Random thoughts on GSUS

There seems to be this recurring theme of Christian-hating going on. It is a cultural phenom that is sort of bubbling up from underground and the clamor is getting louder and louder.

I can understand it. Dang the whining, complaining, martyrdom and judgementalness (is that a word?) of right-wing Christians does grow so wearysome.

If it isn't Pat Robertson calling spouting some anti-one-person one-vote nonsense, it's one of Bush's criminal minions trying to make sure no one gets AIDS education.

Maybe Jesus wouldn't have been a liberal Democrat. But I think he sure as shit wouldn't have been a right-wing Republican. Some days I want to say "Can't we all get along?" and other days it's more like "Just shut the fuck up! It's my country too, you morons!"

Even my 80-year-old mom, the nicest woman in the world, said yesterday "I don't think some Christians are very nice people." For my mom, those are pretty harsh words.

Mr. Stapler is in on the action, too. He had a hilarious idea, born of the hours we spend stuck in freeway traffic reading people's personalized license plates.

What does he want on his plate?

IH8GSUS

I told him the only vehicle he could put it on would be a well-armored tank, and even then he had better watch his back.

Personally, I usually like Jesus. He was a radical, my kind of guy.

But then that pansy-ass Paul came along and mucked the whole thing up. I think most so-called Christian churches are Paulist churches that just use Jesus as a prop.

But Jesus said stuff that kinda makes me wonder if there weren't some cracks in his plank. For instance: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother...he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:26). That's not one you see people holding up at football games.

I really think the whole issue is not so much one of philosophy as psychology. Us mush-brained liberals see God as the Dad who brings us presents when he comes home from a business trip and the righties see God as a cranky Dad with a belt in his hand, just waiting for us to mess up.

My best spiritual teacher, Mary Olive Hill said "God made us in his image. And we have been returning the favor ever since."

Izzy's meme

The gorgeous and talented (have you seen her t-shirts?) Izzy over at Moonshine has a meme. Copy, paste, blog. Go. Oh, and she would like your answers in her comments section...

1) What is your favorite word?

2) What word irks you everytime you hear someone say it? You can have more than one.

3) Name the first concert you ever went to.

4) Name a song will you never get sick of hearing.

5) What song, album or band influenced you most as a teenager OR what song/album is the soundtrack of your youth? You can pick more than one if you have to.

1) What is your favorite word?
Falling. I don't know why but I always want to use it in poems.

2) What word irks you everytime you hear someone say it? You can have more than one.
Orientate. "Orient" means to familiarize oneself, "orientate" means to turn facing east. Please make a note of it. And "literally" because so many people use it wrong. "My head literally came off," I heard a woman say on the news.

3) Name the first concert you ever went to.
Bruce Springsteen at the LA Sports Arena. Maybe 1980? Big fun.

4) Name a song will you never get sick of hearing.
Van Morrison's Moondance.

5) What song, album or band influenced you most as a teenager OR what song/album is the soundtrack of your youth? You can pick more than one if you have to.
Definitely Springsteen as a teen. He was young and scrawny and so raw and honest and great. Back then he had 3 albums out and I listened to 'Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ" about one million times. I used to gaze at Cat Stevens on that Moondance album cover (yes, a vinyl record album cover, I am old) and listen to that over and over, too.

Pass it on

I found this fabulous post over at Suburban Bliss about what happened when a guy decided to send in a ripped-up, pasted-together credit card application that just cried out "Fraud!"

It is just such a great example of citizen journalism. Brings a tear to my eye.

Anyway, pass it on. If enough bloggers copy the post, maybe the credit card companies will get real about security issues like this. (Oh stop being so cynical. A girl can dream, can't she?)

Gabacha loca

It is freezing ass cold here. Well, I live in So California, so that is pretty relative. It is really windy, too, and I swam tonight so my hair is still damp.

I decided I had better take the trash cans to the curb tonight instead of relying on myself to make time in the morning to do it. So I bundled up and went out, trusting that no one would be out and about.

Here is my outfit: calf-length yoga pants, a baggy sweatshirt, a microfiber jacket plastered in dog hair, two, count 'em two long mufflers, both blue, and a red-pink-and-purple sparkly crocheted hat.

I dragged the cans out and it was like the Fourth of July parade out there. The Thursday night futbol practice had just gotten done at the park and dozens of scantily clad sweaty guys were strolling past with their soccer bags over their shoulders and their shoes unlaced.

I could see what they were thinking as this insane-looking bundle of woman struggled with the cans: "Gabacha loca!"

I have to concur. I am a very crazy white woman.

Bitches Brew

At work there are four young women who sit together at breaks, poring over celeb magazines and commenting on the stars' sordid lives.

One of the girls, who is physically quite beautiful, has the bitchiest expression I have seen since high school. I mean, the evil nemesis of my senior year, Jaime Lambert, could only occasionally muster such disdain, and she was really working at it.

I walk into the break room with my usual smile and this woman, technically my co-worker because we are locked in the same building together each day, looks me up and down with this haughty expression of total disapproval that must have been honed in junior high and high school cliques. It is a perfect sneer. The Mean Girls in "Mean Girls" could only hope to look so snooty.

I really felt like giving her a slap. I haven't seen anyone who so obviously deserves it in forever. Of course I can't - I work for the kind of corporation that is so huge it has whole processes and departments just to deal with inter-employee disputes.

So I have to do something short of physical violence, it appears. Since I have to deal with this treatment at least three times a day, I have tried different strategies.

I kept smiling. But that somehow felt like I wasn't doing enough.

I tried glaring back at her. I practiced my Hard Girl glare. That actually worked a little. Now she doesn't stare anymore or leaves when she sees me coming. But it didn't feel good to me.

But now, since I am a kind and enlightened spiritual master-in-training I have decided that my job is this: do nothing. Or keep doing what I was doing before she entered the picture. In the grand scheme of things, what is this poor pathetic little sneerer to me? Except blog fodder, LOL.

International Women's Day

In honor of International Women's Day, I present Wu Jing. She is 52 years old. She lives in Harbin, China, where her profession is to perform an act twice daily of diving into a pool cut into 2-foot thick sheets of ice and swimming for a stunned crowd.

Wu Jing says she loves her job because she has always wanted to be in the spotlight.

I love how proud and happy she looks. I wish that kind of happiness and self-esteem to every woman today and every day!

Pisser of Light

Hm...Looks like a nice place for a pee

What does painter of pastel cottages Thomas Kinkade do in his spare time?

According to the L.A. Times (registration required, damn them) today, he gets drunk, pisses in elevators and gropes admiring women.

An article today lays out Kinkade's follies for everyone to admire.

Kinkade has leaned pretty hard (by which I mean "pimped like Terrence Howard in "Hustle and Flow") on his Christianity to sell his art but it seems from the article that on many occasions, his behavior has been pretty rotten.

There's this:

In an interview, Sheppard, who often accompanied Kinkade on the road, recounted a trip to Orange County in the late 1990s for the artist's appearance on the "Hour of Power" television show at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. On the eve of the broadcast, Sheppard said, he and Kinkade returned to the Disneyland Hotel after a night of heavy drinking. As they walked to their rooms, according to Sheppard and another person who was there, Kinkade veered toward a nearby figure of a Disney character.

"Thom wanders over to Winnie the Pooh and decides to 'mark his territory,' " Sheppard told The Times.

In a deposition, the artist alluded to his practice of urinating outdoors, saying he "grew up in the country" where it was common. When pressed about allegedly relieving himself in a hotel elevator in Las Vegas, Kinkade said it might have happened.

"There may have been some ritual territory marking going on, but I don't recall it," he said.

Ritual territory marking? Is that what they are calling drunken urination in public - indoors - these days? I call it "Eeeeeew" but I'm prudish that way.

And you know what is coming next, don't you? In the vein of other fine moralists like Arnold Schwarzenneger and Jerry Falwell, several women claimed he groped them, made inappropriate sexual comments to them and swore at them when they were trying to help him up off the floor after he fell off a barstool.

Kinkade of course has plenty of rationalizations for his behavior, from the Clarence Thomas-esque to the Biblical:

"But you've got to remember," he said, "I'm the idol to these women who are there. They sell my work every day, you know. They're enamored with any attention I would give them. I don't know what kind of flirting they were trying to do with me. I don't recall what was going on that night."

Oh, yes, it wasn't me drunkenly groping the women. It was their fault! Those hoes was flirting with me!

In response to The Times' written questions, Kinkade did not address any specific incident.

"It does disappoint me when people I have tried to help and befriend make crazy allegations about me," he said. "I am a big fan of imagination, but the specific allegations you have described to me are ridiculous and I feel like the victim of a legal stalker."

Again, not my fault. Legal stalking, modern day lynching, that's what it is.

He described himself as "an average, hard-working guy who just happens to be a famous artist" and said he didn't take himself too seriously.

In the recent arbitration case, he also testified that he had never claimed to be perfect.

"Book of Ecclesiastes says enjoy yourself, have a glass of wine, for this is God's will for you," he said. "It's never consistent with God's will that we behave in a sinful way; however, God also loves us and accepts us and understands that at times we have our failings."

Sure, maybe Ecclesiastes says to have a glass of wine. And yes, I too think God loves us and every little sparrow.

But seriously, man, the distance between a glass of wine and drunken pissing at Disneyland is a pretty fur stretch. My advice would be to stop by an AA meeting and talk to the nice folks there. I'm sure they will be able to help you sort out the difference between an adult beverage with dinner and a blackout-style drunken gropefest.