Being Amber Rhea

GAPN is DHSOTM

Our fellow hostees at DreamHost have declared that the Georgia Podcast Network shall be the DreamHost Site of the Month for May 2006! What do we win? Several things: 1) a nifty banner to put on the site, 2) a shout-out in the DreamHost newsletter, and 3) the respect and admiration of web users everywhere (or at least somewhere).

Thanks to everyone who voted!

(Cross-posted you know where)

Compact cars hate America

In the parking lot just now, I saw an SUV with a miniature “Support Our Troops” magnet affixed to the cover of its gas tank. And I was amused, in a disillsuioned kind of way.

Dammit

I don’t know what happened to that last post I wrote. The one time I don’t save it beforehand in BBEdit… grrrr.

Basically, all I was saying was that I love this post from Belledame at Fetch Me My Axe. I had a couple of lines of witty, personally relevant commentary along with it, but now I can’t remember it and it’s lost forever in the ether. Damn. Well, anyway, Belledame’s post rocks, and so does she.

Remember when we used to do bulleted lists?

A disjointed Powerpoint-style post is about all I have time for today… hence:

• Where the hell did my 3-day weekend go?
• The Da Vinci Code was about what I expected – entertaining, and Tom Hanks had really bad hair.
• The movie theater will give you free refills on 32-ounce fountain drinks. When I asked the kid working there how many people actually come back for refills, he said, “About 1 in 5.” !!
• I finally bought a bathing suit (Nikki – good call about Kohl’s), so that means there will be lounging by the pool. There would’ve been fornication in the dressing room stall, but some kid kept going in and out of the dressing room, and that felt dirty.
• Duane is the man (and he has a kick-ass tattoo).
• Apparently $35 can bump you into a higher tax bracket. WTF is that shit. (“My concern, and I’ll have to check with my accountant on this…”)
• I’m having one of my quarterly existential crises today. But I think it’ll be alright. Eating cake from Publix post haste might help.

Weekend recap… why not?

I am so glad this is a three-day weekend. I really needed some time off – and although this weekend certainly hasn’t been all ass-sitting, it’s still nice not to have to get up for work on Monday morning.

Actually, it’s been a pretty busy weekend, up until today. Friday night Rusty and I went to see Vicki Blankenship’s Indiegrrl Showcase at Eddie’s Attic. Even though we got there late, we were still able to take in a lot of awesomeness. And I bought two CDs, because I’m all about supporting independent musicians. Not coincidentally, you can also hear my interview with Vicki on the Georgia Podcast Network.

Saturday morning I had to get up early to get my hair did at 9:30. At 10:30 Rusty did a Skype interview w/ an independent candidate for governor. Skype rocks my socks.

After that it was off to lunch at the Brickstore Pub, where we did another interview (seriously, we have been a couple of interviewin’ fools lately) with a porn dude, which will hopefully be available later this week. Then we took in some of the Decatur Arts Festival until we realized it was just too damn hot to be out walking around. Rusty got a few photos, though.

Saturday night was the Doll Squad’s Spring Fling show at Smith’s – and guess what, that coincides w/ another interview we did. Unfortunately, we had to suffer through two crappy bands beforehand, and so it was almost 12:30 by the time the Doll Squad actually started their show. Which meant we weren’t able to stay for the entire thing, because we’re old fogies. That pissed us off, because we wanted to see it, but I don’t understand why everything has to start so goddamn late. It’s like the shows at the 40 Watt in Athens… there is no need to wait until the middle of the goddamn night. It would be just as cool at 9:00 p.m.

Yesterday was back to the Decatur Arts Festival again, where Rusty scored some interviews while I sat in Starbucks appreciating the AC. And… well, now this recap has gotten way too long, which should give you an idea of our weekend overall. And now, I must go put away my laundry and do some cleaning; then I’ll have earned the right to lie on the couch watching Grey’s Anatomy on Tivo.

Insert gratuitous Ludacris reference here

“It’s none of my business what other people think of me.”

Last week, my therapist said that statement and had me repeat it. I didn’t understand wtf he was talking about at first; then he explained it. I’ll paraphrase:

Regardless of what you do, approx. 1/3 of the people who know you are going to just absolutely hate your guts no matter what. Another 1/3 won’t give a shit one way or the other. And another 1/3 will like you (or love you) no matter what.

Well, I sure do hope it’s a full 1/3 that would like/love me no matter what. But damn, there I go making it my business what other people think about me again! Let me start over…

Basically, what he was saying was, there’s no point in trying to not piss people off, because you’ll never please all of the people all of the time – and you won’t please some of them any of the time. When all you do is try not to make people mad at you, you’re compromising yourself and giving up some of who you are. So instead of trying to tiptoe around everyone else’s sensibilities, be true to yourself, do what you know to be best for you, and as far as other people go? All you can do is hope that they’ll think well of you, but really that’s their business and has a whole lot more to do w/ them than you – and the “what if” factor is certainly not a reason to stop being who you really are.

So that has been my food for thought since Thursday.

Via AAG: “It looks like a toe”

Always Aroused Girl has a charming little vignette that illustrates that children aren’t weird at all about sex. It’s us adults that go all googly-eyed about it and project our uncomfortableness onto our children, while to them it’s just one other thing. Not surprisingly, the younger they are, the less of a big deal it is, because that’s less time they’ve had to be affected by societal stupidity filtered thru adults.

As an aside, this is also seen wrt transgender parents worrying over how to explain their gender transition to their young children. They think it will be “too hard” for the kids to understand, esp. if the kids are really young. Funnily enough, the opposite turns out to be true; little kids just accept it. They haven’t yet been taught that you can’t change genders (the common black-and-white societal perception).

Hey, antiporn feminists and Religious Right: get out of our bedrooms!

Antiprincess says it perfectly:

This may not be what the average antiporn feminist is actually saying to me, the average consensually-kinky feminist, but this is what I hear:

“but if YOU PEOPLE would just get over this selfish obsession with your stupid little orgasms and REALIZE the REALITY of PORNOGRAPHY (which is not free speech anyway) and how it HURTS WOMEN, then you could get on board and everything would be fine.”

Trust me, antiporn feminist, you don’t want someone on your side who has been bullied and belittled into agreeing with you. People who are beaten into submission don’t make good supporters over the long term. They make good echo chambers, good receptacles of your vitriol, good amen corners; but not because of their deep abiding love for women, simply because they don’t want to be seen as selfish and obsessed. You don’t want someone on your side just because they don’t want to piss you off and risk humiliation.

When people don’t surrender who they are, and work to be part of the solution rather than just complaining about the problem (and, in the case of the anti-porn feminists, they’re often missing the real problem, but I digress) – well, that makes me smile.

(Via Fetch Me My Axe)

1296 toilets

The office where I work has a flat-screen monitor on the wall of the lobby, that displays “factoids” and trivia and whatnot. One of the factoids is, “The Atlanta airport has more than 1296 toilets.”

This really bugs me. If it has more than 1296, why not round up to 1300 and say, “The Atlanta airport has about 1300 toilets.” The fact that they didn’t choose to use 1300 suggests to me that there must be fewer than 1300 toilets, but that leaves only three possibilities for an accurate number, each of which could better be phrased as, “almost 1300.” Not to mention the fact that if they know it’s within a three-toilet margin of error, they could just give an exact number. Why choose 1296 as a point of reference??

Three types of libertarians

I like griftdrift’s definitions of the three types of libertarians, because I call myself a social libertarian when it comes to issues of personal choice, privacy, and freedom. (And I don’t mean “freedom” in the cheesy GWB way.)

He also offers a challenge:

I challenge the hard liners and the fauxs to spend one day making a list of every service they use that is provided or enhanced by the government. I think the enormity of that list would be sobering.

Screaming in a vacuum or living in ideological fantasy land is easy. Acting with good sense is never easy. Maybe one day when the sensible libertarians start making themselves known we might have a true third party in this country.

I’d be interested to hear any responses from hard-line libertarians (you know who you are!). Generally I can respect the positions of hard-line libertarians, but a lot of their ideas seem too far-fetched to ever work in reality.