10:10 AM: I get up, finally roused by the hour and a half of crying and whining from Stanley, as well as by the loud sniffing noises coming from underneath the bedroom door. Is he trying to tell by smell whether someone is still in the bedroom? I don’t know. But I get up.
10:15 AM: After changing into sweatpants, a t-shirt, and a sweatshirt, I head downstairs and check what dog food we have opened in the refrigerator.
10:17 AM: I give Stanley and Paco some Artemis canned food. I give Mina her choice of the leftover Artemis that she couldn’t finish yesterday, or the new Evanger’s Turkey Stew. She gazes into both bowls and then looks at me like she can’t quite believe the slop I’ve offered her.
10:20 AM: Stanley has finished his breakfast. Mina is sitting on the bunny chair a foot away from her food, and Stanley tries to look at her food. I yell at him. He backs off, then approaches again. Clearly, he is interested only in the new food, as he’s stretched out carefully with his nose pointing at the bowl of new food. His back legs are far behind him, as if he is trying to trick me into thinking he isn’t really about to snatch some of Mina’s food. I yell at him anyway, and empty the dishwasher while I wait for Mina to decide if she’s going to eat this morning or not.
10:25 AM: I have finished emptying the dishwasher, and have now put all the dirty dishes away. Mina leaves the food and walks up her ramp to sit in a sunny place on the couch. I take this as a sign that she is uninterested in food, and I call all the dogs to go outside.
10:30 AM: The dogs have successfully done their business, and I have successfully scooped up their dog area without getting any of the poop on my hands. We go back inside, where Stanley beats all of us running up the stairs, and consequently manages to grab a chunk of Mina’s canned food. By the time I see him, he’s already swallowed the food. Mina looks at her bowls again.
10:32 AM: Reluctantly, I open the cupboard and bring out the last can of Hill’s Prescription Diet food that the vet gave me. I am against Hill’s food, partly because if the can doesn’t say human-grade ingredients, then they probably aren’t, and partly because of the vet industry getting all their nutrition information from Hill’s during vet school, and getting kickbacks for selling Hill’s or free Hill’s food for their own animals. Also, I don’t want to open another can of dog food if I don’t have. I decide that if Mina walks away from her bowl one more time, I will open the Hill’s food and see if she wants that instead.
10:34 AM: Mina walks away from her food. I open the can of Hill’s, and Mina comes back to her bowl and begins eating the Evanger’s Turkey Stew. Damn the dog!
10:35 AM: I give Stanley the bowl of leftover Artemis, which he gobbles down as if he is afraid I will take it away from him any second. Because I’ve already opened up the Hill’s, I make a bowl of it anyway and put it next to Mina’s bowl of Evanger’s. Mina ignores the Hill’s.
10:37 AM: I disinfect the humidifier while I wait for Mina to finish, and put my own breakfast together.
10:40 AM: Mina is nearly finished. I have three opened cans of dog food in my refrigerator. For anyone else, this would not be a problem. For someone who has three chihuahuas, this is a problem because the food will go bad faster than the dogs can eat it, even if I give them canned food for every meal for the next four days. Damn the dog!
I have had this cold for 5 days now, and every single trash can in the house has a six-inch layer of fluffy, crumpled booger tissues on top.
EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Also, when I blow my left nostril, air comes out of my right eye. I tried to ask Chris if this was normal, but after he asked me to repeat my question several times, he just goggled at me and then said simply, “There is something very wrong with you.” I don’t think he was referring to the eye air.
This is ridiculous.
I wasn’t thrilled when I heard that Isaiah Washington had called his costar a faggot, but when you grow up with people calling you “China Girl” just because you walked past them, you kind of accept that there are other people in the world who are racist, homophobic, whatever.
But then when Washington brought it up again at the Golden Globes and said he didn’t call TR Knight a faggot, which was disputed the next day by Knight and others, well, then I realized Washington has a deeper problem than homophobia. He has stupiditis.
Before I go into the stupiditis, let’s first examine the whole idea of putting Washington in rehab. Why does he even need to “ask for help” to “examine” his soul and “understand” why he called a gay person a faggot? Here’s a novel idea — maybe he called a gay person a faggot because he’s homophobic. And then maybe he lied about it because he knew that calling people names like that aren’t socially acceptable.
But the last time I checked, rehab wasn’t something that could cure homophobia, or even stupidity. (If it did, I would have already nominated several dozen people for a stint inside.) Putting Washington in rehab is just another example of how political correctness has gone overboard.
As liberal as I am, I have to call a spade a spade. Washington’s in rehab because he has to do something (other than firing his publicist, who seems only to have suffered from the mistake of having Washington as a client) to show he’s sorry. It doesn’t matter that his actions say something other than what he’s now spouting, or that a psych evaluation is unlikely to show some kind of “disease” in himself that caused his sudden outburst of homophobia.
Homophobia, racism, and sexism are not diseases. They are personality traits, and though exposure to diversity can sometimes lessen the degree of hatred and intolerance, rehab can not turn a skunk into a rose. If ABC was really intolerant of this kind of behavior, they should have just fired him and not bothered with the charade of “helping” Washington get over this.
What Washington did was not “unfortunate.” It was stupid; hence, the stupiditis. His stupidity is not that he’s homophobic, but that he showed it.
While the world would be a better place if no one showed these kinds of traits, people are always going to be against other people and often for reasons as little as the way as someone acts or looks. Pretending that racism and homophobia don’t exist is ridiculous, but outlawing expressions of it that could lead to actual physical harm is a different matter. Free speech is not the same as hate speech.
People’s personal feelings on homosexuality are their own business. But when you work for a company that has rules about certain types of conduct, you need to follow those rules. You can’t change how you feel, but you can certainly be smart enough to keep your mouth shut when you know that your personal feelings can get you in trouble.
Washington publicly apologized, for which I commend him, especially since he managed to apologize for his remarks unlike other people who say “I’m sorry if anyone felt hurt by what I said” which I’ve always felt is one of the dumbest ways to apologize without actually apologizing. But Washington already got a free pass back in October when he first called Knight a faggot. This time around, while he didn’t call him a faggot, Washington lied about the original incident and in front of people who knew the truth. Once is a mistake, twice is just stupid.
- No one would be allowed to use “reply all” unless they are responding to a work email. Do we, the people who have had the misfortune of being cc’d on a group email, really need to see multiple email replies that consist solely of “congratulations!” from people we don’t even know? NO!! We do not!!!
In Jane World, people improperly using the “reply all” feature would be punished by being forced to read the very first diary I ever kept, which features such scintillating entries as “PT explained quite clearly to me that I have mixed feelings about Mark. I sometimes like him, but sometimes don’t, so that’s why I sometimes like him and sometimes not.” In addition, it is written in very poor handwriting and contains several hand-drawn portraits of Madonna, circa “Who’s That Girl.”
- People would have to take a test before being allowed to have children. Have you heard the news story about the mom whose 3-year-old wandered out of the house and onto a nearby highway, and when police came to her door, she said, “Oh, he got out again”? And has another child, and is pregnant with a third?
- Anyone suffering from a cold would be immediately locked up and placed in a bubble so that he could not infect, say, his spouse, who currently believes that Trent Reznor’s Head Like A Hole must have been written during a cold like this one.
- All people would be required to tell the truth about other people. Instead of statements from neighbors that they would “never have suspected John of being a child molester. He was a nice guy, very quiet,” people would say, “you know, he was kind of weird, and I started thinking something was wrong when he asked to borrow my daughter’s Barbie doll, because I’m pretty sure he didn’t have kids.” No one would ever say “she was honestly the nicest person in the world and never had a mean thing to say about anyone,” but instead we would hear, “she was a bitch and she cheated on tests all the time.” This particular Jane World law is solely for Jane’s own amusement, and has no bearing on legal issues whatsoever.
- Tom Cruise would be locked away permanently in the Jane World version of Hell, in which he would be forced to hold an infinite argument with someone who was only able to repeat “you don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do” over and over again, and also interrupted him every time he tried to say something.<
- Residents of Jane World would consist solely of people like Jane who hold Jane’s opinions.
- People would get paid for reading good books. Oooh, and for eating potatoes.
As you can see, Jane World is a fascinating new place full of wonder and excitement. Hurry now and book your tickets to visit this terrific vacation spot, before a small minority faction of Janes rise up to overthrow the Jane government!
I did not know that my opinion of President Bush could sink even lower.
Wake me up when it’s 2008.
Derrick Z. Jackson’s opinion
Today Mina has brought a chocolate colored moose into the room, out of the room, and later back into the room. She has also brought her chickie into the room, back out, onto the couch downstairs, then back up to the room.
Currently, in their bedroom, we have:
- A koala bear in the green crate
- A pink pig and the chickie in the purple portable crate
- A chocolate moose on the blue chair
Mina herself is on top of a comforter which is on top of a purple sack bed, which is on the blue chair. If I slipped a dried pea under her sack, she would probably get very angry with me.
Note to self: the next time you want to read a Best American Essays compilation, maybe you should make sure that it doesn’t contain an essay about a lost pet that makes you worried and then happy when the pet is found, but then makes you horribly depressed when the next essay is about a guy who puts his dog to sleep and oddly digs a grave for the dog before the dog is actually dead, and then follows these with an essay about someone whose spouse died, and then ends with an essay by someone diagnosed with liver cancer who later dies.
I’m not sure the library will take this copy back; it’s got tearstains all over it!
Yesterday Chris and I were doing what we always do — sitting on the recliners, dogs napping on or around us, and watching tv. I was fast-forwarding through a boring “Grease, You’re the One That I Want” when Chris suddenly grabbed my arm and turned to me.
“Oh, I almost forgot!” he said. “I was reading some article about a person with Asperger’s on boston.com, and you totally sounded like her.”
“What?” I said. “No way, don’t you have to be, like, super-intelligent?” I was thinking about a Wired article I’d read a year or two ago on Bram Cohen, the guy who created BitTorrent, who has Asperger’s.
“But you ARE intelligent,” Chris said. “More than the average.”
“I thought with Asperger’s, you had to be really smart in one thing,” I said. “I’m the same level of smart in everything.”
“Well, let me tell you about this article,” Chris said. “I mean, I don’t think you have a bad case of it, but you probably have a mild one.”
Read More »
8:30 AM: Lie in bed until Daddy whisks off my blanket and carries me outside, while those dirty rotten boys scamper about on the ground. How common of them to actually walk with their feet.
8:35 AM: Pee on grass. Walk back into the garage and wait for those stupid boys to pee all over my pee spot.
8:40 AM: Get back in the house, accept a treat from Daddy, debate whether or not I want to eat it, and possibly eat it.
8:45 AM - 10:30 AM: Sleep in a blanket.
10:35 AM: Hear faint noises, gradually getting louder as they approach me. Suddenly, my blanket is whipped off. I am naked! Oh, it’s just Mommy.
10:40 AM: Walk around the garage until Mommy tosses me outside. Perhaps I will pee, perhaps I will poop. Or I may just stand here gazing blankly at the back yard.
10:50 AM - 10:51 AM: Watch the greedy boys gobble down their breakfast.
11:00 AM: Hmm, maybe I should take a look at the food.
11:02 - 11:15 AM: Maybe the food will change to pieces of steak if I stare at it and at Mommy long enough.
11:20 AM: All right, fine, I’ll take a few bites.
11:35 AM: Okay, I picked all the good stuff out. You may remove my bowl now, servant.
11:40 AM: Bark! Bark! Bark! So what if Mommy’s on a conference call; I think I might have heard a FedEx truck outside!
11:50 AM: Oddly, the door to my room where Mommy works is now shut. I guess I’ll sit in the windowsill and keep an eye out for more — BARK! BARK!! BARK!!!
12:30 PM: Carry chickie upstairs. Walk around room looking for a place to put the chick. At last, I settle upon my portable pet home, where there is already a koala bear in the corner. I deposit the chickie in the portable pet home, and then I walk around the room looking for a place for me to nap. A mother needs time away from her children, you know.
1:00 PM: I hear Mommy calling. I hear the boys stampeding downstairs. They must be getting some kind of treat from Mommy.
1:05 PM: I poke my head out of the blanket. I take a few steps. Oh, good, here comes Mommy now with my treat, and I didn’t even have to get completely out of bed! What is it today? Mozzarella cheese? I might eat it. Let me roll it around the blanket with my head first.
1:10 - 2:05 PM: Another trip outside and then back to…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..
2:10 PM: I walk up to Mommy in her computer chair. I grumble at her. Thankfully, she isn’t retarded today, and understands in record time (only 5 minutes today) that she is supposed to pick me up.
by Sharon Shinn
ONE LINE SUMMARY: Fiona, the daughter of a Safe-Keeper, tries to become a Safe-Keeper and in the process learns who she really is.
I’m a fan of Shinn’s Samaria novels, but I had no idea that she wrote young adult/children’s books also. This book was so engrossing that I read it straight through in one sitting.
Safe-keepers are in charge of hearing and keeping secrets told to them by the people in their village, and although I didn’t actually like Fiona much herself, I liked the world that was described. My only complaint about this book is that there appears to be no direct sequel to it yet (if at all). The ending of this book is such that it feels like a “To Be Continued…” type of non-ending.
Still good, still recommended, just…write a sequel to this!!
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