Wow. I just noticed this is my 102nd post…

Happy Friday

So I am back from the whirlwind weekend at the beach with The Fam. What I failed to mention in my last post is that about four seconds after I got the internet, I lost it again, and, upset that I hadn’t finished the task at hand, proceeded to write up the whole post and then use my stubborn powers to find it once more by standing tiptoe on the back of the couch just long enough to send it into the ether and then lose connection again… I gave up after that. Sad, pathetic technology dependence.

Today after a delayed flight back followed by a shortened night’s sleep, I am The Braindead, and I feel as if I have fallen down the rabbit hole.

This sentiment is only reinforced by the fact that today, in the very same square in which last Tuesday there was a three-hour blues festival broadcast from a tiny stage with few to no spectators yet a remarkably effective amplification system which turned out to be a celebration honor of World Herpes Awareness Day, a film was being shot. Apparently Portland is the new Vancouver, BC because very recently a car was blown up a few blocks away and, in looking up the plot for today’s shoot it seems highly unlikely that this drama involves an exploding car. For this shoot, blocks and blocks of prime downtown parking have been cordoned off All Hours All Days for nearly a month. For this, countless rig trucks and black uniformed grips and lackeys roam the streets. For this, the police department has been hijacked. For this, you give your consent to be filmed merely by walking to your office. And the new line of the train, which is not yet fit to carry passengers, has been deemed fit to drive a block, back up, drive a block, back up, drive a block, back up, alternately revealing and hiding the hordes of extras crammed onto the platform to make the city look more packed than it is in Real Life in a large scale demonstration of hide-and-seek which constitutes the four hour ordeal that is capturing a ten second filler shot. All of this is more or less fine. What is not fine is when Brendan Fraser comes out for the marketplace scene and the god mic comes out to direct “Extra Group Yellow to your start locations please” and “Action” and “Cut” and “Reset” and “Action” and “Cut” and “Reset” and “Action” and “Cut” and “Reset” and “Now extras with last names P-S” and so on and so forth devolving until the woman is doing some sort of raffle with the extras, I kid you not – I even checked with a coworker to ensure that I hadn’t fallen completely into the rabbit hole. Seriously. She is advertising prizes and calling numbers – all still over the bullhorn.

Meanwhile my task is to find an estimate for a scar revision which involves lots of google searches that turn up sleazy plastic surgeons who do lipo and face lifts and consider themselves artists. I click on one doctor’s site which takes so long to load that I go to refill my water glass and return to find my screen plastered with naked breasts. So I buzz the associate who gave me this task and charge him with attempting to get me fired, to which he replies in all earnestness and without thinking about context that “he gives me oral consent.” So by then I’ve fallen off the deep end laughing, and we haven’t even GOTTEN to the part in my day when I started reading Stiff by Mary Roach and decided that decapitated heads should never, under any circumstances, be allowed to congregate.

And kids, this is all before lunch.

::sigh::

I need a nap.

At a beach house for my grandma’s 90th birthday weekend, and after a pathetic and desperate search for local wifi options in town following a mere 12 hours sans internet access (and subsequent withdrawal tremors), I was finally able to beat someone’s local network into submission on the couch three feet from where I’m sleeping…

The weekend is complete with desert flowers at the bus stop,

hilarious beer commercials,

Tinman,

Dr. Seuss flowers,

and pinup themed restrooms

A string of bloody suicides across the U.S. have been conclusively traced back to Medicare, authorities told us Monday morning.

These suicides were grouped together and nicknamed the Surprise Suicides back in April because of their common factor – none of the victims had previously shown signs of mental illness, nor exhibited any of the common warning signs. They were so unexpected, in fact, that suicide hadn’t even been suspected initially. The deaths were grouped together only after forensic reports deemed them all suicides and authorities from various jurisdictions decided to pow-wow about the strange and sudden rash of spontaneous suicide in each of the twelve geographically distant cases.

In analyzing the weeks of each victim’s life leading up to suicide, investigators pored over endless amounts of data; friends and family were interviewed, occupations compared, apartments scoured. Finally, a common factor was found in the phone records: each victim had been on the phone with Medicare within minutes of his or her spontaneous suicide. Medicare records were reviewed, but no record of any of the victims speaking with any representatives existed. It was a conundrum.

Late Monday night after hours of fruitless investigation, Officer Joe Schmoe, at his wit’s end, dialed Medicare’s number and was immediately placed on hold.

“A recorded voice told me to hold, and then the hold music kicked in. At first, though the music was pretty bad, I thought nothing of it. It was some sort of early-90’s synth piano sound and the melody was pretty corporate sounding. Then, when the final chords trailed off, I was horrified to realize that the same song just repeated again. I mean…it wasn’t even a different song from the same ‘artist’, it was the very same inane song. I listened in disbelief, assuming there had been some glitch, until the third and then fourth time it started.”

“Suddenly I had this feeling wash over me – something I’d never felt before. I had to stop and think for a moment before realizing that the feeling was of…well…a strong desire to jump out of the window. BAM. It hit me. I’d cracked the case.”

He called his superior immediately and the head case managers were called from their beds into a meeting to discuss this new theory. Under supervision and with safety precautions in place, many more individuals tested this theory by calling Medicare themselves. The results were the same.

A press conference was held Monday morning to inform the public of the findings. The families of the victims were understandably outraged, and action groups were mobilized within hours. After finding themselves under siege via phone (by some brave activists) and at their headquarters, Medicare removed the music from their hold system.

A cold silence remains in its stead, but perhaps the victims can finally rest in peace.

Primer for today’s unsolicited opinion can be found here.

The caveat should be offered that I have not seen the curriculum change that is in the process of being adopted. I don’t know, specifically, what it means that teaching tolerance towards homosexuals is being folded into the curriculum. But from the sound of it, the goal is to foster tolerance for people of different beliefs and lifestyles, and, more concretely put, to ensure that the kid with two moms or two dads isn’t hated on.

My personal belief is…what’s the big deal. I was fortunate to be raised in an environment where tolerance for most things was the norm, especially for gays. I don’t see how someone being gay threatens you, Mr. Homophobe, and I don’t see what opening up to different kinds of marriage does to sully your relationship with your wife. But that’s just me. So when I first read this, I tried to do the devil’s advocate thing. I tried to put myself in the shoes of some hater parent. And I tried to recognize their rights to raise their kid however they see fit.

But do you know what? It didn’t take. I just can’t see that side of the argument from any angle. Because if my reading of the curriculum’s intent is correct, then this lesson has to do with families and not with sex or the various alternate sexual positions a gay person might find more useful than missionary. It has to do with understanding that there’s nothing wrong with having two mommies or two daddies (or one aunt and two grandparents, or one big brother, or whatever for that matter) instead of one mom and one dad. It has to do with love, and understanding that families are groups of people who love each other. Despite the massive numbers of people who don’t know how to love or are afraid of love, you’d be hard pressed to find a parent who would fight curriculum because it included I’ll Love You Forever And Like You For Always or some other such children’s book.

The problem here is that we, as not-so-innocent adults, associate love with sex, and we project that onto our kids. But your kid doesn’t associate love with sex (unless s/he does, in which case the cat’s out of the bag and you have no argument for sheltering them from it). If you want to keep your child sheltered from sex until s/he is 35 (can you tell how I feel about that one?), by all means do. This shift in curriculum will do nothing to stop you.

And besides all that, folks, how uptight do we need to be? Shelter your kids from sexually transmitted diseases: yes (by educating them). Shelter your kids from violent sex offenses and power plays: yes (by teaching common sense, respect, and self esteem). Yes. Do those things. But shelter them from the concept of sex itself? From something we’re hardwired to do, on which the survival of our species relies, and that they’ll figure out on their own anyway? Really?

I got an email from a friend about a festival that I’d sure never heard of called Honen Matsuri. It’s a fertility ceremony.

Now I have no idea who took this photograph, and normally I would refuse to place a photograph I didn’t take in my posts, but I have no idea who took this and it’s too good to pass up. So if you took it, by all means shoot me a message and I’ll give credit where credit is due.

But, come on folks:

[Imagine that what you see here is a picture of a shellac-ed, erect, wooden penis, at least twelve feet long and two feet in diameter, next to which a mother holds her two-year-old up to 'pet' the penis while they pose for a photo. I took it down because this particular post was getting way too many hits from people I don't know all over the world and I never obtained permission from the unknown photographer (or its subjects) to post it in the first place. I know. What a kill joy.]

Ok. First, yes, I have to admit I totally giggled. And that isn’t even the best picture. It’s just the one that best illustrates making my point:

If these people can be so far beyond a puritanical moral crisis that it seems to have not even occurred to them that some might find it wrong to put their two year old daughter up to petting a giant phallus, maybe it’s time we take a teensy little step back from our massive shit fit.

Maybe it’s time to shift our energy towards having a shit fit about the fact that while your kid hasn’t ever seen a breast on television, thank god, he has watched hundreds of characters get shot or beaten to death instead.

Or even maybe, MAYBE, we just put the shit fit away for awhile. No?