Category: Uncategorized

We just finished watching Hot Tub Time Machine, which was pretty funny. Slightly misogynistic, but it’s a dude-bro comedy about a hot tub that turns into a time machine, so one must suspend one’s eye-rolls at dude-bro as one does one’s disbelief regarding time travel. I giggled quite a lot. Pretty much anytime Chevy Chase appears, I am guaranteed some sort of laugh.

Now, B has some awful movie on where in the first scene, Gerard Butler’s family is murdered in front of him. Now, Gerard is about to go Charles Bronson all over town.

I do not like movies where children are harmed. Okay, I do not like movies where people are harmed. I am angrily opposed to movies where children are harmed. I didn’t like them before I was a mother, I can’t stand them now. I’m not sure how anyone is entertained by death, especially violent death. Buh.

Perhaps it is having grown up with some violence. I just can’t manage it. I’m a total weenie. I even had to give up certain types of video games because I had such angst when it came to keeping my little characters safe. I was fetal by the time the credits rolled on Braveheart, and only made an exception for watching that due to it being about William Wallace. Given my squeamishness and delicate sensibilities, I avoided The Passion of the Christ. I’d read that story a few times anyway. Remember when Mel Gibson wasn’t crazy?

I don’t mind a movie like Die Hard, or Terminator for some reason. They aren’t shows I would choose, but I can sit through them. Remember when Arnold was an actor? It’s when the violence is graphic, or intense, or prolonged. I’ve never made it through Rocky. I hate boxing! My parents used to watch boxing all the time when I was little. I hate that stuff.

We turned that one off. Now we’re watching Kevin Costner getting it on with Sean Young’s crazy in the back of a limo. Remember when that was shocking? Remember when Kevin Costner was pretty? Sean certainly has some pretty underwear in this movie, but her pancake is awfully white.

You know what’s funny to me? That it is more socially acceptable to watch violence, than it is to watch sex. Me? I don’t want to watch either one, really, but one is quite natural and usually makes consenting participants very happy. The other is something most all of us try to avoid.

You know what movie I used to love? The Presidio. Sean Connery. Oooh. But my favorite movie of all time is Undercover Blues. Dennis Quaid and Kathleen Turner at their primes, and an always enjoyable Stanley Tucci. I always wanted Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas to get married. They had such great chemistry on screen.

The Death Penalty::Against it

And that out of the way, how about something lighter?

I always wonder how people find this blog. I think a large majority of first time visitors come through the WWK project. I know that a lot of them come in under search engines looking for the Ava Dress I posted. That’s a popular dress! I thought you might get a kick out of seeing what search engine terms brought strangers by in the past week. I’m not even sure how things like “a guy rubbed me” or “she love to make me wet myself” find THIS, but I feel like I should apologize to those people. No legal advice or golden shower technique to be found here.

listen to idol girls 2011 2
sugarpill love 2
outside boobs 2
the outside lane 2
andrew blake 1
a guy rubbed * me 1
tagline contest 1
jade green 1
30 rock abby breasts 1
the outside lane blog 1
peed my pants in public 1
gyno exam blog 1
do they rerun american idol? 1
2011 tagline contest 1
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ava dress 1
pia toscana i’ll stand by you 1
stephanie seery-murphy 1
arwen lee adams bicknell 1
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american idol pia toscana stand by me 1
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boobs outside 1
julie anne rhodes and nick rhodes 1
she love to make me wer myself 1
my husband made me wet myself 1
american idol the girls

We have 101 Dalmations on here. B raised an interesting question. How do two British dogs, living in London, manage to produce 15 puppies who speak with American accents?

Do you know how bad 101 dogs would stink? Even bathed? Your house would smell like wet dog all the time. I sure hope Roger’s career in music really took off, because feeding those little beasts would the GNP of some small nations.

I thought this was awesomely, sadly hilarious.

Remember that I am a reformed Evangelical and Young Republican. What’s happening on Capitol Hill notwithstanding, this is exactly how the dialog on sex has been managed at every church I have ever attended. Information about sex is treated like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

If you give a kid information about sex, he might want to have it! I’ve got news for all of you who have never seen Blue Lagoon. Even if you never tell Christopher Atkins how babies are made, just as soon as Brooke Shields’ coconuts are grown in, he’s going to have a hankering to tap that. Michael Jackson sang about it. It’s called Human Nature (any excuse to post this song, as it is one of my all-time favorites. Ugh, I miss MJ.)

Most of us want to have sex. Many of us want to have lots of it. The only thing that kept me from sexing my way through high school and college (aside from my curfew and a very invested parent) was a healthy fear of STDs and pregnancy…and the realization that there was plenty of friction to be had without intercourse. But I had information! Not from my school, or my family, but from my best friend, who came over to my house when we were 16, and dumped a pursefull of condoms, sponges, and gels onto my dining room table and said, “Lane, I know your parents aren’t going to tell you about this, so I am.”

And she gave me the VD talk, and the latex v. lambskin talk, and the pregnancy talk, and the things-you-can-do-otherwise talk, and the promise that I could always come to her if I needed to. I thank God I had her because her information was tight. That one hour probably saved me a lifetime of itchiness.

Not every best friend has that cache of quality information. For instance, had you come to me prior to that conversation, all I could have told you was that when a man and woman love each other very much…they get married, and then they do it. Then they have a baby, and they quit speaking to each other.

I honest-to-god thought you could get pregnant if some semen crawled up your leg. And I was really suspicious about oral sex, too. If it had the word ‘sex’ in it, I thought it might cause a case of the babies. Thank God for my friend!

Later on, when a younger girl came to me for advice, I drove her to Planned Parenthood. I didn’t know squat, but they certainly did. And they saved her a lifetime of itchiness, too.

As an evangelical, I was totally on board with teaching abstinence and with remaining celibate. But here’s the thing with that: Not everyone is an evangelical, and not every child is raised to that expectation–that’s just first of all. Not even all the evangelicals can keep it in their pants, no matter how long they have been practicing celibacy. *cough*

No, we need solid, open conversations about sex. Frank, unemotional conversations about what it is, how to have it, and how to deal with every potential aftermath, including Bunny Boiling. We need frank conversations about physical, mental and emotional health. We need frank conversations about self respect, and respecting others. And we need to cut out the slut-shaming and girl bashing. You notice that no one is talking about how to keep the boys from mounting the girls? Only tearing down the girls who are willing–and even the ones who are unwilling, in some cases.

Let’s take care of each other, yeah? And be good to one another? No matter how many notches are on the bedpost.

We still haven’t seen the first edits, but our publisher sent Nicole a request for cover blurbs, so he must feel fairly confident in the progress. Hopefully we’ll see the edits in the next week or so. I am excited and nervous. I’m hoping they have completely rewritten the bits I didn’t like…lol, or fixed them.

We are home with a sick Thor, and I turned on Animal Planet. That’s good, right? Erm…only if you like watching things get eaten.

I remembered my point about police officers, and it was so simple. Be nice to them. Be nice to all people who work in the public sector because odds are, wherever you are, that worker just got finished dealing with twenty of the exact type of people you hate most. You might be the only good thing to happen to him/her today.

****

I got a phone call from Thor’s afterschool program around 3:23pm today. He was ill. By the time I got there (3:47pm), he was wadded up in a ball on a nap mat, shivering with a chill, compress on his forehead, perfectly silent. He rolled his eyes up at me like a basset hound and said, “I’m sick.”

45 minutes and many, many tears later, he tested positive for strep.

While he was curled up on the examination table, he summoned the energy–and I mean that, you could see him gathering strength to speak–to say, “Mama, I got all my behavior coins today–all five.” And that about broke my heart.

I thought about the effort it must have cost him, feeling the way he felt, and there was that pride. I don’t expect perfection from my son, but I do expect effort, and today’s effort was heroic for a little guy like him. I considered buying him a pony, but realized that was probably overkill. I let him pick out some Gatorade instead.

*****

Peter, the denier. Thomas, the doubter. James and John, the sons of thunder. Judas, the betrayer. If Jesus’ closest staff was so full of vice, why do I expect mortal ministers to be able to pull together anything better? Or does the ministry just attract these personality types? (I’d be the Doubter, by the way.)

****

And I am plumb wore out. After a night on the loveseat with a miserable child, I am ready for a night in my bed with a drugged child. (Help me Cheezus, if anyone takes that out of context!)