Good news: We womenfolk have mastered blogs, dedicated websites and other really, really hard techical stuff. However, we apparently have not learned the finer details of driving a train.

“This is debunking this myth that boys are the ones that are driving the train when it comes to Internet use. Girls are absolutely sitting in the engine … and doing a lot of communicating,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at Pew.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have blogged and need to take care of a couple of burned thighs.

*bimbles off*

Don’t EVEN start to think we like each other.

*bimbles off*

Life is a hard bitch sometimes. No one ever said it would be different and that’s just that. But, sometimes, it’s just a bitch.

When you’re my age, I think you’re supposed to come to a certain acceptance of your life and all the decisions and experiences that have shaped it. There is supposed to be some wisdom, some sageness allowing you to realize all things – big and small – are, in affect, who you are. You make good decisions and you make bad ones and the wheel keeps moving. No one gets to be perfect or right all the time. It is how it is.

Unfortunately, I never developed an acceptance of my life. When I take an inventory, it seems a series of bad judgments, a long line of hurts and pains I might have avoided, but didn’t. Even knowing what I was doing was wrong or simply stupid, I did them. And, now I have accumulated so much bad stuff, it just hurts all the time.

Some people will tell you even if an experience was bad, they wouldn’t change it. Bad experiences are what make good experiences good, in effect. I will be honest and tell you there are many things I would change about my life. If I had a magic pill to go back and choose a different path, I would do in a heartbeat. Cut out people and things that make my heart hurt. Selfish, yes. But, at least I’m honest. At least I can look myself in the eye and not lie about why I would do it.

Life should have a delete option. You get to just delete everything to that point, then start over. Just delete the people and events that still give you pain and move on. To erase false promises, broken hearts and aching loneliness and fill it up with something better. If only a little better.

Some would call me immature or a coward or worse. And, that is fine. They don’t live in my head or in my heart. My experiences don’t affect them. They don’t lie awake at night wondering if they will make it through tomorrow because if one more bad thing happens, all bets are off.

Years ago, I was diagnosed with chronic depression. Not having-a-bad-day blues, not reaction to something bad, but honest-to-god depression. As in, something is chemically wrong with my brain. You don’t just snap out of it. You don’t just think about all the good things in your life and feel better. You don’t pray your way out of it. It just is. It is as real as having a broken arm. And, it makes you as helpless as baby some days.

I’m having one of those days. And, I don’t like what I see when I look at the past 40 years. And, I don’t know what I’m going to do about that. Maybe there is nothing to do. I don’t know.

At the moment, a delete button would be better. If just a bit better.

NOTE: The following containers spoilers for the movie “The Fountain.”

At great personal risk, I have knowledge to save everyone from needlessly wasting two hours of their lives. The great knowledge is this: if the urge to watch “The Fountain” grabs you, lie down with a cold rag across your head for a few hours until the urge passes. Trust me, you want to LET IT PASS.

Facing three days of being at home on the couch after being diagnosed with a sinus infection, I went by Blockbuster when I picked up all my meds on Friday. I grabbed a bunch of movies I had been wanting to see, including “The Fountain” – mainly because the premise sounded good and I like both Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Sadly, I got caught in the same trap with “Flightplan” a couple of years ago. I’m sure all this looked good on paper at some point.

Remember those pot-induced conversations you had in college regarding life and death and the universe and, GOD, EVERYTHING?! Remember how goddamned deep it sounded then and how utterly fucking stupid it sounds now? Okay, add decent lighting, a budget and two good-looking actors to that and you have “The Fountain.”

First, the story is so choppy and out-of-sequence, it makes “Memento” look linear. Truly. I couldn’t decide if Jackman was having out-of-body experiences, he was living three lives or just hallucinating. Having learned this movie was conceived while “Requiem for a Dream” was being made, I’m going with the last thought. I mean, having been a huge “Pulp Fiction” fan, I can usually stay with a movie, even if I have to take notes. However, “The Fountain” offered no resolution, so you’re left with Jackman as a soldier for the Spanish Queen (Weisz), Jackman as research scientist married to dying Izzie (Weisz) and Jackman as bald, Buddha guy crying next to a tree in a snow globe. Soldier Jackman may be tied to Weisz’s current day novel she has been writing (while dying with a brain tumor) OR we may just be seeing him in a previous life. Scientist Jackman doesn’t do much but operate on monkey’s brains and cry a lot. I have no idea what Buddha Jackman was doing in the snow globe, except he wear pajamas, eats the bark from a tree and tattooes himself. And stares a lot. And cries.

And, then there’s the whole idea of the tree of life. Rather than follow one thought throughout, it’s a mish-mosh of Christian, Mayan, Wiccan and New Age ideas of what the tree of life is and how it ties us all together. And, it has something to do with white flowers growing out of Jackman’s chest. And, a wedding ring that all three Jackmans possess.

Weisz doesn’t do much but look radiant during extreme, overly-lit close-ups. She smiles, she writes, she loses feeling in her feet, she faints, she dies. Oh, and she looks good in red as the Spanish Queen.

In the end, supposedly Buddha Jackman is the First Father in Soldier Jackman’s time (First Father is the father of all stuff and such), therefore he is not killed by a whacked-out Mayan priest and allowed to find the Tree of Life. He is rewarded by having plants grow out of his chest. In the current time, Jackman cries over his wife’s death and plants a tree over her grave. In the Buddha Jackman’s time, the tree dies and he cries a lot more. Then, he enters a nebula (while still in the snow globe), which in Mayan culture is the land of the dead. Or something. And, thats it. The end.

I was on antibotics, allergy medication and swilling enough orange juice to need my own catheter…. you know, in a position to watch just about anything. Even HGTV. And, this was painful. Two hours of overdone, choppy, half-assed acting painful. So, just trust me and let the urge to rent this piece of crap pass.

On a side note to Hugh Jackman…. any future attempts by your people that have you starring in roles where you cry so much snot is coming out your nose should be probably ignored.

*bimbles off*

Sometimes I can laugh at the weirdness of my state. And, sometimes, I can only stare in horror.

Battle Against Teaching Evolution in Texas Begins

A few weeks before the March 4 Republican primary, a group of candidates gathered at the Shady Valley Golf Club in Arlington for a meet-and-greet luncheon with voters. For the most part, the candidates were seasoned pros who all seemed to know each other, but one stood out from the rest.

His name was Barney Maddox, and he looked lost. He wore an ill-fitting gray suit, his Coke-bottle glasses kept slipping down his nose, and he looked as if he cut his own hair. While the other candidates worked the room, Maddox wandered around, looking for a hand to shake. Eventually, he ended up at a table overlooking the golf course, where he sat alone, waiting for the event to begin.

Not much was known about Maddox, because he did not grant interviews to the press.
He had, however, been identified as perhaps the most dangerous man on the ballot
by the Texas Freedom Network, a watchdog group in Austin that keeps tabs on the
religious right.

The reasons for this were clear. Maddox was a young-Earth creationist, a Bible-literalist who believed the Earth was just 6,000 years old. He had written part of the curriculum for the Institute of Creation Research, a Dallas-based school that offers courses in creation science, and he had lectured at the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, which claims to have fossil evidence that dinosaurs and man walked together. He had once called evolution “the most irrational belief ever held by man.” Now he wanted a seat on Texas’ State Board of Education.

……

Over the next several weeks, Maddox ran a quiet campaign, avoiding events where the press might show up and ignoring their phone calls. While Hardy was relying on the mainstream press and the education establishment to get elected, Maddox was courting a different stripe of voters. He had the backing of the state home-school association, social conservative groups such as the Plano-based Free Market Foundation and people like former State Board of Education member Richard Neill, who, before serving as Maddox’s campaign treasurer, had once endorsed a candidate who wanted to dismantle the public education system and replace it with private Christian schools.

Maddox did not win the seat. However, the Texas State Board of Education is doing just find gutting our schools of rational thought without him:

Already, the board is dominated by a far-right faction deeply concerned with promoting political and religious ideologies. In recent years, the board has rejected one textbook that taught about global warming—calling it “junk science” and “anti-capitalist”—and forced the publisher of another to replace a picture of a woman carrying a briefcase with a picture of a woman baking a cake. Board member Terri Leo has accused “liberal New York publishers” of inserting “stealth” homosexual messages into textbooks, and Republican David Bradley of Beaumont, the de facto leader of the far-right faction, once criticized an algebra book because it had pictures, recipes and references to Vietnam in it he considered inappropriate for the subject matter. Knowing that legally he could not reject a book on these grounds, he ripped the cover off.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, tossing pieces of the cover to both sides of his chair, “worthless binding. I reject this book.”

Nice. Our children will grow up thinking some mythic old man in the sky snapped his fingers and *POOF* the world. That women should stay home and bake cookies and homosexuals are out to get our children.

Texas, ladies and gentlemen. Home of the religious mouth-breathers.

*bimbles off*

Five years ago, this country was forced into an unwinnable war by our Cowboy-in-Chief through lies, bogus evidence and veiled threats about our children’s safety.

Five years later, at the costs of hundreds of thousands of lives and no end to either the threat of terrorism or the capture of the man responsible for 9-11, Shrub says its all going well, thank you very much.

And, when asked for a response that 2/3 Americans don’t think this is a war we should be invovled in, the Big Dick himself replied with “So?”

There you go…. the men supposedly elected to serve the will of the people.

Oh, wait….. silly me. I forget they are ABOVE all that.

*bimbles off*

As a sci-fi fan and child of my generation, I mourn the passing of Arthur C. Clarke. I can’t even begin to fathom having the kind of mind that would produce his work.

And, although it has been parodied to death, the opening scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey” still gives me chills.

May you find the stars, Mr. Clarke.

*bimbles off*

Happy Day to everyone! And everyone better enjoy it for me, as I’m at home with a bitch of headache. *sighs* Just checked in on some work e-mail and will now proceed to gobble down obscene amounts of Advil and go back to bed.

It should be illegal to be sick on a holiday.

*bimbles off*

“The Bible is not my book nor is Christianity my profession.” ~~ Abraham Lincoln

“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” ~~ Benjamin Franklin

* The Atheist’s Bible, edited by Joan Konner, 2007

*bimbles off*

What is it about Japanese teen-agers? Just when you think fashion can’t sink any lower than slapping chrome on your front teeth, those imaginative Japanese up the ante with Gothic Lolita.

I don’t know what disturbs me the most….. the blank, thousand-mile stare produced by the blue contacts or the guys wearing modified Mary Janes.

(hat tip to Jezebel.com)

*bimbles off*