Willowmist's Wanderings

I’ve decided that Facebook creates a false sense of relationships.  You are not friends with someone if you have to wait for them to update his/her FB status to find out what’s going on with him/her.  That’s not friendship.  I’ve always believed that internet communication creates false intimacy anyway, and now I see Facebook as just that sort of phenomenon, except FB is even more insidious because people ‘connect’ with people from their past and think that they are friends again.  Think about it.  Do any of your FB friends really know anything about you?  Would you be informed of their death personally?  Do you visit them?  If they didn’t write about their illness on their status, would you still know?  Sometimes its possible to find an old friend and reconnect in real life and that’s nice, but otherwise, the way we all use FB is sort of retarded.  Or maybe my standards for friendship are too bloody high.  Either way, I am going to be severing my Facebook ties soon.

Look, I admit it.  I’m grumpy.  I have a number of things going on that I feel I have let get out of control because I haven’t followed my own sage advice and I’ve decided it’s time to get back on track.  Someone has seriously disappointed me this afternoon and I don’t know what to do about it.  I talk a good game about not setting one’s standards too high so you’ll never be disappointed, so it’s not easy to disappoint me.  That’s true.  So when I do trust someone and they disappoint me, as you can imagine, it’s devastating.  So now I’m this weird combination of angry and sad and exasperated with myself.  I went on the treadmill to try and sweat some of it away and now I’m going to have a hot shower and clean some of this house.

Happy April 21 everyone.

So they’re building a monument to Martin Luther King Jr in Washington D.C. It’s actually a cool looking monument:

It’s a 28-foot granite sculpture that they’re planning to place between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials along the Tidal Basin. The money for it has been raised through private donations, totalling $104 million so far, solicited through the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.  Approximately $800,000 of that money is going to the family of MLK for the use of the man’s image and some of his words - the ones not yet considered public domain including his “I Have a Dream Speech.”  No one involved with the project — the national parks service, the foundation and historians — can recall a national monument that was subject to licensing fees before now.

Let me run this by you all again slowly, because I want to make sure that you’re feeling me:

The nation’s capital wants to honor a man — a man who gave his life for freedom and peace — as a national hero in a permanent memorial, but that man’s family wants the nation to pay them to use that man’s image in that memorial.  So, instead of thank-you for the honor to our family, they’re going with pay us to allow the country to honor our family.  Does anyone else find that ironic and a little nauseating?  WWMLKD?

In the interest of presenting both sides, the MLK family has issued a statement that explains how donations to the family charity which supports King Center in Atlanta, a non-profit organization where MLK and Cora are both entombed, have dropped in response fundraising efforts by the memorial foundation.  But, that rings a little false from a family which has sued several media and publishing companies, including both CBS and USA Today for a percentage of profits from the use of MLK’s  image and words.  So now I’m wondering if someone is making a profit every February when I hear that speech about a dozen times on television…it makes me a little sad.  If anyone wants to know why a memorial has not been built before now, or if anyone thinks not enough tribute is given to the man…now we know whose fault it is.  I love Martin Luther King Jr.  I think he was a great man, a visionary.  I’m sorry that his family is dishonoring him so badly.

And, only incidently, if a woman is shot by her husband and the bullet goes into her forehead and directly out the back of her skull and she is, not only conscious, but actually offering the nice emergency medical team a cup of tea as she holds a rag to her head and asks what has happened, I will grant you that I would maybe ask her to stop at the convenience store and help me pick some lottery numbers before popping her off to the hospital, but it is most assuredly not a miracle from god.  What sort of miracle would god be granting by letting a woman get shot in her head by her own husband while she lay in her bed?  What would that message be exactly?

Happy April 17 everyone.

Happy free chocolate day!  I worked from 12-4pm and then we went to Cracker Barrel for dinner.  Their Sunday special is buttermilk fried chicken…..mmmmmmm.  Tom and Vaughan had big hunks of ham - something about tradition and Easter, but I’m pretty sure that you can slaughter the spring chickens as easily as slaughtering the spring pigs.  Really, the point is to kill something and eat it, right?  Then I watched a few reruns of CSI Miami and knit a little on the wedding blanket that I’m supposed to have done by the 18th.  Just so you know, I’m only about half done the blanket at the moment, but now I’m thinking I have no way of getting it to Arlene and Mike by the day of their wedding anyway, since I can’t go to the actual ceremony without childcare, so maybe I have two more weeks to finish.  I can give it to her when she comes back to work.

So I am back on Wellbutrin, which is what I’ve been taking for the last six or seven years.  I don’t think it controls my moods as well as the Cymbalta did, but it has the fewest unpleasant side effects.  I believe I feel an manic episode coming on - you can tell when I get angry and start throwing things away indiscriminately.  I am fighting the urge to delete my Facebook account entirely and I’ve had to really bite my tongue to avoid picking fights with people over stuff that I usually just ignore.  At least the happy pills are working well enough to allow me to recognize the problem and try to control it, but it is making me decidedly less happy in the interim.

So, with that in mind, here are a few things that I have been chewing on lately:

• I don’t care if the Obama children get a dog and name it Bo.  I don’t care how they choose their pet, what it looks like or where they got it from.  Shut up about the fucking dog already!

• Will somebody please tell Tim Gunn that there are lots of things that are more tragic than a fabulous essential dying a slow death in the wash.  A man getting killed defending his ship against pirates, a man held hostage over Easter, a prison in Gitmo where men are held without rights, children starving in Africa…hell, a faded shirt shouldn’t even rate in the top hundred!

• The bank did not take your money.  You spent money that you didn’t have and the bank charges you for that.  If you don’t want to pay an overdraft fee, don’t overdraw your account.  It’s really very simple.  It is not my job to monitor your spending - that’s your job.

And, while I’m at it:

• Cigarettes are litter.  If you drop them on the ground, you are littering.  Stop it.

Happy April 13 everyone.

Lately I have been amazed by the human capacity for ignorance, specifically I mean self-ignorance.  Is everyone so blithely unaware of their own less endearing qualities?  Do we all project our shortcomings onto others or blame the inevitable results of our personality flaws on the flaws of others so readily.  Wouldn’t all of our lives be easier if we actually made some effort to understand ourselves?  Or is everyone really just too retarded to know that they don’t know?

Ok, so….

I tend to stick my nose into everything.  I like to know stuff.  I’m nosey.

I am a chamleon.  I’m friendly and sincere and people like me, but I don’t generally prefer the company of others and I remain deliberately alienated.

I’m lazy.  Lazy, lazy lazy.

I’m sarcastic.

I have a superiority complex.

I’m vain, overly proud and a shameless praise slut.

I’m short-tempered, impatient and I can throw destructive tantrums when I’m really angry.

I argue too much and I always need to explain things — although it sounds like I’m making excuses, that’s not how I mean it.

I talk too much.

I will do just about anything for the path of least resistance.  I haven’t had to kill anyone yet, but I have lied and cheated.

I have a filthy mouth.  Seriously.  I shock my husband and he’s a sailor!

Happy March 26 everyone

Ohmigod! I spend a lot of time defending the US to my friends and family back home. No, I insist, Americans are not ignorant warmongers who think a big army is the answer to everything. Of course they care about people around the world. Of course they appreciate their closest and friendliest neighbours and recognize the incredible historical relationship between the two countries. Most of the Americans that I have met have no idea that Canadians bear them any ill will and are chagrined to hear it is so. Ok, sure, many Americans really don’t know much about Canada or, for that matter, anything outside their own borders, but, c’mon, how much did I ever know about the US before I came here? Nearly nothing to be totally honest. I thought Chicago was a city in New York!

How the hell am I supposed to convince Canadians that the United States isn’t a bad country when they insist on airing garbage like this on a national news channel?? I can’t even watch all of it. That’s how offensively ignorant and insulting it is! If you get all the way to the end, let me know if I should bother.

Somebody better publically apologize for this quick or I’m going to have to move.

Happy March 23 everyone.