me, unplugged

today i was filling out an online survey (the kind that pays you) (hey, i gotta do SOMETHING to earn money, right?), and one of the questions was asking where i purchase body care products. two of the options were:

• Walmart
• Other mass merchandiser such as Target or Kmart (excluding Walmart)

which: AWESOME. apparently enough people (that shop at mass merchandisers that AREN’T walmart) complained that the survey creators added a new options for us walmart-haters.

okay, i may be changing my stance on babies, more specifically, on whether or not i want to have any.

so far, i will be having a french speaking baby. next, i will be having a japanese baby. (which makes much more sense, given that i’m half-japanese.)

essentially, i’m probably going to have to marry a french-japanese man. and that’s not a tall order at ALL.

woohoo! and they even used an Arcade Fire song in the trailer!

Stolen from Bellaventa…

A – Age: 31

B – Bed size: queen (and yes, if you must know, i am)

C – Chore You Hate: dusting. i’m okay with just about anything else.

D – Dad’s Name: joe cool.

E – Essential Start Your Day Item: shoes? *shrug* my days start differently since i’ve been gainfully unemployed since august of last year.

F – Favorite Actor: way too many, i’m not even bothering with this question.

G – Gold or Silver: silver

H – Height: 5’5″

I – Instrument (s) you play: piano (10 years of lessons), guitar (not so great, self-taught)

J – Job Title: ha!

K – Kid(s): oh, HAY-ULL no.

L – Like: mike? (?)

M – Mom’s Name: faye.

N – Nickname: stef, spaz the tampon girl

O – Overnight Hospital Stay Other Than Birth: none.

P – Pet Peeve: people who don’t use their turn signals. i could write a whole blog post on this one. oh wait! i already did!

Q – Quote that you like: “Everyone has to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another beer, and its your round.” – JimmyGulp

R – Righty or Lefty: righty (or “superior”) i only say that because my lil’ sis is a southpaw.

S – Siblings: two.

T – Time You Wake Up: heh…when would YOU wake up if you didn’t have a job?

U – Useful tool: politicians.

V – Vegetable that you dislike: mushrooms. blech.

W – Ways you run late: huh??? like…”my car breaking down”? or “frantically calling my supervisor”? i don’t get this.

X – X-rays You’ve Had: knees, nose (i think), dental stuffs, etc. borrrinnngggg.

Y – Yummy Foods You Make: tons. i’m learning to cook, and i’m also learning that i’m not too shabby when i just make shit up on the fly.

Z – Zodiac: taurus. because WE JUST FUCKING RULE. you know who you are. am i right, or am i right?

okay, so even though nick lachey is all ‘gone hollywood’ on our cincinnati asses, he’s still got a bit of hometown pride. he’s putting up some time and money to put together “taking the stage,” a new reality show on MTV about SCPA (school for creative and performing arts) in downtown cincinnati. of course, nick is an SCPA grad himself, but still.

the coolest thing though? mia carruthers, the singer-songwriter in this trailer, is/was one of my friend’s music students (of course, not so much anymore now that mtv took over her life), and she played at awakenings when i worked there; she’s incredibly talented, friendly, and pretty mature for a high schooler, all told. and obviously, she’s adorable. this may be the only reality tv show that i end up watching throughout the season. go cincinnati! woo!

Open Letter to the Republican Traitors (From a Former Republican)

You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the “architect” America just hired — President Obama — to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.

I used to be one of you. As recently as 2000 I worked to get Senator McCain elected in that year’s primary. (McCain and Gen. Tommy Franks wrote glowing endorsements regarding my book about military service, AWOL.). I have a file of handwritten thank you notes from Presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush I and II. In the 1970s and early 80s I hung out with Jack Kemp and bought into his “supply side” myth and even wrote a book he endorsed pushing his ideas.) There’s more, but take it from me; my parents (evangelical leaders Francis and Edith Schaeffer) and I were about as tight with — and useful to — the Republican Party as anyone. We played a big part creating the Religious Right.

In the mid 1980s I left the Religious Right, after I realized just how very anti-American they are, (the theme I explore in my book Crazy For God). They wanted America to fail in order to prove they were right about America’s “moral decline.” Soon after McCain lost in 2000 I re-registered as an independent in disgust with W. Bush. But I still respected many Republicans. Not today.

How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan defined the modern conservatism that used to be what the Republican Party I belonged to was about. Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today’s wholly negative Republican Party. And can you picture the gentlemanly and always polite Ronald Reagan, endorsing a radio hate-jock slob who crudely mocked a man with Parkinson’s and who now says he wants an American president to fail?!

With people like Limbaugh as the loudmouth image of the Republican Party — you need no enemies. But something far more serious has happened than an image problem: the Republican Party has become the party of obstruction at just the time when all Americans should be pulling together for the good of our country. Instead, Republicans are today’s fifth column sabotaging American renewal.

President Obama has been in office barely 45 days and the Republican Party has the nerve to blame him for the economic and military cataclysm he inherited. I say economic and military cataclysm because without the needless war in Iraq you all backed we would not be in the economic mess we’re in today. If that money had been spent here at home on renovating our infrastructure, taking us toward a green economy, putting our health-care system in order we’d be a very different situation.

As the father of a Marine who served in George W. Bush’s misbegotten wars let me say this: if President Obama’s strategy to repair our economy, infrastructure and healthcare fails that will put our troops at far greater risk because the world will become a far more dangerous place. So for all you flag-waving Republicans who are trying to undermine the President at home — if you succeed more of our troops will be killed abroad.

When your new leader Rush Limbaugh calls for President Obama to fail he’s calling for more flag-draped coffins. Limbaugh is the new “Hanoi Jane.”

For the party that created our crises of misbegotten war, mismanaged economy, the lack of regulation of our banking industry, handing our country to rich crooks… to obstruct the one person who is trying to repair the damage is obscene.

Just imagine where America would be today if the 14 to 20 million voters — “the rube base” who slavishly follow the likes of Limbaugh — had not voted as a block year after year thus empowering the Republican fiasco. We would have a regulated banking industry and would have avoided our current financial crisis; some 4000 of our killed military men and women would be alive; over to 35,000 wounded Americans would be whole; we would have been leaders in the environmental movement; we would be in the middle of a green technology boom fueling a huge expansion of our economy and stopping our dependence on foreign oil, and our health-care system would be reformed.

After Obama was elected, you Republican leaders had a unique last chance to send a patriotic message of unity to the world — and to all Americans. You could have backed our president’s economic recovery plan. Since we all know that half of our problem is one of lost confidence and perception, nothing would have done more to calm the markets and project resolve and confidence than if you had been big enough to take Obama’s offered hand and had work with him — even if you disagreed ideologically. You had the chance to put our country first. You utterly failed to rise to the occasion.

The worsening economic situation is your fault and your fault alone. The Republicans created this mess through 8 years of backing the worst president in our history and now, because you put partisan ideology ahead of the good of our country, you have blown your last chance to redeem yourselves. You deserve the banishment to the political wilderness that awaits all traitors.

the other day, my friend and i got into a discussion about prayer, and, as she’s catholic, we got onto the topic of praying to mary. now, being what i like to call a “recovering catholic,” i was fully aware that those that follow catholicism pray to mary and the saints, along with the holy trifecta. however, i asked her why she didn’t just pray to god and jesus, as it seemed to make sense that you’d just pray right to the source, and not go to their underlings to get prayers answered. and then i remembered. 

“oh yeah, that’s right, catholics believe that mary was sinless like jesus, right?” to which she replied that yes, mary was “conceived without sin.”

in the grand scheme of organized religion, this small difference between catholicism and other sects of christianity probably isn’t a huge deal. but it certainly did get me thinking. my initial thought after she told me this, borne of years of church-going and sunday school, was how it just seemed silly to believe that mary was sinless when it was clear she was human, and no human being who has ever lived was, or is, or will be, perfect, except for jesus (but only because he was ALL human and ALL god) (yeah, i can’t wrap my head around it either).

a brief history of my faith

after years and years of going to church, struggling with my faith, praying, talking to those who were “in the know,” studying the bible, and rededicating my life to christ countless times, i realized that doing all of those things while never quite being able to reconcile my own feelings about it made me feel like a complete fraud. it was a personal decision, see. my mind has always thought in logical, rational terms, and religion and faith don’t exactly mesh with rationality so well. faith is very emotional…it’s about having a relationship with someone that you can’t see, touch or hear. the only “responses” that you get from this being are almost completely subjective, and it’s entirely up to you to decipher how events that occur might be an answer to your prayers. or a non-answer, as the case may be.

when my ex-husband and i were going through a really difficult time, i prayed (a LOT) for us to be able to communicate clearly with each other, for us to be able to work things out, and to try to remember why we had fallen in love in the first place. so what, then, was i supposed to learn by the fact that, after months of marital counseling and prayer, we ended up getting divorced anyway? when i posed this question to some of my fellow believers, i got a number of different responses. some said that i should be learning that perhaps we weren’t meant to be married in the first place (in which case i should probably also learn that i had poor judgment in relationships…which may be true).  some said that i should take home the lesson that god doesn’t always answer our prayers in the way that we think he should (in which case, i say…what’s the point of prayer again?).

this is, of course, only one situation. there are countless others where i would pray for something and receive an entirely different “answer” to my prayers. and of course, there are times when i would pray for something and i would get the result i was praying for. doesn’t that seem just a bit…random to you?

in the end, i felt like praying was an entirely fruitless exercise in what was supposed to be a way to feel closer to god, which is something that i never felt after praying. it really felt like something that i needed to check off my list every day, along with reading the bible, in order to be a Good Christian. because that’s what Good Christians do, right? 

because all prayer was doing for me was leaving me completely frustrated, depressed and feeling like i was only “living the christian life” for family and friends, i stopped praying so much. and i stopped reading the bible. and eventually i stopped going to church. and i honestly can’t say that i feel any more or less spiritual than i did all those years as an active believer.

(whoa…waaaaaaayyyy off my original point here. sorry.)

to get back to my point, my friend believes that mary was sinless, and my former belief system tells me that she was not. who is to say which one of us is right or wrong? we can’t both be right, so one of us must be wrong. and what kind of eternal consequences (if any) are there to pay for being wrong about that?

let’s take this one step further. some people believe that abortion is wrong. in most circumstances, i am one of those people. but i also believe that not doing everything within our power to stop it from being necessary is also grievously wrong. there are many ways in which i believe we can circumvent the need for something like abortion, but until we’ve addressed the underlying issues (ridding ourselves of this ridiculous abstinence-only sex education and implementing comprehensive sex ed, for one), then abortion is, and will continue to be, a necessary evil.

but whose belief system is right? is my friend’s belief system right? was mary sinless? does being on a birth control pill constitute murder? is capital punishment okay?

what about other religions? the majority of the world (along with myself) would say that it’s wrong to hijack planes and fly them into buildings, killing thousands, but what about the countless natives who rebelled, and were killed by, colonialists who tried to make them conform to their belief system? were the colonialists right to do so in the name of god? and wasn’t hitler a christian, believing that what he was doing was right?

i think that basic moral code dictates that murder is wrong, in any fashion. but i’ve heard many people of faith say that war is a “necessary evil,” and that capital punishment is our answer to “an eye for an eye.”  but if someone is TRULY pro-life, shouldn’t they be pro-all life, and not just unborn babies?

the biggest problem that i think that i have today is the large amount of inconsistency that i see in organized religion and those who believe. many christians i know (if not all of them) pick and choose portions of the bible that they wish to believe as it suits their religious interests. in parts of the old testament, god states that homosexuality is wrong, but there are also parts where he states that if a woman’s husband dies, her brother-in-law is required to marry her. does anyone carry out this edict anymore?

to say that i’ve become jaded and cynical about organized religion or monotheism is an understatement. i’m still trying to sort out what this means for me in a spiritual manner, and if i simply need to set aside religious leanings and try to be as good and kind of a person as i can to myself and others. for now, that is all i have, and until i feel like there is more consistency and meaning in christianity, it is what i will continue to believe.

churchill’s in carew tower is closing on march 3rd! why doesn’t the entire frickin’ city just close up shop then!? booooo!!!!!

*sniff*

the only 4-star restaurant in ohio, kentucky and indiana, pigall’s, is closing at the end of this month. i just finished reading a review over at kate’s random musings, and now i’m sad, and angry at myself for not going when i had the chance.

i was fortunate enough to dine at the maisonette before it closed, but i had really wanted to try out pigall’s before they closed, and now they’re completely booked up until they close on february 28th. it’s a shame.

i truly believe that what makes a city attractive and interesting is the number of non-chain institutions (shops, restaurants, etc.). after pigall’s is gone, what next? will we be taken over by more of the likes of palomino’s, rock bottom, or cheesy and overpriced american versions of scottish and irish pubs? (okay, i fully admit that i’m kind of being a snob about that last one.)

i suppose i’m just really disappointed that we first lost one wonderful culinary institution, and now we’re going to lose another. i know that i’ve slammed cincinnati in the past for being boring/awful for dating/ridiculously conservative, but i really DO want to believe that cincinnati has the potential to be a great and interesting city to live in. it’s just getting more and more difficult to believe.