I think I just drooled all over myself...

OK, seriously, I just HAD to post this when I saw it: a new movie called Julie & Julia staring the extraordinary Meryl Streep and being about the sumptuous Julia Child! Need I say more? A movie about three of the most amazing things to come out of the modern world: 1) Julia Child, 2) Meryl Streep, 3) French Food! Anyway, it's coming out on the 7th of next month. My mouth is watering just thinking about it...this will be way worse than watching the food network. Appropriate snack items must be prepared, regardless of theatre rules...

On a different note, a brothel in Berlin recently had the brilliant idea to give discounts to customers who use public transportation or human power (a.k.a. a bicycle) to reach them. (Wow! What is it with me and brothels recently? I promise I'm not really looking for stories on brothels, the find me...) Once again, I'd like to take this moment to point out what a good idea it is to regulate the sex industry. It's good for everyone involved since the owners can do it without fear of being shut down, the workers are legally protected from abuse and patrons don't have to worry about being arrested and can be better assured of cleanliness and quality. Seriously, we should legalize and regulate the sex industry.

Now that we're on the subject of things that need to be decriminalized, I seriously believe that we should decriminalize the use and possession of, but not sale of, most drugs. While it is true that checking yourself in to a rehab program does not inherently carry with it the penalty of criminal charges, many of the people who need addiction help most can't afford to go to a clinic because they cost ungodly amounts of money. Many of those people must wait to be caught for any help to be found for them and even then the only "treatment" for them involves incarceration and little, if any, psychological or medical treatment for their very real and very deadly addictions. I think the money we use locking up minor drug offenders could be better used providing drug addiction services to low-income people and funding community-wide drug abuse prevention programs targeted at teens and adolescents. Preventing drug abuse in the first place would tackle another problem: the large-scale sale of illicit drugs in the US. Sale of drugs will not ever be completely eliminated, but using community-based efforts to keep kids off drugs and out of gangs (because gang membership is often coupled with drug use, although it's true the the inverse is not true) will greatly decrease the market for selling drugs in the first place thereby eliminating much of the problem related to drug sales and smuggling. Wouldn't it be better to rescue 3 birds with one stone than continue to jail all three birds? It's cheaper for the government and the community for solutions like this to be implemented in place of the usual incarceration without rehabilitation method currently employed by the government in far too many of these far too common cases.

Also, the word of the day is pulchritudinous. It's an adjective meaning "characterized by or possessing great physical beauty and appeal." Plus, it's super fun to say!

Some people don't take hints very well. Admittedly, I suspect, or rather know, this is partly my fault, but seriously. So, I went on one date with a guy. He keeps coming into the store when he knows I'll be there and I'm fairly icy him, don't look him in the eye, don't answer his texts and come up with lots of reasons I can't hang out with him. Yet, he still texts me and asks if I want to hang out. Someone asked me what was wrong with him. Nothing. Nothing's wrong with him. He's just not my type. I'll give you an example of what I mean.
(parts of a conversation I don't really remember)..."and you die."
"And then what?"
"What?"
"After you die, and then what?"
"You're dead. That's the end."
"So, you don't believe in an afterlife?"
"I think it's a bunch of hooey. I think people made up an afterlife to comfort themselves. People can't deal with the idea of the cessation of their existence, so they made up an after life to make themselves feel better. I think that once you're dead, you're dead. That's the end."
"Yeah, many people do have trouble with that." I give him time to make another remark, but he doesn't, so I continue.
"I think that each person's life is inherently insignificant. A million years from now, no one will care about what you did or even remember it. There many not even be anyone here at all. People made up an afterlife to deal with their own insignificance."
"Yeah, as for me, I just don't know. I figure I'll find out when I'm dead. What are you doing tonight?"
"Sleeping."

In other news, apparently you can get arrested in the UK for being too loud during sex.

A New Zealand Olympic-hopeful has opened a brothel to fund his Olympic dreams and relieve the financial strain from his parents. (Prostitution is became legal in NZ in 2003 and brothels are allowed to operate under the same health and safety regulations as every other business and must be registered.) Sadly, NZ Olympic officials said this will count against him in the selection process since Olympians are supposed to not only be outstanding athletes, but also role models for the young people in the country. Apparently, the officials think that owning a legal brothel constitutes being a bad example. Way to impose your conservative morals on the rest of the planet.

Honduras's ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, and interim leader, Roberto Micheletti, have agreed to peace talks. This may prove to be fruitless though since Zelaya has said that his reinstatement as president is "non-negotiable" and Micheletti has referred to his return to power as an impossibility. Hopefully someone will prove flexible and concede something. From the sounds of things, to avoid a conflict, it may have to be Zelaya since most of the government and much of the country, although by no means most, support Micheletti. Certainly, there are some who support Zelaya in the country, as there are many who oppose him. There have been many demonstrations both for and against Zelaya since the coup there two weeks ago. Costa Rican President, and 1987 Nobel Prize winner, Oscar Arias is to mediate the peace talks, if they ever happen. Thus far, the only thing that happened was that each leader met with Arias, didn't see each other at all, and left delegates to do the negotiating for them. We'll have to wait and see what happens. In the mean time, here's a bit of background on the conflict. As a side note, I found it entertaining that chinaview.cn stated that Honduras's interim government has received no international recognition because it has, from Taiwan. Anyway, I found that funny.

Also, Dick Cheney sucks. But, hey, what else is new, right?

Breakfast: It's trying to kill me

Why do people eat breakfast? Seriously.
Every day, my mother gets up and makes breakfast for herself, as I'm sure most people do. She east some eggs on toast and drinks some tea and then goes to work. I really don't understand this practice. Every time I try to get up and make breakfast for myself in the morning, it turns out disastrously. Not that the food is bad, because, trust me, it's not. Rather, I start eating and about 5 minutes later I get the urge to run to the bathroom and "worship the porcelain god" as people say. Usually, the recommended course of action for myself is to wait about two to three hours after waking up to begin ingesting food.
Even simple things disagree with me. Today, all I did was try to eat some biscuits. Clearly, the wrong decision. Even worse are the days when I try to eat something like quiche or hash browns and eggs or most variations of the traditional hot breakfast.
Even if we were to remove the sausage, ham, and blood pudding from the second dish, it retains it's inherent lack of appeal upon first waking. (In case you were wondering, that, or some variation of it, is what I got served most mornings while traveling in England, minus the meaty bits though.)
That's not to say that I don't like breakfast foods though. I love pancakes, waffles, eggs on toast, beans on toast, cereals, crepes, etc. It's just that I don't like eating them when I first wake up. This is what my preferred breakfast looks like:
Mmm, cold milk! Not much of a real break in the fast, but it agrees with me every time. Occasionally, I try one of these (minus the banana, of course):
This one's a bit hit-and-miss with me though.
So, seriously, why do people eat breakfast? (I hope I'm not the only one who feels this way.)

Someone should buy me a powermat for the next gift-giving event in my life. And some thoughts about relationships.

Many men, when asked, by women at least, what they want in a girlfriend/wife/relationship respond by saying they want a woman who is smart, independent, funny, gorgeous, nice and some other attribute that he particularly finds attractive and most men don't. If this were a game show, the host would take this moment to push the "WRONG ANSWER" button. What I find is this: most men want a woman who is smart, but not as smart as them, independent, but not completely, beautiful, but unaware of it, and nice. Really, now, what kind of girl do you think this produces? A girl may be smart, but she has to dumb herself down for the guy she's in a relationship with because he's not comfortable being in a relationship with a girl who presents a mental challenge to him. The girl who used to be the boss in elementary school, class president, school leader, finds her independence unwelcome to most men. They feel unappreciated when they're in a relationship like that. She wants a 50/50 relationship, he wants a 70/30 relationship. For all their spouting about girls needing to be independent, "you can't depend on me, you're too needy" crap, men sure do get upset when their girlfriend actually doesn't need them.
This reminds me of a song. (If you've never heard it, take the time to listen to P!nk's song "Stupid Girls") One line in particular stands out to me in this song, "Maybe if I act like that, that guy will call me back." P!nk meant, of course, the fact that girls wear what they perceive guys want them to, act the way they want, talk the way they want. And of course, the girls who don't do that have some trouble finding a guy they like, except for the "unusual" or "weird" guys who are into the smart, independent girls. The vast majority of men, however, are not.
The point of this isn't really to make men sound like jerks. However, I think there is an important piece of information that a lot of men are missing: girls are at their most vulnerable when they're going through puberty. It is during this time that a girl is starting to see boys in a different light and looks for some sort of reassurance that her physical changes are good. However, that is not the message most girls get when they're seeing those changes. I'll give you an example. When I was in entering middle school, some of the boys in my class where beginning to show obvious signs of maturing. They grew quite a bit, their voices changed, they started growing excess hair. Those boys were admired. "You're becoming a man!" the world said to him, "Aren't you happy? This is a wonderful thing." How amazing! He's more mature than the other boys, more of a man. By contrast, a girl in my 5th grade class who had the misfortune to develop obscenely early (there is such a thing, children are incapable of dealing with the physical and mental changes caused by sexual maturity) was harassed. The boys in the class had what I can only refer to as an obscene nickname for her, Titanic, in reference to her very obviously developing mammary glands. She was ridiculed and sexually harassed. What kind of picture does that paint for girls? She begins to show physical manifestations of her sexual maturity, and rather than being supported and admired for her maturity, she is told that her body is shameful, sinful, wrong. Her body, once the instrument of play and learning, has become nothing more than he object of men's sexual desire. Her substance, what makes her who she is, is no longer appreciated the way it was before. So, if a girl is told that she has the freedom to be independent, but is treated as a sexual object, what result is to be expected but that she will view herself as nothing more than an object? Although parents and, at least in part, educators spend time trying to convince girls that they should be who they are and that their physical changes are perfectly natural, normal, and should be celebrated. The reaction from peers is quite different. I think this is what many men do not realize. Your treatment of a girl when she is vulnerable will determine how she reacts with you from then on. Your subconscious signals tell a very different story from what comes out of your mouth. You speak correctly and frequently do not follow through. To reference a favorite movie, "It is not what we say or feel that makes us who we are, it is what we do." If you truly feel that women should be independent and smart, your subconscious actions must reflect this.
And I don't mean just people in middle school and high school. Frequently, college men exhibit signs of confusion about what they want, wandering around, giving contradictory signals to women and then wondering why we get angry. Many men seem to suffer from the delusion that it's OK to pretend to be available, inviting the woman in and getting her to open up to him, not something most women do easily, when they are clearly unable to "seal the deal", as it were. They don't know what they want out of a relationship or from life in general. Even at the age of 26 or 28 or sometimes more, men clearly have no idea what they want. They formulate this idea of themselves as being sure of what they want when their actions indicate the opposite.
As a general rule, if you find yourself at the age of 26 or, God forbid, 28, and you have no idea what you want out of life or are just genuinely confused, you need to rethink your life. At 26, you are, quite simply, too old to still be so confused. It's time to rethink your life and grow up. Seriously, you've had enough experience in life, even if it wasn't in a relationship, to have some idea about what you want, even if you don't know exactly. Your unwillingness to grow-up may actually be the reason you keep getting hurt in relationships. Women aren't particularly turned on by indecisiveness and confusion as it's a sign of emotional immaturity and a non-committal mindset. In other words, your inability to make up your mind makes you look like nothing more than a confused little boy to women. Perhaps this clears it up a bit. I hope you think about it seriously, if you happen to be in this situation.
On a completely different note, this may be one of the best things ever invented and I want one, or several for my house.