By the way, we’ve had a nice, constant, soaking rainfall going since late yesterday afternoon. I link you to this story about drivers becoming stranded in flash flooding across my area. See? Stressful. Not relaxing. You try getting a water-loving six-year-old across a puddle-riddled parking lot in the rain at dark-thirty in the morning, attempting to keep him as dry as possible so that he isn’t walking around in soupy shoes all day and tell me how relaxing that is. Om my arse.
In other opinions: I saw Bridesmaids. I laughed. I enjoyed myself. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why Melissa McCarthy is up for an Oscar. Ugly pants, wrist-braces, and gross-out barf takes do not equal great acting. They equal SNL sketches. I could stretch and give you a nomination for Wiig, who did a very nice job showing the evolution of emotion and maturity in her character, but McCarthy? All she did was poop and blurt out inappropriate phrases.
Still other opinions: I am delighted to read that Samantha Garvey, the homeless teen who made it to the semifinals of the Intel Science Talent Search, has been able to bring about some change in her situation through sheer intellectual talent. I love seeing a young woman rewarded for being smart, working hard, and looking to education as a way out of poverty. I love seeing her hard work celebrated. It is difficult enough to maintain the grades she has made when you know where home is. I cannot imagine the challenge of doing it while bouncing around between housing, with disabled parents, and the worry of where you’ll be tonight, much less tomorrow. I love that she has dug in and stayed put intellectually, and I love that she is being lauded for it. I hope the media latches on to the idea and hunts down further deserving young women and men, and makes news of them and their accomplishments, rather than the current alternative of making news of people who have accomplished nothing more than notoriety.
One more opinion: The only people who can run for office, are people who can afford to spend months, even years, without working for a living. People who have no need to earn to provide for themselves, or their families are the only ones who can stay on the campaign trail. Thus and so, you are never going to get a political candidate who is in touch with Middle America. Middle America knows that if you disappear from work for weeks at a time, your rent doesn’t get paid, your kids don’t eat, and the bank comes looking for you. This is what is so frustrating about politicians.
The Outside Lane 