stupid things i have done

i am a dumbass for many reasons, but lately it's been hard to ignore. here are a few things that i've done that make me feel even stoopider:

1. i threw away my paycheck from starbucks a few weeks ago.
i got a new one, but still, i'm a total retard for doing that.

2. i made a payment of $5,568 to my at&t phone bill
no, i don't like them that much. i failed to put a decimal point in front of that pesky 6. so when i went to balance my checkbook last night, i saw -$4321 in my account. (cartman's mom's voice kyle's mom voice*)what?what?WHAAAAT? yeah, so i called and it seems that the payment was in the ethernet, not at my bank, yet not at at&t. after talking to about 248234 people at both places, i finally got a woman who said that, instead of it taking 3-4 weeks to refund that money, she could expedite it so it goes through in 72 hours. golly-gosh, thanks for that (wondering why no one else told me that, especially after hearing my head explode)

3. i had $23492 in coupons i could have used while we were grocery shopping last night, but i didn't.
'cause i'm an idiot and wait until i'm ALLLL THE WAAAAY up at the register to look through all 234624234 of my coupons. so i spent about $10 more than i should have.

that's it for now. i'm sure there will be other things later. as a matter of fact, i'm almost sure of it.

*thanks to adam, who paid attention to south park better than i did ;)

last weekend, a bunch of my friends and i had our annual girls' weekend. my sister and i took our yearly jaunt up to milton, WI to amy's parent's mobile home. we also went to an apple orchard, but it was so f*cking cold (like 45 degrees with a brisk wind) and there were about five apples left on the trees, so we didn't pick any. but i bought some apples and some cider and took some pictures, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

orchard	shannon, kristin, amy, and dawn
pumpkin patch	a really old cash register

we also went shopping, which is a yearly tradition. we went to shopko and big lots. i got a bunch of shit i didn't need, which, of course, is the whole point of the weekend. then, saturday night is reserved for gluttonous eating and game playing. we played the game loser! which was totally fun. then we played dirty minds, which was fun, but it can get annoying if you have a dirty mind and are full of sugar and pizza and are tired. then we decided to call the games quits and watch TV. i talked them into watching super troopers, which amy fell asleep in the middle of. i didn't take it personally, 'cause kristin stayed up and thought it was funny. :)

i know i mentioned that my sister and i bought my mom a new bed, but i didn't post the pic of her with one of the serta sheep.

the quandary to breeding

this is a response from a dear friend who is currently residing in oxford, UK. and it's totally true.

The problem with population, of course, is that the “wrong” people are breeding. (Though it’s probably politically uncorrect to say so.) Birth rates in first world countries have been dropping for a while, and it’s most noticeable among more-educated people. In Europe they are very worried that state-run social security programs will completely collapse because we will soon reach a point where there are too many retired people and not enough people paying taxes into the fund. Which is also an issue in the US, of course. The main problem is that the people who seem to have the most children are those who can least afford them. Births per 1000 population in Italy: 9. Births per 1000 population in Mali: 50. The rate of natural increase in the US is only 0.5%, and in many European countries it is in negative figures. Although, I suppose that people in developed countries hog the most resources, so maybe it is us who need to stop breeding after all.... just don’t count too much on your 401k.

so i guess my beef isn't with smart people who are breeding... it's the rich, entitled republicans and the poor entitled republicans. and i know a lot of my friends' parents are poor republicans (which seems to be a contradictory term), but i'm not trying to win a popularity contest with my anti-procreationist views. the religious, moral majority have been shoving this breeding culture down our throats to further their own agendas. now i'm voicing my opinion to furture mine. i want a nation of well-behaved, quiet children. i want to go back to the time when the parent was in charge. and until adults can get it through their heads that it shouldn't be their goal to be their kid's best friend, i think breeding should stop.

if you're not going to raise your kid to not be a selfish, republican, entitled asshole, then get fixed.

stop breeding

for those of you who begged me to repost this

i saw a headline that caught my eye at starbucks today. it read next stop for us population: 300,000,000

it made me very angry.

let me break it down for you people: selfish breeders are overpopulating the world

there are many things i can think of that are because of overcrowding. here is a brief list that i came up with while i was weaving in and out of screaming children at the grocery store:
1. less children would mean more money for the adults who don't them. more money, happier people.

2. more money=more expendable income. more expendable income=bigger houses. bigger houses=more taxes. more taxes=cleaner cities and better schools (for the few people who should be allowed to breed in my new world order)

3. less children now means less crime later. here's how that breaks down: people would be less angry if there less people to compete with in this world. be it for jobs, members of the opposite sex, personal space, the less people in the world, the more breathing room we would all have.

4. maybe if you just had one kid, you could pay more attention to that kid rather than having to keep track of 3 or 4 or 5. and maybe that kid will get the attention that s/he deserves and become a productive member of society, rather than being some afterthought and resort to crime or acting as a way to get attention.

5. less kids would mean less SUVs and minivans on the road. less SUVs and minivans would probably mean less accidents (because i don't know about you, but i can never see around those fucking things in traffic), more gas for everyone, and more room to park. and in order to get an SUV (in my NWO), you'd have to be a contractor or... no, just a contractor. i really can't see any other use for them. as for minivans, if you have one and you don't have kids, then you're just a loser.

6. adults can finally have their world back. we wouldn't have the moral majority crying, "won't someone please think of the children!" because the few that exist wouldn't be enough to make anyone care. and maybe the media would finally give up on this "bleeding heart" tactic of playing up the death of a kid. bah. they're totally useless in our society, wasting our resources, time and energy. the only who cares about that kid dying is the parents. boo hoo. and if you only had one, you could keep an eye on whether they were watching the spice channel or reading "on the road" or "fight club." oh, and i wouldn't have to be bombarded with flashy, dumbass advertisements anymore, be it on TV or in a magazine or on the radio. and no more toy and candy aisles in the grocery stores. so i don't have to hear any of those rugrats whining that they have to have that. boo-fucking-hoo. you don't even know what it is, yet you have to have it? get a fucking job, then you can buy it.

7. not having kids will prevent things what happened in amish town, PA, earlier this week. that guy who killed those girls in that schoolshouse was deeply depressed over losing his infant daughter 9 YEARS AGO. i have an idea, asshole: GET COUNSELING. and i'm not upset that kids were killed, i'm upset that someone can let something like that get to him for so long that the only other option is kidnap a bunch of amish girls and kill them execution-style. that's a little extreme. don't get me wrong, the amish breed like rabbits, but they also have farms to run, clothes to make, butter to churn. they actually do need the extra hands. they also don't overrun the public school system, nor do they live on government money. oh, and they keep their kids in line with something called "discipline," something that seems to be pretty rare these days.

i am not going to have kids. i will be able to keep all of my 401k, spend my freetime furthering my education, taking trips, reading quietly and going out on a moment's notice. i can buy a house with only 2 bedrooms because that extra room will just be for storage. and what will i do with all that extra money? roll around in it. oh, and go shopping for whatever i want.

maybe with fewer people in the world, maybe we can actually feel like we have a place in somewhere. right now, with the way we're going, your kids will have to compete against millions of kids to 1) get into college 2) get a decent job. this is the BREEDERS' FAULT. you felt that having kids was more important than the bigger picture. if people had one kid, maybe they could give that one kid a better education. vacations. experiences. you can save more money for their education. but instead people are having tons of kids and barely getting by. they may not go to college if they don't get scholarships. and then what? they work at the wendy's drive through until they die?

and thanks to the advancements in medicine, they won't die until they're 100. but that's another rant altogether.

a break from my recap

i was reading the trib and i came across this article by Garrison Keillor. now, i usually don't endorse his "campwobegone-prairiehomecompanion" kind of lovefest, but the title caught my eye... this is why i continue to work at starbucks, if only just to wrestle one smile out an uptight yuppie.

Talking to strangers -- how sweet it is
In South, familiarity breeds ... familiarity

Published October 18, 2006

I was misunderstood growing up and have often been misunderstood since, but then so is everyone else. People are busy, and you can't expect them to drop everything and try to understand you. If you want to be understood, practice kindness and mercy. Kindness is seldom mistaken for anything else. Small kindnesses reverberate a long time in people's hearts.

A woman checking IDs at the airport saw me coming the other day and said, "Good morning, sunshine." She didn't know me from Adam. She glanced at my driver's license and said, "Have a good flight, darling." This was in the South, of course--in Austin, Texas, to be exact. Northern women would no sooner address a strange man as sunshine than they would ask if you wanted to see their underwear. But that woman's sunshine shone on me for the rest of the day, and a week later I still remember it.

Like I remember old waitresses in diners who addressed everyone as love. "Care for more coffee, love?" Yes, dear. And you left a quarter tip instead of a dime. Fifteen cents for a little endearment.

On the flight from Austin, I sat next to a black woman my age from Alabama who was in a chatty mood. I said, "You've seen a lot of history in Alabama." She said, "And it isn't over yet." We got to talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his family, and she blurted out, "I just cannot forgive those children of his for never giving their mother a grandbaby. Four healthy children. I don't know their sexual orientation, but you would think that one of them could've produced one baby for Mrs. King to hold. She died without ever getting those babies to hold in her arms. Do you have grandbabies?" I said I have two. "I've got two," she said, "and every time I look at them, that's me. They're the continuation of me." She patted my hand. "I am going to pray for your grandchildren. Tell me their names." So I did. When the plane pulled up to the gate in Chicago, she touched my knee and said, "It was good talking with you, darling."

Up here in the north, a man wouldn't touch a stranger on the knee or address her as darling, lest he be reported to the Attitude Police, but once in Nashville, a lady said to me, "Sweeten up to me now," meaning "give me a squeeze," so I did, of course. She smelled of lavender and talcum and lemons. Everyone craves a little sweetening now and then, but in Minnesota we don't squeeze easily or address one another as "darling."

I went to a big dinner of die-hard liberals in Texas and was darlinged left and right and sweetied and even occasionally precioused, but if you were among Democrats in Minnesota, you might think you were at a meeting of Mormon actuaries. We offer a cold handshake and a thin smile and that's all you get from us. We are wary of the big grin and the shoulder squeeze, the trademarks of the con man, and we resist being drawn into friendly banter with strangers for fear we'll end up with a truckload of aluminum siding or a set of encyclopedias.

We're burdened by the need to be cool. When I was in college, I read Kafka and Camus and tried to write like them, in flat non-American English, as if written under the influence of a migraine, until it slowly dawned on me that I was missing the basic experiences that had formed them. Enduring high school is not the same as growing up Jewish in Prague or fighting in the French Resistance. I had no solid basis for being cool in that existential motorcycle James Dean absurdist chain-smoking hero sort of way, so I gave up being cool and settled for being pleasant.

And now I see teenagers locked up in iPods, looking sour and sleepy and hostile, and I hate to see them reliving that part of my life.

If we can't talk to strangers, if there is no public life in America, then it's no wonder politics is so out of whack. And yet in the South, which has produced the most regressive politicians this side of Sudan, who are proud of bad government and lousy wars, in which a disproportionate number of young Southern men die, you keep running into the friendliest people on Earth. Explain that to me, sunshine. Sweeten up here and tell me why these good people keep electing those dreadful idiots.

flea market 9/30

kristin, shannon and i went to the kane county flea market. we found a ton of cool stuff and the weather played nice, too.

a really old stereo	back of really old stereo
rain clouds in the distance	civil war tombstones

annette moves 9/29

then annette moved into her first, very own condo in roger's park. here are some pictures of that. please ignore the boxes.

fireplace is behind those boxes.	kitchen
entry to 2nd BR	sadie, the cat

blasts from my iPhoto past 9/5 & 9/23

i was going through some old images in my iPhoto album (how virtual!) and i remembered a bunch of stuff i'm sure no one would want to know.

this is from a show that scott had at south union arts. they have this cool neon jesus hanging from the ceiling.

but the best part of the place were the sad kitty and doggy pictures they had in the bathroom

then we had my mom's surprise birthday party in milwaukee. my aunt linda got the cake.

the second best part about going to milwaukee was the return trip home. we stopped at one of the many local fireworks stores.

brouhaha. those are hockey players, by the way

openfire

the world of typos

this sounds like something i would do... accidently, of course:

Ottawa County, Mich., is in a hairy situation after an unfortunate typo was printed on ballots for the upcoming November election. A total of 170,000 ballots were printed with the word “public,” minus the “L.” The error occurred in a portion of text regarding a ban on some types of affirmative action. It will cost the county $40,000 to reprint the ballots.

thank you to Joanna Miller of chicagoist. read it or else.

and while you're there, check out my sister's posts.

am i toting too much?

found: one wallet

this weekend, my sister, of rampant douchbaggery and my mom and i went mattress shopping. it was a 60th birthday gift to my mom, who was badly in need of a new mattress, her last one having been purchased before carter was in office. so, we went to american mattress, where the badly coiffed salesman put the pressure on us and his badly bad manager put even more pressure on us. so we went across the street to bedding experts (ah, you gotta love the suburbs. oh wait. no, you don't). we get a bed there. but it all happened too quickly. it was only 2:30. the day couldn't be over yet! we. must. do. more. shopping!

against my mother's wishes, we went to the mall. the aspect of a free clinque make-over appealed to my sister (and i think i heard my mom inwardly groan). so to woodfield we go! we park somewhere within the same zip code and rest on a planter once we reached the doors to macy's. i notice a business card on the ground. and my mom notices a wallet in the planter.

"is that a real wallet?" she asked? i pick up the buldging item, promptly spilling everything that's in all over the ground, but not before i notice that there's actual greenbacks in there.

"it IS a wallet!" i declare. mom thinks we should turn it over to macy's lost and found. having worked retail before, i know how long personal items can languish in a department store's l & f. i decide that i'd find a way to get the wallet back to its rightful ownwer.

when scott, shannon and i went out for pizza later that night, i pulled it out and tried to see if there was some contact information i could use. here is a brief list of the items that were in there:

NJ ID
NJ driver's license
SS card
2 credit cards
a signed check for $25
black check with dupe attached
a check for the wallet owner's birthday for $25
an expired phone card
recipt for $800 worth of suits
birth certificate
$140 in cash
many, many business cards and notes

there was a business card with a website on it, which lead me to an email address. i wrote, saying if an identification could be made, i'd return the wallet. and he actually wrote me back! i guess he had come to chicago for a convention and he was sitting on that same planter waiting for his hotel bus. his wallet must have fallen out of his back pocket. he said that he had been looking in three states for it. when he asked me if there was anything left in it, i said, "everything is left in it." he was incredibly grateful.

so i sent it back to him today. but here's a picture for those of you who just can't quite comprehend how much stuff was in this wallet.

ps. makeovers were had, much to my mother's chagrin.

read the chicagoist, dammit

because my sister now writes for their weekend edition. she do purdy things wit wurds.

chicagoist

i am 67% Nerd

alright, enough of me bitching... let's have some fun!

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

Congratulations!

you know you want to take this test. so go ahead... take it

preservation

i read an article in the trib this morning about a neighborhood being landmarked in chicago. i recently joined preservation chicago, where they were talking about how some people don't want their block landmarked, not unlike this Hanna character in the trib article. during the preservation meeting, i asked the president, who was speaking, if the reason people didn't want their houses to be landmarked was because of money. once landmarked, you have to get approval to change anything on the outside of your house, like new windows or structural changes, which can add time and money to a project.

but this hanna guy (who is a "wealthy mortgage banker") is bitching that landmarking prevents new houses from being built, including "affordable housing."

let's examine that.

the article says that, in that block, "...the proposed district has experienced four demolitions--one of them a brick and stone three-flat designed in 1913--that have all been replaced with mega-mansions."

out of 124 buildings, four have been demolished. that's not a lot. but i'm on the side of preservation, so four is too much if they were really significant or unique buildings. and who wouldn't want a shittily-constructed "mega-mansion" put up in its place. they're sterile, uninteresting and add nothing to the neighborhood except more wealthy mortgage bankers.

also, what exactly affordable about that neighborhood. some of you who don't live in chicago know that even lincoln park is too expensive for most people's taste. so mr. hanna is saying that by landmarking gems in rich neighborhoods, the city is preventing affordable housing being built in those areas.

no one in those neighborhoods would allow affordable housing to be built anyway. and what would constitute "affordable" in lincoln park? $1200 a month in rent for a one bedroom? $300,000 mortgage? to a wealthy banker, that probably is affordable, but for us working stiffs, that's way out of our price range. and everytime an beautiful, old building gets knocked down, the city and developers always put in a huge, ugly, souless three-flat or mega-mansion. they aren't going to waste precious space on a bungalow or an apartment building. and no way are they going to cut their profit margins by building "afforable housing."

mr. hanna needs to think about where he lives and what he's saying before he opens his big, rich mouth.

ps. i realize that buildings could be torn down in cheaper neighborhoods, too. actually, i think it happens more in less desirable areas because the buildings are more likely to be foreclosed or run-down because the owners can't keep them up. or it's a rental building or house, and the owner really lives in boca raton and doesn't give a shit about it. but does that mean that rich developers can take over these poor neighborhoods and tear down history just because the people there can't afford to keep them away? no. there are plenty of other, ugly, non-historically significant houses and buildings that can be torn down instead.

grossness that must be recorded

ok, i told myself that i wouldn't blog during work hours, but this needs to be documented.

i just ate pop-tarts. two of them. cherry with frosting. my mouth and throat burns because of the sugar content. i'm not sure what possessed me to eat such things, but i want to tell the world the nutritional information of these two diabetic coma-inducing products.

serving size: 2 pastries
calories: 410
fat content: 10g
sodium: 330mg (14% of my daily value)
fiber: 1g
sugars: 33g

gasp. i can feel the sugar seeping into my system! i can feel the greasy coating on my tongue cutting off my airway! quick, someone do a tart-ectomy!