what?)
• Wild cherry bark tea

And that's only some. Tonight I'm researching peanut allergy. I'm telling you, no matter what you want to read about, it's on the damn internet somewhere.

The best part, and saddest part I suppose, of having the internet back was that I got to watch the tribute video to Roger (theboringdispatcher) who as I mentioned was an online buddy of mine who passed away recently. If you ever wonder what kind of mark you're leaving on the internet, what kind of impression your blog readers or video watchers have of you, all you can do is hope that you are as loved as this guy was. I came like THIS CLOSE to crying toward the end here. Who says your internet friends cant be your real friends too?

While My Guitar Gently BOING CHING BINK! Shit, That's Not Right

David has been wanting to take up the guitar for a few months. He and I actually met in band, so the two of us have musical background, but as an adult, I have to wonder what the hell were we thinking picking the instruments that we did. I played trombone, now, where will that EVER come in handy? I can play the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher (wah WAH wah w-WAH WAH WAAAH) or play the "you lose" sound effect for gameshows (Wah-Wah-Waaaaaaaah.) David played the tuba, and he played it well. If you know anything about symphonic band, you know that the tuba is the heart of the band, and without it you just have a hoakie group of kids with woodwinds. Oh but what can he do now? Join a mariachi band, maybe.

Ooopa oompa OOOMPA oompa OMPA "Malaguena Salerosa" Ooompa oompa OOOMPA oompa OMPA.

Those instruments were good for high school band, and they were really fun and everything, but it's not something that you can continue on with, especially when you live in apartments.

I replaced music with knitting as far as my math related brain exercise goes, but David still clings to the idea of playing music. That's why he wanted the guitar, because it's a bit more portable than a tuba, and cooler, and he can sit in his box all day and figure out how to play it.

He kept on about this guitar business for I don't know how long, MONTHS. I considered getting him one for Christmas, but then he broke his collar bone, and that was the end of THAT idea. Dude couldn't put underwear on, how was he going to manage to learn to play the gee-tar? He has lots of friends who play, one of which was willing to sell his guitar to him for, you know, like only $400. Eventually he sort of gave up on the idea, and figured that maybe he'd buy one from a pawn shop with that "boost the economy" money that everyone gets in May.

Then one day last week, one of his friends says "Hey David, you still looking for a guitar?"

"Yeah, but I cant buy one right now or anything."

"Oh it's cool, here, you can just have this one," and the guy handed over a beautiful acoustic/electric guitar, for free. And no, it didn't come from the dumpster, the guy just bought a new one and gave David the old one.

The guitar works perfectly. He doesn't have an amp (but his homeless buddies are searching dumpsters as we speak for one) but he sent the guitar home with a guy who does have one, and it works fine. I guess it's called an open body electric guitar, which means that it works as an acoustic, so he can learn it even without the amp. He's had a pick in his wallet for I don't know how long, some teenager flicked it at him or something and he kept it. Now he finally gets to use it.

One of his customers is teaching him to play it. First he was given some fingering exercise, and then he was taught the scales. So he's actually learning the musical part of it, he's not just picking it up and going "That sounds good! Im'a gunna start me up a BAND!" like every other guitar playing douchebag on the market. I'm actually a little shocked at how quickly he's picking it up, I mean, he has all of the notes in the different scales right, but they just don't sound pretty sometimes. I cant describe the sound, other than it's like the string isn't able to vibrate the sound right if he plucks at it wrong.

Ok, if you're a band geek, think "honk blat TWEET!"

Last night as I was heading out the door to steal an internet, which I do by driving my car a few buildings down and using an open network, he says "find me some guitar tabs for Beatles songs." I guess tabs are for idiots who cant read music, which yes he can read music, just not guitar music yet. You sort of have to understand that different instruments have different music because of what keys they are in, it's complicated and yet very simple.

Anyway, I found a site that had a bunch of Beatles tabs, and opened as many as I could in Firefox. I showed him when I got back, and we saved them all to Word, but some of them, like Blackbird, were really really hard. Though he doesn't know the cords yet, he was able to play "And I Love Her." He printed it out and took it to work with him so that he could have his friend teach him the cords so he can play the whole song.

David is actually very bright, and can pick things up pretty easily, and I don't know why I doubted him.

Last night he was serenading me with his newly learned song, with a mistake here and there and every few notes, and he starts singing it. David? Can NOT sing.

"Where's the money?" I ask him.

"What money?"

"The money your mom gave you for singing lessons."

At first he looked like he was going to get mad. Then he got all sad and said "I spent it on video games."

But I gotta hand it to him for learning the guitar and actually picking it up so fast, it's just a damn shame that he cant sing for crap.

Still, David playing a guitar = hot.

Increased Productivity

Internet connection was still down today so I had another "writer's retreat" day. Ok, technically a writers retreat is where you go hang out in a cabin in the woods, or an old locked up theatre like in Haunted. People give up their cell phones, crackberries, iPods, and wireless internet, and they do it all while drinking instant coffee and working on their masterpiece novel. Me? I don't have a TV, and when I lose my internet connection, that's it. The kids have been playing so good together as of late, and Ty's still out of school until Monday so David takes the car with him to work, not that there is anywhere to go really. It becomes "the only thing left for you to do is write."

I have a desk that I sit at, despite having a lap top. The novelty of sitting anywhere you want wears off when it's too cold to sit outside and you've lost three power cords to Wade tripping over them, pulling them out of the computer and permanently mangling them until they completely don't work. But I like having a lap top because I CAN sit wherever I want if I wanted to, and plus I need to use it in Starbucks to feed my need to be seen writing. Mostly I just work at my desk because it keeps me focused on the task at hand. Funny thing about the desk, Target's website lists it as a "Black Kid's Computer Desk." Not a (black) Kids Computer Desk, or a Kids Computer Desk in Black, but a Black Kid's Computer Desk. That isn't why I bought it but I still think that it's funny.

Ok that's partially why I bought it.

I started off this morning with whole grain pancakes and some sausage. Not soy sausage, or any veggie sausage shit, I mean I had me some SAUSAGE, because a girl needs a little sausage every now and then.

Yesterday I had 10,700 words written in my manuscript and today I have 14,600, so the sausage made me productive. And I only stopped to do the following:

• Clean out my purse
• Load the dishwasher
• Imagine what a yeast infection must be like
• Wonder what a yeast infection is
• Wish that I could look up yeast infections on the internet
• Read/shit
• Fed bunny and bird
• Dust my computer
• Eat leftover chicken floutas
• Change poopie diaper
• Feed lunch to children
• Receive groping from David
• Talking to David about micro management
• Read/shit
• Fiddle with my camera, then frowned when the batteries died and I had none to replace them
• Go to Walmart for batteries, pull-up diapers, and razors
• Consider a pair of sunglasses momentarily
• Read/shit
• Receive package from the mail man and it was awesome
• Open package from mail man and find my business cards inside which say "Jessie Terwilliger, Author" with my address and phone and email and shit
• Changed another poopie diaper
• Eat a delicious steak
• Eat a delicious cake
• Type a bullet list blog entry

I mean, that's rather productive, don't you think? Considering all of the things that I didn't do, which I wont list, because that would be boring.

Everybody Poops- The Musical!

I haven't had an internet connection all day, but this seems to happen sometimes when it's storming like it is. It's a blessing in disguise really, because not having the internet has forced me to focus on writing, and that is just what I needed, as I explained yesterday. Less internets, more manuscripts.

I spent the whole day working on my new story. I'm up to 10,700 words, and I don't know how many chapters. The chapters aren't numbered because that's not the narrator's style. He's kind of a punk. Anyway, I was really really productive today and that feels good. I have a good idea of where the story will go and how it will end, but I already wrote out a map of the plot but now I'm changing it around a bit. Conflict is hard to create in a novel. I know what I want in a conflict, it's just a matter of how it arises and who it all happens to. There really isn't much to it yet, so I wont say anything else, because nothing is set in stone at this point. Thats why I keep changing my map.

David comes home after work and I tell him about the productive day that I had, and he has a big suspicious smile on his face.

"What?"

"I bought the kids something," he says grinning.

He reveals a plastic chicken toy that has little pastel gum balls in it's packaging. "It's one of those pooping chickens!" he says.

Oh god.

He opens it up and pulls the plastic chicken's head off, and crams the gum balls down into it's neck.

"Watch," he says as he winds it up and puts it down on the table. The thing starts rocking back and fourth on its feet, causing it to walk, and after a few steps it drops a colorful candy turd out of a hole in it's back side. A few more steps, and it drops another. All three boys are scream-laughing over this marvel.

Though I cant say much about a plastic chicken that poops candy, I can relay to you some of the memorable quotes that came from the experience of playing with said chicken.

"Wade's not sharing the poop." -Ty

"Wade, give your brother a handful of poop right now!" -David

"You have to shove the poop down its neck and it will come out the other end" -me

And then David brings up the fact that the kids haven't realized that the poop is candy. "My bet is that Wade will eat it first," he says. "Leave it to Wade to put something like chicken poop in his mouth."

Sure enough, after David left for a run to the store, Ty yells "Oh no! Wade's EATING THE POOP!"

I turn around and Wade is frozen with his hand in his mouth, his fingers wrapped around a chicken poop gumball that is on his tongue.

"Eat it Wade," I say encouragingly. He thinks about it for a minute, and he smiles as he shoves it in.

"EEEEEEEW!" screams Ty. "HE ATE POOP!"

"You eat one Ty." He looks at the one in his hand for a minute, then tentatively eats it. His eyes grow wide and confused as he chews the poop.

"It's candy," I assure him.

"OH!" he exclaims and pops more into his mouth.

I'm wondering if I need to explain to them that real poop is not made of candy and we shouldn't eat it. I've never had to have that talk with them ever. Thanks for the wonderful gift, David. Got our damn kids eating poop now. It's bad enough that I've already had to explain to Ty today that his tongue "is not a vacuum to sweep up ranch dressing."

Damn kids, we try to give them some ranch dressing for their veggies, and they end up vacuuming up the whole lot of it with their tongues. And they eat poop.

David says the poop gum balls lose their flavor in 10 seconds. Real poop is not the same.

More Friends From The Planet "Hi, I Used To Know You!"

Hey, what the hell? Are you all a bunch of prudes? This is your last chance to win the box of sex, so I suggest that you enter to win while you still can.

Ty is out of school all week long, and this means that I don't have to drive. I don't have to get up early to drop David off and then make several short back and fourth trips just to get everyone there and home again. I wore yoga pants all day and I do not plan to go outside at all because it is misting. It's weirder than shit. It's like wet fog, and I am dampened by it. Literally and figuratively.

I've been struggling a bit with my creative mind in the past week or two, so other than updating the blog I haven't done any real writing. I've been knitting, for those of you who were promised goods, but that is really more of a left brained activity. I cant help but wonder if it's these awful books that I'm reading. I finished book two of the series and now I'm on book three, which is "Beauty's Release." It's dreadful but I feel that I cant give up on it, since I've invested so much time into it already.

In the end, Ill probably add Anne Rice to my list of celebrity arch enemies, directly under Suzanne Sommers.

I've mostly been farting around on the internet, but I really need to get back to work on promotion stuff and maybe even hammering out some more chapters in my new manuscript. Actually, I don't really have to, it's all up to me, but I feel like I should anyway. But still I did nothing for the most part, I did design the dust jacket for the hardback version of Golden Dawn, but other than that I was not productive at all. I did do a lot of cleaning, because that's what I do when I'm avoiding writing, which in of it's self is productive since it needs to be done anyway, its just that I don't really want all of my energy to be going to scrubbing bubbles and dusting. And the kids have just been entertaining themselves in their room, they like to play together now so I'm pretty much left out of it, and that's fine with me. They still need me for food so HA.

Out of boredom and avoidance, I logged on to Myspace. I only do this every few days, most of the time I go longer. I'm surprised that it hasn't been hacked and used for spamming or lulzing. Anyway, I had a message from a girl who knew me in high school and decided to get back in touch with me.

I hardly knew her, she was like a friend of a friend as I recall. She wasn't sure if I remembered her, so she attempted to jog my memory by telling me who she used to hang with and such. She asked me if I still lived in Yucaipa, and if I was working.

Why, so we can set plans and then break them, or you can come and order food from whatever fast food place that I no doubtingly ended up at?

For the record, I've never worked fast food. I worked flower shops.

I know that I am socially retarded and that I don't usually get the social cues, so it could be possible that she was trying to start a conversation with small talk. But again, I don't really know her, and even if I do sort of know her, I haven't seen her in six years and I know relatively nothing about her. Maybe that opens up the opportunity to start a new friendship since we only vaguely know of each other, or maybe it just makes it weirder. I think I'm actually happier meeting people that I've never met than rekindling something from the past, especially if there isn't really anything to rekindle.

At any rate, I told her that I'm in Beaumont, and that I put Yucaipa on my profile to throw people off and so they don't come bother me. I told her that I'm an author, because I've learned not to say "house wife" first because then I get job offers, or worse I get asked "Why?" I hate being asked why. I said something to the effect of "I get to stay home with the kids and work on my books," la dee dah. I didn't go much into detail, because word gets around fast in Yucaipa as to people's whereabouts, thanks to Mrs Case, Mrs Centner and Mrs Ellis, who specialize in "Where Are They Now" trivia, and if their latest update to their circle of gossip is "Oh Jessie? Yeah, she's writing books and living out of town and her husband just bought her a new car," it certainly will be more positive than what they can get out of "house wife." "Oh, she's jobless and living off of David."

People don't seem to get that if you quit your job three years ago and never looked back, and you haven't sought employment, you aren't "jobless." A guy who tried to sell me a car didn't get that either, and he totally talked down to me and ignored anything I said after he found out that my husband is the only one who works. He also lost himself a customer.

So I sort of played up the author thing so that the spin wouldn't be as harsh, but also because it's fun to brag about it, even to people who I don't know.

See also: blogging.

And yeah, it kinda does matter what people perceive, because I almost always run into some douchebag someone I graduated with any time I go into a store in that town. Maybe they'll sell me my tacos, or maybe they'll check my groceries if I have to run to Staters. It helps if they're nice to you during those brief encounters, and not shooting you sideways looks, it just makes things easier.

This girl, she says she's having a baby. That's great, and I suppose I can relate. Maybe that's why she contacted me, because she's looking for mom friends. Maybe she wants to hang out with people who are like minded and have the same kind of things going on. But honestly, I really don't like hanging out with other parents. There is nothing more that will drain your creative juices than discussing diaper rash cream and epesiotemy scars, because essentially it's all either the same thing, or one is trying to out do the other. Anything your baby did, mine did six months earlier. New moms, pregnant moms, they just spout off articles that they read in their Parenting Magazine or explain the mechanics of labor to you. I haven't renewed my subscription to Parenting in over a year and I've forgotten much of the process that involves birthing.

I don't know, I mean I have no ill will toward this person, and I never have, and I appreciate that I was thought of and remembered. Maybe if we had ran into each other by taking a college course together or she recognized me at Starbucks and asked to sit down, like how Kevin Sorbo did, but no. This was your average "Oh hey, I found your Myspace, remember me? I was Jessica's friend and sometimes we talked to each other during passing period."

Like I said, I'm a social retard and I miss a lot of social cues, but still I've let go of the idea of friendships forming from random "I found you on Myspace" messages. Not because it's the internet in general, because I've made friends through my blog, and when my elementary and middle school best friend Chawny found me on Myspace she became a blog reader and we became friends again. Then again, her and I knew each other much more than me and this girl. The point is that I don't think that the Myspace is a great place to conjure up friendships, old and new.

That, and I don't think that I was ever really someone who you'd look up six years later because you thought I was cool or fun or something.

Are you actually "friends" with any of your "friends?"

They Expected Better Of Me, They Say

Little to no introduction for this one. From the Press Enterprise...

Fontana man robbed of tacos

A hunger for carnitas nearly led to some carnage after a Fontana man was robbed of a bag of tacos at gunpoint.

Police Sergeant Jeff Decker says the 35-year-old victim had just bought about $20 in tacos from a street-corner stand Sunday night and was bicycling home when the suspect confronted him and said “Give me your tacos.”

Decker says the suspect grabbed the bag of food, punched the victim in the face and began to flee. When the victim demanded his tacos back, the suspect pointed what appeared to be a handgun at the man and threatened to kill him before running away.

"So David, why are you so sad today?"

"Some asshole stole my tacos. Then he punched me in the face. I don't even know if he had a gun, he just said to hand them over and I did."

Actually no, David was not the man who was robbed of his tacos, but I thought that this story was so damn funny that I just had to blog it.

Anyway, we had a nice day, the four of us together. Ty is out of school for the week and David was off of work today, so we went to a park in Yucaipa for a picnic. We had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, some Chex Mix type snack stuff, baby cucumbers, and some delicious snickerdoodles. We sat at the table and the kids played on the slides until bigger kids showed up, so we called his parents to see if we could drop by for a visit since we haven't seen them in a while, but my father in law was out gambling with David's brother Steve (the one who sleeps with a plastic baby doll and foams at the mouth) and his mother was lamenting over this fact, and also she was sick she said, so we decided to just go home.

He cleaned the kids room and I did laundry. Their room really needed to be done, and that is one of David's only chores besides taking out the trash. It's just that I have bad knees and bending over to pick their shit up really kills me, and I suppose I could get one of those extendo-grabber arm things, but why do that when I have a perfectly good David for that? Exactly. Besides, I really needed to just use the time to catch up on laundry, I've fallen behind in the past few weeks because Wade hasn't been napping like he's supposed to and so I have to wait till night time to do it, but now I don't want to go to the laundry room at night because there is a homeless guy sleeping in it most nights. David saw him once, said he stunk really bad like shit, and I know he's in there because the lights are off but I can see someone moving around in there by the glow of the vending machine. I don't know why they don't lock that thing at night anymore.

Id say something to someone but nobody will care.

But I finally got a few loads done, and I folded them while David made catfish. He coated it with dill and mustard and fish fry. It wasn't as good as the stuff that he used to catch, but I ate more of it than he did.

I finish up laundry, he goes to work, and I get this email from an anonymous address, clearly one that someone made for this single email, and they say,

I think that the "prize" you are giving away on your blog is really inappropriate, and I expected better of you. What would your dad think?

Obvious troll is obvious.

I suspect that it could be a family member, but whoever it is has made my day. I haven't gotten a single negative comment or creepy email in months, I was wondering where had all the flowers gone. Whoever they are, they are referring to the "sex in a box" giveaway. As I don't know what the specific problem is, I do have to maybe wonder if this is coming from some kind of lurking family member who still thinks that I am 14 years old or something.

What would my dad think? It doesn't fucking matter, the man is dead, and has been for years.

Whoever it was, they should realize that I am not 14 years old, and I haven't been for...shit, 10 years? When the fuck did that happen? Anyway, I don't really know WHAT to say here, other than maybe that I'm married with kids, and it shouldn't be an issue at this point if I "go there." I could give away a box of condoms or a gyrating dildo. What, is it that I didn't give away a gyrating dildo, and that's why you "expected better of me?" Are you convinced that I am on some kind of downward spiral or path of blogging destruction that will end in me posting pictures of my vagoo and making dirty movies for Xtube? Do you really think that I need to be reprimanded for this?

Are you scared of the vibrating cock ring, or just scared that I OMG know what one is?

Get a grip, know what I mean?

The Comeback Kid And Nancy The Queasy Crack Whore

Ongoing contest with an awesome prize, go here and check it out!

Ya'member that movie Rookie of the Year where the 12 year old kid breaks his arm, and when it heals the tendons are super tight and it turns out that he can throw a 120 mph fast ball or something, and he ends up playing for the Cubs?

Ok, so David broke his collar bone, ya'member that right? You should, it was only like a few months ago. Before he broke his collar bone, his game was full of fail, he basically didn't play any sport so good, even golf, which was invented for people who fail at everything from soccer to badminton. Well when his collar bone healed, something went just a little bit wrong, and it healed a little crooked. This means that there is one certain movement that he is unable to do, but there really isn't anything he can do other than to have a doctor re break it and force it into healing right. Or, he can just live with it. Since it's just one tiny movement, and he doesn't use it anyway really, he can just work around what he has for the time being.

Then one of his customers gave him a handful of tokens for the driving range in Yucaipa. So he and my brother in law decided to go screw around and hit some balls. What happened is what you can call amazing. Because of that one simple movement that David cant do on a count of his bone not healing right, he can now hit a golf ball straight. He cant hit it very far, but hitting it straight counts for a lot in the game.

He is by no means a golfer, but at least he's not a joke anymore. And it's good that he's found an acceptable place to be in the world of golf, because all we have around here are fucking golf courses and houses built upon them, owned by assholes mostly. And was it by chance that David's bone healed just a fraction of an inch off, keeping him from swinging clubs around like a fucktard? What if he's scouted by the PGA guys who hang around Beaumont? Is he going to somehow climb his way to the top of whatever golfers climb, and become a golfing legend, only to trip and fall into a sand trap on the last hole of some big important game, knocking his collar bone back into the correct place, taking away his special powers of hitting straight, and he totally blows everything? Just like in the movie?

He loses the trophy, the deal with Quiznos, the underwear ads for JC Penny, and all of that stinkin' filthy money.

In the mean time while he was "golfing" I washed the car...for the second week in a row. Because David has been golfing for two weeks trying to hit the big time, and dirt shows up on red really badly. My secret solution for washing a car is to add dish soap and liquid dishwashing detergent to the water. The detergent is designed to help water sheet off of dishes, and it works with the car too. I've decided that the anthropomorphized version of Nancy is a 30-something year old crack whore with tuberculosis. She cleans up nice, but sometimes when you run her good she gets to making all of these sounds and shit, don't sound good. And she goes through gas like it's crack.

Back to me washing the car, or giving it a whore bath, whatever, I haven't washed a car in like six years. I used to wash my car every Friday in high school, then I moved to a place that didn't have faucets outside, so I got to using those automatic car washes. That worked fine, until Wade came along. Wade is deathly afraid of car washes, to the point of convulsing and vomiting in terror, so we don't go get those done anymore. And we cant wash the car here because there is a law against it or something, which is dumb because you have to keep your car clean and running at all times, but you aren't allowed to wash or fix it on the premises. Stupid. So I've taken the last two Sundays to keep my new ride looking clean, like the misunderstood little lady that she is.

I even fixed the bumper, which had some paint oxidizing on it when we bought it, but I smothered it with Armor All and it fixed it right up. Unfortunately, the day after I did this last time, he went and drove it down a dirt road and dust stuck right to it, so my poor crack whore had a filthy ass all week.

I don't know that I'm going to keep this car for very long, it scares me. The bitch is unpredictable sometimes, like randomly stalling after turning corners, or shouting at inappropriate times. She's like my drunk friend who passes out at parties and leaves me to explain and apologize to everyone for her behavior. When David goes to academy, I'll probably get myself into something a little less American and by proxy more reliable, just for the sake of not having to deal with...whatever the hell is wrong with this thing, I don't know.

But it's mine as of a few weeks from now when I pay my sister back in full with our tax return, and while I've got her Ill drag her out of the parties as she cries and makes a total mess of herself in front of everyone because I just cant help but feel bad for her, and I'll wash her on the weekends.

Or give her whore baths, whatever.

Sex In A Box Giveaway!

There was an explosion(!!!) of interest in the "sex in a box" that I had mentioned the other day. I decided to do something constructive and give away a box full of sex, formally known as the Durex Pleasure Wave Vibrating Pleasure Pack.

By the way, you're all animals, and you need to be caged. And I don't want to know how the Astroglide got into the shoe, but according to Rule 34 there is a porn of it somewhere, and I just refuse to look for it.

The box of sex contains the following:

3 latex condoms, one of which has a bunch of bumpy nodule things on it, one is ribbed, and one is unleaded.

1 vibrating cock ring

3 lubricant packets, one is cherry flavored/scented, one is warming (or scalding) and one is mint

So how do you win sex in a box? Very simple. You leave a comment here on this post, and you tell everybody on the fucking interweb about this contest, and I will be using a random number generator to determine the winner.

"But Jessie, why should I advertise this? I want the sex box all to myself, and if more people play then my chances will drop!"

That is where you are wrong, and also very very greedy. For every 50 comments/players, I will throw another box of sex into the prize bag. So if 100 people chip in, there will be two boxes of sex that will be thrown into the audience (or mailed via USPS depending on your location.)

This special giveaway is the first in a series of giveaways, and this particular one ends Wednesday, February 20th at 6:30 PM Pacific Standard time. I am hoping for a lot of participation, because the more participants I end up getting will determine how often I hold future contests and what kind of prizes I will give away.

If you are allergic to latex or if you have no use for condoms because you are hopelessly single or not into dudes, use the lube for fapping and put the rubbers on doorknobs at your local KFC.

Comment and win, it cant be easier, but you come pretty darn close.

GO! GO! GO!

Long Shorts Are Long

Hey, I'm going to be posting information on how you can win your very own sex in a box from Davidsdoll.com tomorrow evening. The contest will be fun and easy, just like you.

It snowed yesterday. We woke up to McFluries and then by 11:00 there was full on snowflakes hitting the ground and sticking. I had to drive in the shit. And it all melted in about an hour, even though it snowed for a good two hours straight and there was maybe an inch on the ground, the sun came out and melted it ALL.

But such is California weather, the very next day I go out shopping to buy shorts for David and I, because neither of us own any and it's going to warm up again. I own a lot of skirts, and skirts have their place, but I would like to have shorts now after two years of skirt wearing. Going back to my old ways.

I'm driving him to work so I can drive down to Target, and there's something funny about my turn signals. They aren't flashing or anything, they're just staying solid.

"Oh I forgot to mention that," he says. "The turn signals don't work anymore, I don't know why. The light still comes on, they just don't blink. If you want it to blink you have to do it yourself."

Lousy Americans, cant build a car for shit.

I swear to you, I will never buy another American car for the rest of my life. Mechanically I'd give the car a B+, there are a few random things that are a little wonky but they can probably be fixed. But it's the stuff that breaks so easily on it. The trunk popper doesn't work, one of the bright beams doesn't work (electrical problem, we checked,) the stereo has no knobs, the CD player is for shit, the hazard lights don't work, along with a number of other things that aren't that hard to fucking do right the first time.

Owning this car has convinced me that General Motors should no longer be creating thousands of different models of cars if they cant get a simple trunk opening mechanism right.

And can you believe that the Alero was once a $25,000 car?

He told me to go to Target anyways, so I ghettoed my car into the different lanes of the I-10 by manually flicking my blinkers on and off.

I get there, and I find practically nothing. There are $30 pairs of shorts, which are way too much to spend on a fucking pair of shorts, and there are shorts that will probably get jammed into ones labial folds. Then there are long shorts. Not capris, or pedal pushers, these are shorts that are going to cover your thigh, almost to your knee. Like a good length for a skirt. They're kinda cute, the tag says that they're "walking shorts," which is what I intend to do in them. They were decently priced, so I grabbed a pair. I also got a pair of flannel ones because, why not? They said "modern fit" on them, and I try to be modern when I can. Except for the 1950's style house wife skirts, those are afreakingdorable, but I was buying shorts today, not skirts.

I get over to the men's and I get a pair of plaid shorts for David. He needs to update his look as well, I decided on a whim. Plaid is full of win. And we plan to go on a picnic on Monday since Ty is out of school for the whole week (yeah, President's Week, what do you think of that?) and I thought that it would be swell if we matched. Yeah, swell.

Anyway, I got what I came for, and I was confident about my new look. Because you can change your whole look with just one pair of modern fit walking shorts this day in age. I'm convinced of it.

I like Target. I like Target's selection of clothes. They don't make short shorts in size 16 because people who are size 16 should not wear them. Most of the shorts they sell are longer, and the t-shirts have positive messages on them. That's where I got my "support organic farmers" shirt, along with my recycle shirt, not to mention a number of the Beatles shirts that David and I own.

I ghetto my way back into town and show David what I got. He was a little too excited that he got plaid shorts to wear, but when I showed him the shorts I got he said "Those are kinda long, don't ya think?"

He said this because he likes my legs. A lot.

"I think they're cute, and they look comfortable. They're walking shorts David, they're what's in right now."

"It's just that they're long..."

"What? Are you trying to say that I cant cover my body?" my heart bled to him. "Well let me tell YOU something, I don't need some MAN to tell me if I look good in something!"

He rolls his eyes at me. "Yes you do."

"No, because-"

"If you don't care what I think, then why do you always ask what I think about something that you're wearing or about to buy? Every time you're going to buy something and I am there, you ask my opinion on it. When I'm not there, you send me picture messages."

"I am just making polite conversation when I do that."

"Oh yeah? Then why is it that when I say that I don't like a dress or something you end up not getting it?"

"Name one time!"

"Two words: gaucho pants."

I slapped my forehead. "Gaucho pants." Pictured right.

"Yeah, gaucho pants. Remember those? Remember how you were going to buy some but then I pointed out how horrible they looked on EVERYONE? Even girls who were attractive, do you remember what I said about them?"

"Horses ass..."

"HORSES ASS!" he yells before I can finish the "ass" part. "And you know that I was right, that's why you didn't make that mistake. You would have put those horses ass pants on honey and you would have cried about being fat, even though you've NEVER cried about being fat before. Face it, you need my help. You need my approval."

""Well just so you know, Long Shorts were in my size, and they don't make shorts like how I used to wear, you know, like medium length instead of insanely short."

"I've got nothing against Long Shorts, doll. All the hot moms are wearing them. They're like the summer equivalent to the Yoga Pants. You've got great legs, you'll rock the Long Shorts, I guarantee it."

Why's he always gotta be so right all the time?

I should take in to consideration that he sees people all day long going to the grocery store, Starbucks, and the like. Things that I do. He sees what people are wearing to do those things, and even though pajamas are almost always spotted on some fat ass, he sees what looks good. He notes the atrocities. The tramp stamps (lower back tattoos.) He was right when he said that thongs looked too distractingly uncomfortable to be sexy. The long shorts are a little Mormon, but I like the trend of showing less skin. Not that I'd be out in public with a huge t-shirt and paint splattered sweat pants, but still, I think it's progress in the way of aging with dignity and not having body parts hanging out all over the fucking place.

But if you want an honest opinion about something you're wearing, David wont lie to you.

No, I have never punched him or cried because he said something looked bad. It only takes me a minute to realize that he's right, and then I step away from the fad, and nobody gets hurt.

Spontaneity

After I picked David up from work yesterday we dropped by the mailboxes, since I forgot to get the mail yesterday and I knew the guy had been there already for that day. He comes back to the car, and I see him shaking an envelope and holding it up to his ear. He gets back in the car and says,

"The school sent us anthrax."

"What?"

"There's some kind of powder in this envelope, and it's from the school district. They sent us anthrax!"

"Let me see that!" I say as I rip it out of his hands, because you know, if it really was anthrax I wanted to touch it too. That's the smart thing to do, right?

Then I notice that the envelope is dripping with glitter. There is glitter on my hands, and all over David. Probably all over the inside of my mailbox.

"I'm waiting to open this till we get inside."

Yeah, it ended up being this card from Ty. His teacher had it mailed to us so it would be a surprise. Sending preschool artwork through US Mail makes a huge mess...a huge, pretty, sparkly mess.

And there's not even that much glitter on the card!

Ty sees me holding the card and puts his hands to his face and giggles.

"Is this from you Ty? Did you send me a card?"

"Yuh!"

"Would you like a hug?" I ask, because you have to ask him first or else he will get upset.

"Yuh!"

And when he walked away, he had glitter stuck to his face, because it was all over me. I have a feeling that glitter is going to be all over everything for a while.

After David and I ate crab legs and steaks, we set to work jamming Pixi Stix through Ty's Valentines cards, since both kids ended up crashing shortly after their dinner of organic chicken noodle soup. (No, I didn't make that, it's from a can but it's organic so it makes it ok.) And on the Pixi Stix note, I bought him those cards because he doesn't know who any of the cartoon characters are like Spongebob or Diego, and because giving tubes of sugar to his classmates is sure to make him at least a few friends.

It's almost 11:00, and David goes "Shit, I forgot to go to Walgreens!"

"What's at Walgreens?"

He stands up, with his hands splayed out in front of him like he's pushing a door. "Sex...in a box!" he says, like it is something magnificent to behold.

"At Walgreens?" I asked as he put on his jacket and ran out the door all in one fluid motion.

He comes back a few minutes later and shows me this "pleasure pack," with all different kinds of condoms and lubes and vibrating cock rings. Scientists say that lube is for putting things into your butt or into the butt of a loved one with ease. I'm not a fan of the buttsecks, and nobody but nobody is permitted to "stick it in my pooper." Also I was concerned because only an hour before I had found a website by mistake that featured pictures of women with granny smith apples in their butts, accompanied by pictures of girls with multiple squash, beer bottles, and bars of soap in the same spot, and I showed him.

I wasn't exactly sure what he had planned, and I was a little afraid to ask.

"The guy, he was all embarrassed to touch it, and he was giggling, it's like 'Dude, you work at Walgreens, the only things people buy at this time of night are condoms and cigarettes.' It's like the guy's never had vaginal intercourse in his life!"

Vaginal. That's the word I wanted to hear, thank god.

And yeah, he uses big words like that.

He goes to the kitchen and gets an armful of candles from the cupboard. "Did you make the bed today? Oh wait, it doesn't matter. Anyway, I was on my way to take a shit the other day, because I like to shit in Walgreens while I'm at work, and I saw this on one of the end caps and I thought of you. Wanna come in here and help me open the box?"

"Well um...at least you thought of me when you saw the sex in a box."

If that's not spontaneity, I don?t know what is.

*(scene missing)*

By the way, any product that features "warming action" will only make it feel like someone shoved a handful of Flamin Hot Cheetoes in your snatch.

Gives an entirely new meaning to the term "fire crotch."

Romantical

I have an award thingy that I am passing on to everyone who is in my sidebar. If you are there, please take this token of my adoration.

I've added a few of you, so if you aren't sure, check toward the bottom. Also if your link is missing it is because I don't read your blog or I decided that you suck and I omitted it. Sorry.

So Valentines Day? Not feeling it. He goes,

"My work has a new pizza."

Looking at a can of Philly Cheese Steak Pringles that he brought home I say, "is it Philly Cheese Steak pizza?"

And he says, "No, that's Dominoe's that does that."

"Is it the Valentines day heart shaped pizza?"

"How did you guess that?"

"I don't know but I want one."

"They're thin crust though, you only like thick."

"But yeah, but...cant you just do what you normally do for me, you know, take the large crust dough and make a medium sized pizza out of it so that it's like super thick, and then just dent in one side of it and make the other side all pointy like a heart?"

"Um...it doesn't work like that. How about I make you a pizza and I write 'I'm gunna fuck the ever living shit out of you' in sausage?"

Tonight we had our v-day dinner, choice boneless ribeyes, french bread, and crab legs. I'm making him some sugar cookies that I am going to dip in chocolate and he bought me some potted flowers for my balcony earlier this week, but we aren't doing anything special. The rest of the night he's cleaning the kid's room and helping Ty fill out his Valentines, which all have to be addressed to "my friend" and they all have to get one, and I'm doing laundry. We don't really get into the Valentines thing around here, because every day is Valentines day for us, and we always have dinner together, and he always picks me flowers from people's yards and/or random parking lots, we love each other just the same. I am excited to go to Walmart on Friday and buy crap loads of discounted candy. I love the chalky hearts, the ones that disintegrate, mostly just the orange and yellow ones. Oh but not those hard ones that taste like Windex. No thank you to Windex hearts.

But I've been asked by a few people in emails and in person a question that we can discuss today since it's topical. As David is always praised by my readers for his maturity and for being a good worker and a great dad, people sometimes ask me, is David romantic?

David is...affectionate, which I was never accustomed to before. He kisses me all over the place, like my arms and my legs. We could be standing in a parking lot and I swear to you that he will actually crouch down to kiss my leg. If we are sitting together at the computer looking at something he passes the time by om nom nomming my shoulder. He will do things for me if I ask him to, like paint my toenails. The other night I asked if he would brush my hair, which he's never done before.

"Sure, alright," he says, and gets a brush. After a minute or two of slow brushing, with his hand following the brush with each stroke, he says "This is making me hard." We both laughed.

He's not really creative or imaginative by nature, so he doesn't shower me with poetry or surprise me with gifts. But he does call me up and say "oh my god, look at the sunset!" or drag me out side in the middle of the night to hear owl mating calls.

He doesn't open doors or put the toilet seat down, but it's 2008, I can do that shit myself.

Sometimes I go into our room and he's in the bed rolling around and thrashing about. I ask him what he's doing and he says that he's trying to warm up both of our sides at once so that I wont be cold when I get in. Then he gets back to work.

When he comes in the door after working, he grins and says "Hi baby!" the same exact way that he does when he's groping me and smelling my hair at the grocery store.

You know, I don't know if these things count as romantic. For us, it is. Heart shaped cookies is romantic for him because he loves food, especially in shape form. It really depends on who you are I guess. But then again, how many husbands wallow around on the bed trying to make it warm? I looked up the WikiHow on romantic ideas, and most of them just struck me as odd.

12. Write your partner a check for one million kisses.

16. Using a knife, trace/write "I love you" in the butter. It will surprise your partner next time (s)he uses it.

17. Hide a love note in the bottle of vitamins. The note says "Try some vitamin L."

22. If your partner buys soda by the can, use a permanent marker to write "I love you" on the top of every can. Only do this if you consistently tell your partner you love them or it might be creepy.

26. Pull the bag out of your lover's (unused) breakfast cereal box and slit a small hole in it. Insert a love note. Tape up the bag and return it to the box.

Then again, someone else probably thinks that Vitamin L is a great way to start the day. I don't get it. Is that supposed to get you laid?

You tell me if that ends up working for you.

Sorry, Writer's Block, Vlogging Instead

Today's episode includes:

• My new intro: win, lose, or fail?
• Something Im making
• Something from a blogger that was in my mailbox
• Buttsecks in literature
  
• Thank you
• A contest with a prize
  

Dispatched- I've Lost A Friend

I'm rather sad today.

If you look in my sidebar where I link to everyone, you know that I enjoy both the blogs and the vlogs. If you are strictly a blogger with no interest in the vlogs, then you probably wont know anything about this. And if you are a reader only, then you really wont know, but I know, and so many many people on the internet know.

One of my online friends passed away Saturday night. I blogged about him once, he called himself The Boring Dispatcher, but his name was Roger. I called him Spatch at first, then eventually I called him Roger, or Spatchie. Spatchie Spatch.

I first started watching Roger's videos when he was still TheDispatcher, before his account got suspended. He was the first well known Youtuber that I had subscribed to, and I loved his don't give a fuck attitude. Then he became TheBoringDispatcher and I watched him there. Eventually I decided to talk to him for whatever reason. I hardly left comments on his videos, I always just messaged him directly. Then he got a Myspace, and I added him. In the blog entry that I wrote about him, you'll read about how I ended up landing an interview with him, which didn't turn out as great as I thought it would because he was more of a talker than a writer, and text interviews are the most rewarding when the person writes back some great responses, but I still enjoyed getting his answers for the stupid questions that I asked.

Then one night he talked to me on some messenger system until 3AM. At first he tried to convince me to drive to LA and have sex with him, and even went so far as to send me a picture of his penis. I declined several times, and eventually he gave up and we had a good and meaningful conversation, probably about the internets mostly.

In the following months I messaged him a few times about his videos, one about circumcision from what I remember, and when he was getting a lot of hate about his girlfriend being "ugly." He was feeling kind of down, so I told him that his girlfriend was beautiful and that it was good to see him happy with someone. "Thanks, it means a lot to me," is all he said. He never wrote very much, but I thought he was a nice person, and worth dropping a line to every now and then.

The last time we spoke, he had mentioned in his videos that he was working on some kind of autobiography, I guess because he said that his story is worth reading, and he used to fancy himself a writer back in the day. I let him know that I am also a writer, published author, and that I've helped a few friends with their manuscripts and they've helped me with mine, and that I would love to take a look at what he had if he wanted some feedback. I do this for any of my online buddies who are taking a crack at writing, and Roger was no exception. He told me no, that it was too emotional, too deep to share, and I told him that those kind of stories are often the best stories, but he wrote back saying quite bluntly that it was TOO PERSONAL, which I understood as "GTFO I'm not giving you my shit to read." I didn't respond, I just let it go.

So our friendship dwindled, but I never unsubscribed. When he went all emo and made the FailedVlogger channel, I subscribed. I watched every one of his videos, listening to him calling some other Youtuber out on their bullshit, or being interrupted 100 times from the CB radio at his work while trying to make a video. I made one video response to him, which isn't really saying much, but I was never really big into the video making thing anyway, I'm still not.

Then came the day that the guy actually went and subscribed to me. That was awesome, because my Youtube channel has all of like 15 subscribers since none of the videos really make sense unless you are a Davidsdoll.com reader, and he was one of them. Unfortunately, he subscribed after I had already left Youtube to go to Lulu, but it's the thought that counts.

A few weeks ago, I checked my subscriptions to see if maybe I had been just missing his videos when he added them, because I hadn't seen a Dispatcher video in a long long while. Turns out, all three of his channels were wiped clean. He had removed every one of his videos. I still didn't unsubscribe, I figure he'd be back whenever he was over his funk. Then this morning I saw Heatherface's video, which was a reply to Battim's video, and I found out that Roger would not be coming back to Youtube, because he's really gone now.

So this is weird, because I've never lost an online friend before. I think that we are all still trying to get used to what "online friend" means to be honest. What does it mean that you've added me as a Myspace friend? Are we real friends, or what's the deal? You read my blog, but are we friends? We email back and fourth, you leave comments, but are we friends? I consider my readers that I interact with to be my friends, definitely. This is why I've met a few of you without hesitation, because I would like to know you better. Even Liz, who doesn't have a blog herself, and who seldom comments, is someone who I was excited to meet.

This might sound a little stupid, and I may very well be made fun of for this, but I think about my internet friends a lot. I talk to David about something I read on a blog or something I saw on a video like how most people would talk about something that happened at work, or at the very least something seen on television. I get phone calls from people, and if those phone calls stop I do my best to find out why. And I post my phone number because I know that the people who call it are worth talking to. If I think that there is some kind of discomfort happening between me and another blogger, I either shoot them an email and determine that it was a misunderstanding, or I just label it as "confirmed for brawl." People, assholes mostly, would tell me to get a life, but I don't understand the sentiment behind that. It's clear that I have a life, I just really like my online friends. I've said before, it isn't like the chatrooms on AOL, this is people connecting through diaries and journals, sharing intimate and not so intimate details of themselves. It's way different.

Just like in real life, sometimes online friends get offended by something that I wrote about, or they'll simply tell me that they no longer want my friendship. After that, I just call it quits. I know that they still read my blog based on my Statcounter (and by the way I'm not really out and out tracking anyone, I get too many hits to be able to isolate and analyze every visit to know who it is and why they were here,) but I prefer just to end it. Roger and I were on good terms, and I missed the fellah when he left the internets, and when I heard the news, man. That spot on my forehead, right where my hairline starts and about an inch below, it tingled. I get that whenever I learn that someone that I cared about or at least knew well died.

And with Roger, I mean, you cant say that you didn't know that it was coming when you watched his vids. He smoked, he was extremely overweight, and he didn't give a shit. In fact, he laughed at anyone who said anything about that stuff, because he knew. He was a happy guy, regardless of his weight and such, he was way more than just a fat smoking tow truck dispatcher. It's like when Steve Irwin died. It was such a shock, but then again, the man's job was molesting snakes and crocodiles, what did you think was going to happen? Freak sting ray accident aside, the point is that it really seemed so sudden and unexpected because it was. Who knew that Roger would die at 31, just a few months after going from one of the top Youtubers to suddenly stop posting vids? Who actually thought that he was on the verge of death like that, right now?

You cant say that you didn't see it coming, but wow, it came, and the Boring Dispatcher is gone.

It's a weird feeling.

And I am never ever going to delete the email from him containing the attachment of a picture of his penis that still sits somewhere in my old Yahoo mailbox.

As Roger would say, "I gotta go."

Scientology's Closed Due To RAIDS

February 10th was the day of the big Scientology raid. Normally I try not to blog on a whole lot of the worldly goings on, and stick to knitting and grocery shopping and the results from those endeavors, but today I am going to discuss the raids.

I've spoken out a few times over my nearly three years of blogging against Scientology before on the barley formula that they prepare for the babies, which is pretty much malnutrition and infant botulism in a bottle , but you know, Hubbard said it was ok so nobody questions it. Nobody in Scientology anyway. My personal issues with Scientology are mostly child related. My reader base is mostly made up of women and mothers, or at least people who will cringe when I tell you that Scientologist's punish babies in their cribs by making them do pushups and pullups if they've done something wrong. Yeah, they punish babies in their cribs. Tax exempt child abuse is what it is. Most if not all of you know that I am against organized religion, but that's the thing here. Scientology is not a religion, and anyone who thinks that it is needs to see a psychologist immediately!

Today, a group of hackers on steroids known as Anonymous protested at the Scientology compounds, churches, and any other buildings they own in great numbers. You may have seen Anonymous "exposed" by FOX news a while back, about how they blow up yellow vans and corrupt LOL by making it into LULZ. Anonymous probably hacked your Myspace and changed your orientation to gay, they probably made fun of your poorly drawn anime on your devianTART page, left negative comments on your LiveJournal, corrupted your LOL, and possibly ordered a ton of pizza to your house.

But now they are doing something productive with their skills and numbers, they are going to attempt to bring down Scientology in their very first IRL raid. And from all of the reports, it was full of epic win. I think the funniest part is that the "Scifags" were feeding false news stories to the press about the protests getting violent.

From Encyclopedia Dramatica:

The Church has been caught feeding news sites with false stories about the Anonymous Protests turning Violent. Within minutes of the three stories being discovered regarding the Australian cities Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, it was found that they were simply copied images from a 2005 Haliburton Protest in Houston TX. Indymedia took all the stories down within the hour, but NOT before the Cult of Scientology's Black PR Campaign against Anonymous had been archived.

Co$: You Fail... HARD! ... LULZ!!!

Was I there? Am I Anonymous? Well, let me ask you this, do you think that I was? Do I strike you as the kind of person who would protest/raid a corrupt organization? Could you imagine me doing that? Assuming that you've been reading my blog for a good amount of time, do you think I was there?

Ill let you come to your own conclusions, and leave it at that. K? K.

The point of the raids was to show the world, not only what the CoS is doing behind closed doors, but also to show the world that the young people are not just fapping to fetish vids on Youtube, and that just maybe they can be the ones to put an end to the Scientology shit since nobody else has. Scientologists go after anyone who attacks them, but who are they going to go after when their enemy is Anonymous?

I would love to see the demise of Scientology, and not because they make you pay to be a part of the religion, people can make decisions about what to spend their money on, whether it's a Nigerian ambassador who needs to borrow your bank account to transfer some funds, or to hear the Xenu story. My beef is with the way that they treat children, and how they are able to get away with it because they consider it to be a part of their religious practice.

Here are some bullet points to brief yourself on.

• Scientologist's are encouraged not to treat sick children with conventional medication, and not to comfort and nurture children.
• They have children doing physical work, shoveling gravel, laying carpet, mostly clerical work sometimes 40 to 60 hours a week
• Teachers don't have college degrees. They are trained in Scientology technology. They don't explain. They don't help. If some child doesn't understand, it's because they don't understand a particular word, so kids are constantly being told to just look up a word.
• Children raised in Scientology are often given only minimal basic education, but rather they are fed propaganda and pseudo-science.
• A child who falls and hurts himself is taken to the place where he was hurt and the injury is pressed against the object that caused it. It is believed the pain can be made to flow back into the object.
• Some parents who left Scientology also report they neglected their children because they were kept too busy with church programs, instruction and work.
• Scientologist's are not allowed to break a child's fever with medication, instead they must make the child lay still in order to bring the fever down, and if this doesn't work it's because you didn't do it right or you didn't do it enough.
• Parents in Scientology often have little time to grocery shop and are so concerned with "climbing the bridge to their personal freedom" that the children have little to no food at most times.

For me, it isn't about the money that they have to spend to learn about the alien that blew them up in a volcano, or the creepiness of Tom Cruise's ranting, or how boring science fiction is to me as a whole, it's about the fact that there are parents out there who are being taught that it is ok to neglect and abuse your child for the sake of "personal freedom." If you want personal freedom, don't have kids. That is how it is done.

Today, Anonymous turned out in large numbers in order to prove a point, and it was well taken. Authorities were friendly if not helpful in most cases, Scientologists were too scared to do anything for the most part, and the fact that the CoS put out fake news stories just shows you that the raid worked, it showed you what lengths they will go to. In other words, they LIE. About EVERYTHING.

Beware the ides of March.

The Continuing Saga Of Staring Girl

Here I was thinking that maybe she had been fired, possibly for staring at people. "Maybe it wasn't just me," I thought to myself. "Maybe she stared so much that she thoroughly wigged out a good number of the customers, and she's gone."

"David," I say, "Has she been in the parking lot at all?"

"Not for a few weeks," he told me. "I think she's gone."

It sure seemed that way, as I myself hadn't seen her in about a month. I know that it has been suggested that "Staring Girl did Civic," but I don't think she did. We actually think we know who stole my car, in fact we are 90% sure of who it was, but there isn't anything we can really do about it since we have no proof, other than the fact that David has delivered pizza to the people in the past, and not only are they smack dab in the middle of my apartment and the three miles up the road where the car was found but they also happen to have quite a few random car parts laying around. Not like redneck car parts like bumpers and wheels, but things like air intake things and fuel injection things. The kind of stuff that was stripped from our car. But what can we do?

I went to the store yesterday, and I bought stuff for lamb-burgers, Liz's lambchops that she made that were so good, and organic chili. David called me from the parking lot saying that he was starving, and asked me to bring him some nom-noms. "Chicken from the deli," I thought, because that cheep assed fried chicken that Stater's sells is full of win.

So after I finish up in the produce section, thus ending the grocery shopping trip, I head over to the deli. There was a line. There's always a line, and it's always old people griping about needing their ham cut paper thin. And that is when Staring Girl came out of nowhere, eased in front of me, and started cleaning the windows of the deli case. There was something very suspicious about this because she was still wearing the green reflector vest that you're supposed to wear when you are out in the parking lot getting carts. It was like she saw me through the open door and grabbed the nearest bottle of Windex so she could come over and mess with me. And that's not even in her job description, the deli people clean their own cases.

She wasn't staring, but rather she was in front of me almost saying "Look at me! Look at my giant butt, just LOOK AT IT, YOU!"

No, Staring Girl, I will not play your game anymore. I have the right not to be on the receiving end of your creepy eyeball assaults, and I will use that right.

I know that you all want me to turn the tables on her, stare her down into submission or just bop her on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and shout "NO!" at her like the unruly dog that she is. Or maybe just go Scientology on her ass and be all "Do you exist? What are your crimes?" Instead, I decided to back out of the situation, just to know that Imo not the crazy one here. Foregoing the chicken, I backed up my cart and headed for the checkout stand.

I had won, I had defeated her by - wait! She's not following me over here IS SHE? Oh god, she really IS out to mess with me!

I get in the line with the checker girl who I know likes to talk a lot, but not about the kids, just to me. This way I can focus my attention on the conversation and not on the holes that are being burned into my skull by Staring Girl's laser eyes. Yeah, she has laser eyes now, pretty sure. Anyway, she bags groceries at a check stand a few over to the left, and I'm next in line. I wont look at her, but I can see her through what is left of my peripheral vision. If I could only read her name tag, but alas, she doesn't have her regular Stater's issued tag, she has a cutsie little heart with her name written in puff paint and I cant read it because it's too darn cute, don't you hate that? When you cant read a font because it's TOO cute?

I only want her name because my plan is to grow some balls and just flat out say "Hi (Staring Girl!) How are you today?" or somehow communicate with her. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe she's the nicest girl in the world and she volunteers to rock little orphan babies to sleep when she's not working. Either way, she will either answer me properly if she is normal, shy away if she is creepy, or say "Fine Jessie, how are YOU?" if she's really really creepy.

Just as the checker starts ringing up my stuff, I see her coming my way, like she's going to handle my celery stalk with her big angry man hands, but suddenly a bag boy pops in from the right and asks me if I want paper or plastic.

Savior isn't the right word, but it's the first word to come to mind.

But now I KNOW that she's trying to mess with me or get my attention because she looked kinda pissed when he showed up, and she padded off all mad. And the whole time this is going on she's wearing that vest, that's the thing. She starts to head back outside when the manager stopped her to scold her for not being out on lot.

So what the hell is going on? I don't know, but while she was outside she was looking for the Civic, I just know it. I'm hoping to avoid her finding out about the Oatmealbeal, though it's kinda hard to miss, what with it being hooker-lipstick-red and all.

I could shop at the other Staters, but it's a few miles away and this one is on my block. And I shouldn't have to do that anyway. I must get to the bottom of this, find out why she not only stares, but is now actually following me, for reals now. And it's not all that funny anymore.

But like with the people who probably stole my car but we have no real proof of it, what can I do?

The Kid Has Outsmarted Us

Did you know that 99% or more of child prodigies don't succumb to their potential?

The word "prodigy" did not come up in the meeting but it did come up during a lot of Googling and it was used a lot in the Wiki articles.

This is a chart that I got from a Wiki about IQ or something. I have edited it to show you where David, Ty and I land. I have an IQ of 117, though that score is a few years old. As you can see, I'm only slightly above average. David is a 122, which is well over average.

And then there is Ty, who falls in the "superior" range at 132.

He clearly takes it to a howl-notha-levowl.

One of the main reasons that these smart kids end up failing classes later in life is because they get bored. Many parents and schools agree that when a kid like Ty comes along, you should challenge them further by moving them up a few grades. Well, let's look at David for example, who was also remarkably smart at Ty's age. I think I've mentioned before that even though he was able to complete the upper grade work, socially he was a little screwed up, because he was small and picked on for being a "baby."

Kids are assholes, we know that.

The thing is, he quickly learned that he had to grow up if he was going to survive the elementary playground, which I believe is a direct correlation to his maturity level today. I mean, after all I am four years older than he is, he was never really interested in the girls who were his own age. And while his peers are inviting him to parties and knocking up multiple girlfriends and asking him to join in the fun and orgies, he's just not interested, because he feels that he's above all of that, not because he's cocky, but just because it doesn't interest him to get into trouble with that stuff. Most of his friends today are aged 30 and up, and it's usually several months or even years before they find out how old he really is.

So David, in high school, failed quite a few courses. Like PE, which is a bullshit class anyway. The one thing that he really excelled in was music, and because it challenged him it kept his interest. David can read and perform a piece of music almost flawlessly, but on the other side of the spectrum, can David improvise a solo or even think about playing jazz music? No. David severely lacks creativity, BUT he is a critical thinker and problem solver. Notes on a page are easily translated for him, but without the notes, he's just a fat kid with pimples holding a tuba going "huh...huh huh...huh..."

I knew another kid like David, he was three years younger than me, one grade behind me, and yet he was in my math classes in high school, and eventually he just passed my ass right up. This kid could pick up any musical instrument and learn it overnight. Yeah, I lent him my trombone once, fucker ended up playing better than me and taking my spot in 2nd chair. And then laughing about it like a little cunt. Scott was smart like a whip but he was a real asshole, a real anal retentive, boring, mean, rock without a personality who I was madly in love with for like six or seven years.

I don't know if that says more about him or about me.

Anyway, so from what I've read, the problem with these smart kids is that they can easily be distracted and take their eyes off the prize so to speak. David, socially, fucked. Scott, socially, fucked. But these were both kids who were put in school with other kids as opposed to being homeschooled, basically, they were made to learn to deal with other humans. Now did it affect them academically? David yes, Scott no. Scott was actually very popular, I never saw anyone pick on him, and now he's like getting a degree in music or something. David on the other hand had no interest whatsoever in college. Ok, but David did have that little interruption when he was 15, and for that some might want to blame that because if he hadn't of had to take care of a baby he might have gone to college. Let me tell you, David was damaged when I met him. I've known him for six years, and been with him for five, and I know that if he hadn't of become a teenage father, he'd of either dropped out of school, gotten into drugs really bad, or maybe even killed himself. Or all three. He was actually fairly suicidal before we dated, and I mean, what 14 year old isn't these days, right? What with the cutting and the Fallout Boy music and shit, but David was just more or less kind of done. Maybe it was hormone driven, as it usually is at that age, but speaking as the person who knows him best at this point in his life, Id say that he was going to quit IRL forever because he was bored. The only real reason that he went to school and even applied himself was because of music, which was undoubtedly his saving grace.

So, now I've got a smart kid on my hands, and I realize that this could go either way. It's a tremendous responsibility from what I've read on. We actually have a very prodigy friendly district according to the people I talked to. We even have a special school for students who "aren't right for the big schools," where they basically just turn in their work to a teacher once a week. They made it clear that it is NOT homeschool, it is through the district. It is also for kids who have medical problems that would make it hard for them to attend the big schools.

I was told that as of right now our goal is to try to get Ty to interact with his peers, which he does not like to do because they aren't interesting enough. Not only is he not part of the crowd, but he's significantly ahead of the crowd. Some districts have a policy to skip them ahead, and others think that the kids will level out as they get older. Beaumont apparently tries to cater to the child's needs, which is excellent and the right way to go in my opinion. They try to keep these smart ones in their natural environment and just sort of boost them up a little to keep them from falling behind. Because when these kids fall behind, they fall way WAY behind, and once they've lost their motivation it is hard to get them back on track. Miss Penny is actually catering to him a lot, by asking him how much time he needs to finish something, little things like that.

Then there's the question of what is more important, smarts or popularity? And which will Ty decide is more important, and how much can David and I influence his choice, if at all?

However, should it turn out that Ty just does not develop socially, probably wont develop socially, and has no real social interests, the Performance school might be right for him. I do want him to become socialized, and I think that Kindergarten will be really interesting for him. Developing social skills is really important, and that is one of the disadvantages of kids who are raised at home. But, you know, we can only really wait and see how this is going to turn out.

It IS really weird that the smartest person in this house right now is 4 years old though, you have no idea.

132. 132? 132!!!

I went to the meeting today with the school speech therapists, the head of the district's special education department, and the school psychologist to find out the results of Ty's evaluation. I never blogged about the first meeting because I was without a computer at the time, but essentially they tested a number of things, including his speech, his emotional and physical development, and his behavior. If you are new here, first of all, LURK MOAR, and second, all of this came about because Ty's teacher was concerned that Ty was possibly autistic, and at the very least had noticeable speech problems.

Here I have the official results of the assessment and what they mean, and I am going to post a good part of it here for a few reasons. One, I'm a blogger and I have to occasionally update you on the children's, possibly because you are family or you are just a random stranger who thinks we are neato. Two, it is actually pretty interesting, and it will be a little long but it probably wont be boring. And three, I know that there are parents out there who are refusing to let the school step in to evaluate your kid, because you are afraid that they'll say that the kid is handicapped (or a "retard") or you are a proud parent who doesn't want to recognize that your beautiful baby is possibly defective. Please understand something if you are part of that third group, the system has checks and balances set up so that the big ol' scary gubment cant just be givin' pills to yo baby. You have to consent to EVERYTHING they do, furthermore even if they do "diagnose" your child with something, it has to be seconded by a neurologist. I know this is true in my district and probably all of California, but correct me if I am wrong or if you live in a different state and there are different procedures there. The point is, get things checked out, because you wont know the outcome until you do it, and if your child does need help, you can get it early enough and not send him or her into adulthood with issues that could have been easily identified and worked on earlier in life.

Ok, so without further delay, this is the official assessment.

REASON FOR EVALUATION: Ty was referred for assessment by the Student Study Team at Blah Blah State Preschool. The SST noted weak performance in speech, group instruction, difficulty following conversations, difficulty with transitions, fixation tendencies, and staring off.

PARENT INTERVIEW: On 1/17/08 Ty's mother Jessie stated that Ty squeals in excitement but does not make noises out of context. Ty's mother indicated that he enjoys robots and machines. He frequently asks how or why things work. Ty enjoys the following activities with his family: going to the park, riding bikes with dad, and playing cars with his 2 year old brother. Mom indicated that he appears to learn better through kinesthetic movements. Ty's mother thinks that he may me having the most difficulty in class with social interactions. She also reported that he has difficulty cleaning up at school and at home. He lies on the floor and says that he is hungry or thirsty. She stated that she has never seen him mad. Ty's mother describes him as a good big brother. Mom indicated that Ty loves school and likes to learn. It was also reported that they eat very healthy foods at home and they do not watch television. Mom stated that he does not like stickers on his skin. She also indicated that he was scared to go into other peoples bathrooms with the door closed, except at stores like Target. He is also afraid of the dark. It was reported that Ty has had limited interactions with other children until he started school. The majority of Ty's socialization with his peers occurs within the school day.

DEVELOPMENTAL PROFILE: The IQ equivalence as indicated by this assessment is 132 which falls in the superior range.

ACADEMIC: Ty identifies and labels all of the letters in the alphabet. He understands the correlation between the letter and sound. Ty enjoys books and attends to the story to its completion. Ty understands that the pictures in the story support the text. He recognizes his name in print and is able to write it independently without any visual clues. He is beginning to sound out words and beginning to use CVC words. He can draw a circle and a triangle when asked without any visual cues. He is able to copy a cross, an X and a horizontal and vertical line. Ty completes puzzles without frames, can count 1-20 with one to one correspondence to 14, he identifies and labels colors and he demonstrates the understanding on the concepts "one" and "all."

FINE AND GROSS MOTOR: Ty holds the pencil with his right hand and all five fingers. The pencil is almost at a 90 degree angle. Ty used his shoulder and arm to write. Ty was able to cut on a straight line. When Ty picked up the scissors and he held them upside down with the paper up against his body. He readjusted and stabilized the paper with his left hand while he cut with his right hand. Ty had difficulty cutting out a circle the size of a dollar coin.

SOCIAL/EMOTIONAL/ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR

The preschool teacher reported that Ty has difficulty transitioning within the classroom environment, difficulty with group instruction, has fixation tendencies, and stares off at times.

GILLIAM AUTISM RATING SCALE SECOND EDITION (GARS-2): The GARS-2 is a questionnaire completed by Ty's mother and preschool teacher.

Ok and then it shows a chart based on mine and Penny's scores, and according to my answers Ty's probability of autism was "possibly" and Penny's was "very likely."

Ty was observed laughing inappropriately in the assessment environment during the assessment. He became fixated on a ceiling tile that was not positioned correctly and continued to laugh throughout the assessment. Ty was observed in the classroom on 2/5/08. There were 3 stations and some students were working with the teacher. As they completed the task, they were able to play until called to do another group task. Ty was by himself talking outloud about the fish tank. When he realized that no one was attending to what he was saying, he walked over to Miss Penny and said "look here." Miss Penny had to turn around to see what he was talking about. Then he went to Miss Dime's group and said "what's this?" Ty was observed playing independently and appropriately with the toys going from one activity to another. He was observed engaging the teacher but not the other students.

BEHAVIORAL OBSERVATION: Ty came to the testing session with his mother, and demonstrated very active behavior through the entire testing session. When asked test questions, he would often answer the question as well as begin to talk about other things not associated with the stimulus items. Ty was compliant with the test administrators throughout the testing session and only needed minimal assistance to return to the task.

Regarding Ty's receptive language skills he is presented with a standard score of 98 (average is 85-115) revealing no delay in comprehension skills for his age. Ty understands concepts such as big, small, and even more elaborate concepts such as "a small black dog" or "the longest nose."

Regarding his expressive language skills, he is presented with a standard score of 101 also revealing no delay in expressive language for his age. Ty produces 4-5 word sentences consistently, and is able to ask questions appropriately. He can express his needs and wants. Ty comments on his environment. During the assessment, Ty observed that a ceiling light was broken and continued to comment and laugh because of this. Ty will occasionally demonstrate incorrect grammatical structure but nothing of significance. Ty has difficulty with topic maintenance. He tends to play alone and demonstrates limited interaction with his peers. His teacher said that his overall interaction and use of language in the classroom has improved since he started school approximately 5 months ago.

Some examples of Ty's expressive utterances are as follows:

"But why is the light broken?"

"Look! Those are my friends!"

"I'm not afraid of spiders anymore."

"My mom's wearing different ones, black ones!"

"Where's the thing to hang my coat at?"

"It cant work."

Regarding Ty's articulation skills at the word level, he is presented with a raw score of 10 errors and a standard score of 109 (average is 85-115) revealing age appropriate articulation skills. The intelligibility of Ty's speech decreases when he speaks quickly but overall his speech is intelligible to family and unfamiliar listeners.

IMPRESSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS: Ty is a 4 year 5 month old male who demonstrates a superior IQ equivalence of 132. He also presents age appropriate receptive and expressive language skills, which do not affect his overall intelligibility. He occasionally demonstrates decreased grammatical structure and demonstrates difficulty with topic maintenance. He also tends to play by himself and demonstrates limited interaction with peers. It was reported that Ty has limited interaction with peers outside of school and has only participated in a classroom setting for the past 5 months. Teacher has reported that his skills are continuing to improve. Based on assessment results and information provided by parent/ teacher, Ty is not eligible for speech and language services at this time. Ty was rated as possible to very likely on the autism questioner by teacher and parent. Ty's development as reported by parent, is not consistent with autism at this time. The following is recommended:

1. Continued participation in regular preschool for correct peer models and social interaction.

2. Parent and teacher to encourage Ty to remain on topic. Assist when needed with social exchange during peers.

Ok, so basically he's an average on his speech, but when it comes to academics he is actually way above average. Verbally I was told that "Ty is very, very, very bright, and he probably has so much stuff going on in his head at once that his mouth cant keep up. This explains why he sometimes talks about random off subject things. Ty assumes that we all know what he is thinking. He does not interact with his peers well most likely because he isn't interested in what they are doing, he wants more of a challenge, and he is generally uninterested in what they have to say because he is intellectually above them."

It was recommended to me verbally as well that Ty do some social interaction outside of school, such as sports teams, Boy Scouts, and the like. I know for sure that Ty is not a sports fan, just like his dad, but they did recommend Karate. There isn't a whole lot of social interaction in Karate, but it is group instruction. I'm also thinking craft classes, maybe a knitting class if I can get him into one, swimming lessons this summer, and maybe even music if we can find some kind of group setting, since lessons aren't all that socially interactive.

So there you have it, he's not autistic, he's just too smart for his own good. My kid is a genius.

Condiments Aren't Free

Speaking of douchbaggery, is it just us or does Wolfgang Puck look like a complete nut hole on this box of chicken stock? And David, he doesn't quite have the goofy look down, but he certainly looks equally as dumb as Mr. Puck, Mr. "Volfgang" Puck.

David had the night off last night so we had a bread dipping party on the coffee table and worked together on the notes for my new manuscript. Yeah, I don't stop. Even though the other one isn't even going to be published until May, I pretty much write a book every time you poop. I'm not ready to talk about this one yet, other than it is first person and it is told from the point of view of a guy. I need David's help because the character is a little bit of him, a little bit of me, a little bit of my ex boyfriends, and mostly one of his recycle customers who digs through park trash to find bottles and cans, but who is also a germophobe.

He pulls out a piece of yellow legal pad paper and I can see that there are notes on it.

"So this guy, one of the words he says is 'killer,' which is his word for 'excellent, cool, bitchin.' He says 'nice' with great emphasis, like he says it instead of saying 'awesome.' Ok, and 'rally it!'" We both laugh at this. "Rally it means that he's going to go gather recyclables in a certain area, like I'm gunna go rally the sports park' or I'm going to go rally the middle school.' He also says 'sweet' and 'fuck,' and the most random and interesting conversation we had today was about condiments."

"Condiments?"

"Condiments arent free, he says. I don't know how we got on the subject but he reached into his pocket and pulled out a fistful of ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard and hot sauce packets from fast food joints. He says he gets a pound of the stuff a day, and that it's big bucks, because buying that amount of condiments at the store would easily be $5. Then he put them back into his pocket, and I thought it was weird that he kept them in his pants pocket and not in his backpack."

"I wonder what his fridge looks like at home..."

"He probably just keeps them in his pocket all the time and uses them."

I guess you could say that David is like my muse. I don't get a whole lot of people interaction, but that's all he does all day. He will meet a person, or someone will do something random, and he will make a note of it and tell me to "put it in the database." The database was actually partially his idea as well. It is simply a series of Google Docs that are basically just formal versions of his notes that he takes for me. For example, I have a whole folder in my database dedicated to "character prompts," this is the one that he helps out with the most. Like with this last fellah that I wrote about, I have a short blurb about the person, a funny thing that they did and notes on some of their mannerisms. I have a short bio of the gal who works at the porno store in Redlands who explained "the arcade" to me, and how she sometimes feels like saying to the guys who visit it, "No, you cant go back there and whack off," because she has to clean up the mess. And I wrote about her industrial sized bottle of Windex and giant roll of paper towels. I write about these things so that when I need a character, I can just pull one up from the database and use it. The same goes for weird news stories, places I've been, or random how-to's that I find amusing. This is very similar to what my favorite author, Chuck Palahniuk, does for organization. It's rather helpful, and so is blogging. I had to rely entirely on my blog and memory for Golden Dawn, fictionalizing everything and making changes along the way.

We share a loaf of French bread, I mostly stick to my organic olive oil and he mostly sticks to the leftover juice from that lamb Liz cooked. I like the sauce and all but that shit is potent. If you put too much on the bread it will fuck your shit up.

David and I, we talk, and it is great. He helps me write out my map for the book, and he gives me ideas, helping me come up with a resolution to the conflict. Never once has he thought that my idea of being an author was farfetched or cockamamie, he believes in it, sort of like how I believe in his dream to go into law enforcement, and I kick him out of bed at dawn four days a week so he can go run. He cant help me word things much, or write anything because he doesn't have that kind of mind, but that's ok because I cant get up at dawn and eat oatmeal with him before he goes out and jogs. We are there with each other in spirit.

We are reading the same book series right now, you know, those dirty Anne Rice books. I'm on book two and he's on book three, and we are both really disappointed. They are horribly written, there are very simple errors throughout the book ("he threw her on the bad" instead of on the "bed") and for whatever reason as David is telling me that the rough draft that I have of my first three chapters needs more descriptive words, one of Rice's "gems" pops into my mind. "His eyebrows were knit in worry."

Out loud, I say without previously mentioning the poorly written sentence, or even being on the topic of the books at all at the time, "Anne Rice is a fucking retard." Then I snicker and accidentally blow snot out of my nose, and I say "sorry" as I grab a paper towel.

David, upon seeing this, spits Dr Pepper out of his mouth and nose. Upon seeing that I started choking on the ball of bread that I had in my mouth. Then David farted.

All that was left was for me to walk over to him and jam my finger down my throat to make myself barf all over him. I didn't do that, but it would have completed the sequence.

After we cleaned ourselves up, he asked me about what my ideas were for settings, and I pulled up my notes on 7th Street Park.

That's how things get done around here.

Bye Bye Latchkey Brats, HA HA HA!

Here's an interesting little article that I got from my Press Enterprise newsfeed this morning.

February 5, 2008

Beaumont to tackle loitering and truancy tonight

BEAUMONT -- The Beaumont City Council is scheduled to consider two ordinances that would address daytime loitering and truancy when it meets at 6 p.m. tonight.

One ordinance would make daytime loitering and truancy illegal for any juvenile enrolled full-time in school. Some exceptions would apply, such as if a child is home-schooled. Juveniles who violate the ordinance would be fined more than $300 or ordered to do community service.

The ordinance would make it unlawful for a juvenile's parent or guardian to knowingly permit or allow the child to violate the law. Parents and guardians found to be in violation of this ordinance can be fined more than $1,000 and/or imprisoned in county jail for a maximum of three months.

A second proposed ordinance would address repeat curfew and daytime loitering violators. The Beaumont Police Department has proposed both ordinances.

The council will meet at the Beaumont Civic Center, 550 E. 6th St., Room 5.

If there is one thing that Beaumont has a lot of, besides wind and dust, it's unsupervised teens. In the month of January alone I had mentioned punk assed kids loitering at the grocery store, a group of kids that were seen running from a car that they had stolen and crashed into a wall, and bratty little groups of hooligans who hoard the public library computers so they can check their Myspaces. Ok, so I have a bit of a preoccupation with picking on teenagers because I don't particularly care for them, but I think anyone who has ever been to Beaumont will agree that it is a problem.

The issue possibly stems from the way the economy is in this town. On one hand, you have a lot of working poor families where the parents are constantly out working in order to make ends meet. On the other hand, you have a lot of working rich families where the parents are constantly out working in order to dig themselves out of their tremendous debt that they got themselves into by buying the overpriced housing and unnecessary vehicles. This creates a lot of "latchkey kids," which we will research using the Wikipedia today, simply because I'm not trying to be lulzy here, because unsupervised children is serious business.

Latchkey kid or latchkey child refers to a child who returns from school to an empty home because his or her parents are away at work, or a child who is often left at home with little or no parental supervision.

In the United States, a 2002 Census survey reported 5.8 million (15%) of all humans between the ages of five and fourteen years living with a mother care for themselves an average of 6.3 hours per week and 65% of those children spent between 2-9 hours home alone. White non-Hispanic children are more likely to be left home alone than children of other races.

The effects of being a latchkey child differ with age. Loneliness, boredom and fear are most common for those younger than 10 years of age. In the early teens, there is a greater susceptibility to peer pressure resulting in alcohol abuse, smoking and sexual experimentation.

Socioeconomic status and length of time left alone can bring forth other negative effects. In one study, middle school students left home alone for more than three hours a day reported higher levels of behavioral problems, higher rates of depression and lower levels of self-esteem than other students.

Now pay attention to this part, because it applies to YOU.

The legality of the latchkey children's "alone time" varies with country, state and local area. In the United States, state and local laws typically do not specify any particular age under 18 when a child can be legally left without supervision. As a result, parents are often left without clear guidance as to when children may be allowed to remain at home without supervision. Parents can be held accountable by child welfare organizations or law enforcement if children come to harm while left without supervision if, in the opinion of the agency, the children's age or other considerations made such a choice inappropriate.

So there are a lot of kids in my town who are on their own for the most part. My town also has a gang problem that nobody wants to acknowledge because they don't want to scare off the businesses. I mentioned a while back that people these days don't teach their kids the basic rules of society, like how to properly use a crosswalk without impeding traffic. A perfect example of this would be something that happened when I was driving around with Liz from Seattle. I was turning from 6th street to Beaumont Avenue, and it was a red light BUT the right turn lane had a green arrow. I slowed, but planned to roll it because I legally could, but I ended up having to hit the brakes because Dumbass McGee (approx age 15-17) decided to jaywalk. He did not operate the crosswalk button in any way, he simply stepped off the curb, and ran straight into my car. After a moment of evaluating the situation, and being positive that I did not him, that HE HIT ME, the situation was of course found to be very lulzy.

What parents don't seem to realize, from my observation anyway, is that your young adult might be able to take care of themselves while you're at work better if you taught them the basics! Use crosswalks, don't fuck around in the grocery store, and if you plan to paint your face up and put contacts in your eyes that make you look like you have little X's in them instead of pupils, don't say "what in the fuck are you staring at" when people look at you. You are clearly asking for it, so you have no defense whatsoever if I make you uneasy by gawking, or tearing your shit apart on the internet. I'm all for artistic expression, but honestly, if you cant take the stares, stay out of daylight. That's why vampires made up that law anyway, you know.

As for the fines they plan to charge for daytime loitering and truancy, I think that it's a great idea and all, but there is no way that they'll enforce it. Remember that I said that most of these parents are not watching their kids because they need money, either to survive or to buy more stuff. How many of them really have $300-$1,000 that they can just let go of simply because their kid was at the Starbucks for too long without an adult? But I do love that the parents are being held responsible, in that their punishment for knowingly allowing their kids to loiter is to pay a grand AND/OR go to jail for three months. It is absolutely unacceptable to push the blame entirely on the kid if you aren't doing a damn thing to correct their behavior!

Bottom line, Id like to see this actually turn into something productive, but I don't think it will. For as long as parents try to pass the buck on the responsibility thing and assume that 13 year olds can raise themselves, nothing will get accomplished.

The Rather Unfortunate Regret Of Knowing Mr. DB

A douche bag: everyone knows one.

Not the device that you insert into slot A, but the personality type. If you are unfamiliar, consulting the Encyclopedia Dramatica will tell you that:

A complete douchebag is someone who pisses you off. Most of the time it's like a sixth sense, you can't put your finger on it, but you just have the feeling that this person just pisses the fuck out of you for no reason. Although, there are douchebags that piss you off and you definitely know why, like Jack Thompson, Tom Cruise, or Your Mom.

There are many ways for someone to be classified as a douchebag, but the main qualities of one are: very stubborn, complains excessively, has a very asinine goal, extravagant, and knows he/she is right and you are wrong. They often have a short temper, but they usually are pussies and run to solitude.

(Dont click those links unless you are prepared. You've been warned.) This is what it is like to work with a guy named BB, who David and I now call DB, short for Douche Bag. His douchification most resembles the stubborn, extravagant, asinine, "I'm right, you're wrong" type.

For example, when his car broke down a while back, he bragged out loud that it wasn't a problem because hey, he can just go buy another one, right? I mean, who CAN'T just go buy another car? Seriously.

Another example would be that he is very proud that "his old lady" gets whatever she wants, when she wants it. This is because he takes her Disability checks and uses them for bills and what not, and turns over his tips and pizza boy paychecks to her in return. It's not like the Real Housewives of Orange County who buy weekly Jaguars and tennis bracelets, it's more like she gets to go to Walmart to buy new picture frames when she gets bored, because I know EXACTLY how much this guy makes as a driver, and there is a reason that it is David's second and not his ONLY job.

And to explain how smrt he is, when David went back to work with his broken collar bone, DB's advice to him was, "There's this thing out, and it's like a metal rod, and what they do is they put it like in your collar bone, right? And like what happens is the bone forms around it, so it's like when it heals, you're like three times stronger because you have this metal rod in you. Just go get that done!"

Yeeeeeeah.

Well today, I met DB. After dropping Ty off at school, we drove over to the pizza place so David could look at the schedule. Seconds after we parked, DB pulled in and parked next to us. While David went in, I stayed in the car, and DB stayed in his. I found it rather odd. Moments later, David came out and DB got out of the car. Here is a 40 something pizza driver who sits at the bottom of the driver seniority simply because he's a douche and everyone knows it, walking like he's listening to rap music up to David. He's got a Bluetooth headset, and he mysteriously says "I'll call you back, baby," out loud to seemingly no one. David says that the guy has his old lady sitting on the phone overhearing his conversations and everything he does while he's out of the house pretty much the whole time he's working.

"Yo," I hear him say to David. "Your new ride, you said you had problems with the idle?"

"It idles low, yes," he answered.

"Pop the hood right now, let me take a look."

"Nah BB, it's cool, I gotta go right now."

"Come on, pop the hood. I went to Junior College for this. Let me fix it for you right here, like right now, for free."

"Ok, I cant right now BB, I gotta go."

"Pop the hood man, all I'm asking is for you to pop the hood."

"NO BB," David said firmly, but still friendly enough as to not cause a problem.

"What's the matter? Why wont you let me help you? I know what I'm doing, man."

David is thinking about the fact that for all he knows, BB could have stolen the Civic, and popping the hood for a guy he barely knows to show him what great gadgets we have under there, well, it doesn't seem safe. I'm not saying that it was him, or we suspect him, I'm just saying that we are extra cautious right now with our new car. I know it's a little paranoid, but for one thing, we just got our car stolen and stripped less than two weeks ago, and also the guy is a huge douche bag.

"All I'm gunna do is this thing, like what you do is you disconnect the cords from the battery for 20 seconds, right? Well this resets the computer, and it will make the idle higher, that's all I'm going to do man, that's all."

Asinine.

"I gotta go BB, don't worry about it though, my brother is a mechanic and he's going to take a look at it."

"Well let me just see what's going on, I could save your brother the work. I went to Junior College for this, I know what I'm doing man."

The guy's insistence reminds me of Ham Sandwich Guy, a great blog entry from This Fare City, seriously, read that one when you're done here today, it's fucking funny. Seriously, just go over there, I went to Junior College for this. Go over there when you're done. Ok? Because it's like a good read and shit. Seriously.

"BB, I have to go, don't worry about it," David says as he quickly gets into the car before BB can say anything else.

As soon as he shuts the door I say "What a fucking DOUCHE BAG!" probably loud enough that he heard it. David is going "God fucking damnit! God FUCKING damnit!" as he practically hits his head on the steering wheel. DB wanders aimlessly while calling his old lady back.

"He is ALWAYS fucking like this, you have NO idea," he says to me.

"I have a pretty good idea, the guy isn't hard to read."

I have to admire David a little, because he has an excellent fake "I am concerned and I am eagerly pretending to be listening to your bullshit" demeanor around douche bags like DB, my brother Richard or his brother Matt, which will come in handy when he's a cop. The funny part is that I get to see the David that most people, namely douche bags, never see. The David who calls people crack heads as soon as he's in the car, fucktards as soon as he hangs up, and walks in the door and screams WHY? WHY ARE THEY THAT STUPID? HOW CAN YOU BE THAT STUPID!

If David thinks you're an idiot, you probably wont ever know about it, unless I think so too and I accidentally yell DOUCHE BAG a little too loud in the car and you overhear it.

And on that, I don't think that he heard me because he was already back on the phone with his old lady. But I kinda wished he had. I like taking 'em down a notch or two, or in DB's case, a nozzle or two.

So long and thanks for all the lulz DB.

Now THIS Will Make A Person Whoremonal

We went over to my brother Rob's house for a Superbowl party. I don't give a fuck about football, check out my great nephew Aiden!

















We are pals, baby and I.

Aphephobia- The Fear Of Touching People

I've been doing book marketing all day. And now I am a little anxious about something.

Hey man, this author stuff is serious business, and it is now my official occupation since I got tax shit in the mail from my publisher. I haven't gotten tax forms in like three years. Boy don't that make me feel like a growed up.

Ok, so essentially, this is how the book publishing thing works, from what I gather. You either submit your work to places like Randomhouse, Doubleday, or Hawthorne and get rejected a million times, possibly having your work stolen from you so Jessica Seinfeld can publish it and steal your fame, finally being accepted and then having to travel to talk to people in other states in corporate offices, they publish it when they want to publish it as opposed to when you want to because they probably don't have your best interests as a writer at heart, and you lose your copyright and make $0.19 per book, not to mention you pretty much have no say in cover design. Or you take the self publishing route and promote the book your DAYOM self, down to getting it into book stores, let alone selling it, but hey, you get to keep your copyright and you are your own boss.

I come from two or more generations of entrepreneurs so I choose to self publish. Also I hate corporate bullshit.

So my job right now is to plan the promotional stuff, because the book is done and I'm just waiting on the edited version to come back to me. I cant set it up for presale or get it in the back door anywhere yet because I don't have my ISBN, or International Standard Book Number as of yet. What do I mean by back door? Well if you are with a big company, they'll get your book into stores because that is how they make money. I have to do all of that by myself, unless I only want to sell the book on Lulu, which is great and all because it's free but it isn't enough exposure, as I learned through my first publishing experience. So I have to get a hold of an ISBN, and then use it to get the book listed on the store websites, such as Amazon, Borders, and possibly my best market Barnes And Noble.

Yes, I am aware that these places can be called "corporate bullshit" but I am getting myself into the stores all on my own, which is more than YOU ever did, so shuttie.

Right now I don't have an ISBN, so I am just bookmarking the places that I need to list my book for sale, and the places where I need to promote it. This is a pretty decent list of book promoting websites that are free. Now, listing the book for sale on sites like Amazon and B&N is going to give me the opportunity for presales, which is something that I didn't have when I did the other book, because I did it 100% through Lulu, which does not offer presales. Then, I have to do press releases, which I didn't do enough of last time, and I need to send out copies for review to bloggers who I believe would create the right amount of buzz on the interwebs, which is going to be a big big part of the marketing as a whole.

The hardest part of the campaign, which is making me nervous even though it is months away, and is also the most profitable and will bring in the most non internet exposure, is book signings. To set these up, I have to contact, for example, the managers of the local B&N stores and tell them that my book is in their system and that I would like to do a signing at their store. From what I hear, it isn't hard to get one set up because they like to do these, unless the manager is a douchebag, in which case I've been advised to call back in a few months because the store will surely have a new manager if that is the case. So the problem, for me, is people in general. It's no secret that I don't like to touch people, for them to touch me, and handshakes are a bit gross to me. So how the hell am I going to sit at a table for two to eight hours with stacks of my book around me, shaking hands with strangers? Let alone talk to people?

Not to mention the fact that I have NO idea how to buy a business/casual outfit.

The bigger thing at hand here is having to touch people, I mean, I can psych myself into talking to people, I do it all the time. But touching people really irks me. Did you know that on an average day your hands will come into indirect contact with 15 penises? Think about it, a dude takes a quick leak in the Walmart bathroom and doesn't wash his hands, so whatever was on his peeter is now on the door handle, shopping cart, and various items that he manhandles throughout the store, where any one of us could touch where his filthy hands were, therefore transferring peeter germs to our hands. Or worse, the guy who cuts holes in his pockets so he can jack off while standing behind the register at McDonnalds, he not only handles your money, but your food! And if you shook someone's hand, a hand that had possibly touched its daily allotment of 15 penises, and then I did a book signing where I sell, say, 75 books, it would be like giving 1, 125 hand jobs behind an Arco station bathroom.

Germs are the enemy, and their main form of transportation is hands that have touched penises.

Maybe it doesn't bother you, but it bothers me, and if you ask Ty why he got sick a few weeks ago he will tell you what mama said, "I got sick because I was licking check stands at Staters." That is right, and he has learned that licking check stands is wrong, no matter how bored you get while shopping.

When you are shaking hands with people after church this weekend, remember that sweet old Mr. Adams might not fap (you know, shake hands with the one eyed milk man) anymore, but you don't know that he wasn't sitting in the back pew casually adjusting his junk while you sang hymns, and then you'll understand why I think touching people is gross sometimes. I'm just saying.

And for the record, yeah, sweet Mr. Adams still faps. THEY ALL fap, don't be so naive.

"Babes," says David, "you'll make more friends with hand sanitizer than vinegar and honey put together."

What in the hell is he talking about?

That's A Tough Question

The other day Ty's school had "cuddle up with a book night" as a promotion for the book fair, so the kids were all invited to wear their jammies and have stories read to them. Ty and Wade even wore their robes, and Ty got to use his book money to go shopping. He keeps/finds/steals change from us and puts it in a special book money jar that has a lid that counts how much money is inside. He had $30 saved up! He bought his brother a touch and feel book about a caterpillar and he got a few books that he was interested in.

I'm really glad that Ty enjoys books. Wade is still a little rough on them, but what I find amazing is that Ty is starting to read! It's crazy.

The other day at the store, Ty noticed some big cardboard hearts hanging from the ceiling. He asked me why they were there, and I said that they were decorating for Valentines day. The next time he went he asked me what hearts mean. "Love," I said.

And then the next time we went to the store, he waited till we were at the checkout stand to ask "What is love?"

I opened my mouth to say something, but I realized that he had stumped me. Oh yeah, I'm such an expert on it, look at me in my happy marriage, and I cant even explain what love is to a four year old.

The checker, who is a bit older and maybe wiser than me even said "That's a tough one kid, I don't even know the answer to that one."

I gave him an answer eventually, but it wasn't one that I really thought was thorough or good enough. I told him that hugs mean love, and that kisses mean love, but I'm not happy with this answer because hugs and kisses do not mean love. You can hug and kiss a person that you don't love, people do it all of the time! Love isn't physical actions...or maybe it is. To a 4 year old I guess it's physical but, damnit, why couldn't he have asked about sex? I can answer that one easy enough. But how the hell do you explain love?

He knows what like means, he "likes" his Tigger blanket and he "likes" spaghetti, he even tells Daddy that he likes him. Ok, so love is like really really REALLY liking someone, but that doesn't help because he really really REALLY likes pizza. Maybe I should teach him that love is a people and pet thing, you can love your mom or a cat but you cant love pizza because it is food. You might like pizza a lot, but you don't love it.

What about when people use it sarcastically, like "I love it when my kids ask me questions that are too damn hard to answer."

I ended up reading an article on How To Explain Valentines Day To Children, and here are some snips from it.

Step One: Talk about love. Explain that there are many different kinds of love to honor on Valentine's Day, including family love, romantic love, love for friends, spiritual love, love for pets, love for the environment and so on.

That's all well and good, but what is the difference between loving your little brother and loving canvas grocery bags? HOW do I explain these things?

Step Five: Talk about why hearts are associated with Valentine's Day. If you like, read your children a couple of love poems to help explain why people connect the emotion of love with that part of the body.

The problem is that people often connect love to other parts of the body, and though he is too young to understand it, I understand it and it is clouding my judgement on what to say here.

Step Six: Explain the connection between flowers and romance. Centuries ago, a "language of flowers" was developed in Persia and Turkey, then spread to Europe. Each flower had a different meaning, and flowers were sometimes used as a code for lovers to exchange messages. A red rose has come to mean "love" and "beauty."

But gifts, poetry, it's not love. It is only showing love, and I would like to know how to make a specific statement about what showing love is and what feeling love is. I hate to confuse the poor child but this is important. Don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to make this complicated, but "what is love" is a question that has had mankind stumped for ages, and planting the seed of understanding that answer early is going to impact his life in so many ways.

Or it wont and I am totally overthinking this. And I probably shouldn't be looking it up on the interwebs.

Sucks to that. According to some snips from Encyclopedia Dramatica:

Love: Where babies come from, and the most widely used rationalization for sex and drama.

Love used to be a special feeling between a man and one or more women. Unfortunately, society has watered down this tradition and it can now refer to relations between a peeping tom and two women, couplings with teenage girls, or a whole grouping of people all at one explosive moment. This infiltration by liberals into a once sacred realm means that every Tom, Dick and Furry can use the word as a justification for their desire to rape someone more stupid than they are. Love has now been rendered little more than a way for bank managers to make hapless fools over-drawn.

In 1993, Euro dance act Haddaway asked the question “What Is Love?”. To this day no one has been able to come up with a suitable answer.

Over use of the word is what is making this hard. The way that people throw it around, and the divorce rate the way that it is, I just don't know that there is any real way to explain it, other than to show it, and to be an example of it. I don't believe in lying to kids or pacifying them with bullshit answers.

But how do you go about explaining it?

On the subject of love and Valentines and shit, if you look in my sidebar ironically in The Love section, you'll find a cute little widget for my Valentines box. You can send me a Valentine that I will get on the 14th. And no, you don't have to "love" me to send me a Valentine, you can like me as a friend or how you like pizza too.