5 posts tagged “life”

List five reasons (at least) why you are awesome.
Submitted by goobers18.

I should think my awesomeness, already apparent to everyone, is of the type that can hardly be defined, let alone summarized in a neat, bulleted list.  The awesome is too great to be contained by you and your numeric-organizational fetish.

*sigh*  Well, here are 5 reasons why I am awesome today:

1. I get phone calls in the middle of the night from Australia.
2. I can teach Australians to make pancakes over the phone in the middle of the night.
3. I watch Invader Zim with my 2-year-old, thus introducing him to important vocabulary such as "doom" and "filthy humans."
4. The pumpkin polenta I made...yes, awesome.
5. I grew both the pumpkin and the thyme I used to make the pumpkin polenta.

What are some ways you save money? 
Submitted by Pixiemom.  

We save money in as many ways as we reasonably can.  We would probably do most of this even if we had more money, because I would so rather spend my money on a vacation or a new skirt than on my utility bills.  Also, T is a seriously frugal dude.  I'm going to leave out some of the more obvious things like using CFLs and not running a half-empty (or half-full) dishwasher.

Utilities:  First and foremost, we unplug nearly everything when it's not in use.  Battery chargers of various kinds, computers, the stupid clock on the coffee pot--all are sucking power even when they're not in use.  We unplug them all.  I turn my computer off at the power strip every night.  Also, I hang the clothes out to dry whenever possible.  We'll even hang them up in the house, which makes us look like white trash (but T says that's OK since he's an immigrant and immigrants are expected to do weird stuff, right?).  Another thing is that I try to get a lot of my baking done at one time, as that cuts down on the number of times in a week I have to preheat the oven.  Propane (for the oven and the furnace) is damned expensive, so every little bit helps. 

Groceries:  This is a tough one.  The price of food is getting higher lately, and we are somewhat demanding in regards to food.  We are big into veggies and fruits and fish, and those can be expensive.  We don't eat much processed food besides breakfast cereal (yay, breakfast cereal).  Anyway, we also have some dietary restrictions; to wit, the kid and I don't eat wheat or dairy if we can help it.  Wheat is cheap; alternatives are not.  Basically, with food, I walk this line where I try to save as much money as possible through matching coupons to sales so that then we can afford salmon and olive oil and spelt flour.  You have to get an organizational system down for this, though, and be somewhat vigilant.  You have a dollar off coupon, say, for some Dannon yogurt.  Well, that's nice, but it's not going to be a really good deal until the store puts the yogurt on sale, too.  That's when you strike!  This is stupid, I know--it's not a fun way to shop.  I get a small thrill out of seeing how much I'm able to get for my budget, though, and out of seeing my "total savings" on the receipt.  Quite often, between my coupons and the card savings and special deals, what I pay is half of what it would normally cost.  That means we eat better than we could if I didn't do this whole stupid routine.

Rebates:  Our local chain drugstores (Walgreen's and Rite-Aid) both have these rebate things each month.  This is how we get many of our hygiene items.  So, they have a deal where you can get a $1.00 rebate on, say, Crest toothpaste.  Let's say they normally charge $3.00 for it.  I also have a coupon for $1.00 off.  At some point in the month, they will likely put the toothpaste on sale for $2.00.  So, I lurk.  When that sale happens, I pounce!  I use my coupon, thereby paying $1.00 for the toothpaste, which I then get back through the rebate.  Of course, I probably wouldn't send the rebate form in for just a dollar, but the beauty of the Walgreen's and Rite-Aid setups is that you can send in only one form for all the rebates each month.  So, I get checks or gift cards for $20.00 or so a month--and a lot of those toiletries were essentially free if you count the coupons + sales + rebates.  Clever, aren't I?

Household stuff:  I make my own laundry soap.  Our laundry detergent now costs us about $1.00 a month.  And it works.  We don't use commercial cleaners, except the occasional burst of Simple Green.  To clean the house, I use mostly baking soda and vinegar with a little borax.  Our house is clean enough and almost totally lacking in chemical contamination.  There are no airborne toxins or hormone mimics from chemical cleaning products.  Our house usually smells of nothing at all, except maybe my cooking or of the mums when they're in bloom.  Also, we reuse a lot of stuff.  We will wash and reuse Ziploc bags and aluminum foil  and glass jars and yogurt containers until they are totally worn out (and then we recycle them whenever possible). 

The dogs:  We don't feed them.  Just kidding.   

Kid stuff:  Gah, there are so many expenses associated with kids.  The diapers--we used cloth most of his life, and now he's almost entirely potty trained.  The toys--mainly, here, we buy quality toys that will last him.  I'll pay more for a wood or metal toy, because he destroys plastic in a hurry.  Also, we avoid toys that require batteries like the plague.  He gets them from other people, of course, and I then use Walgreen's rebates and so forth to keep us in batteries.  We entertain him in ways that are basically free.  The park, the library, the backyard (harassing the dogs, naturally), hiking.  He loves all those things, and surprise!  Free!

Savings:  We're lucky in that my husband now has benefits at work.  He has a 401(k) that includes some matching from the company and profit sharing!  Profit!  We take maximum advantage of that.  Also, we use Upromise.  It probably wouldn't add up to much if it were only our shopping contributing to it, but it is set up so that my mom's shopping also contributes to it.  And she shops a bloody lot.  So, 4% of the cost of every cute little sweater with trucks on it goes into a savings account for my son to be used for college or other education later in his life.  Finally, we leave our loose change sitting around.  Yep, just sitting around.  And what happens then is this little leprechaun comes along and swipes it and emits shrieks of thieving glee as he stuffs it into one of his three piggy banks.  When his banks are full, we take them to a real bank.  The kid has two accounts (the Upromise mutual fund and a standard savings account at our local credit union), both of which are sizeable at this point.  Not quite a silver spoon, but certainly better than nothing.

Food:  We don't waste food.  For example, for Thanksgiving, I like to make a cranberry jelly.  Jelly takes the juice from the fruit and then you have the pulp leftover, right?  I just took the cranberry pulp and made things out of that.  I made an applesauce cake substituting the cranberry pulp for applesauce.  I made a cranberry bread pudding by stirring the berries into my normal bread pudding (and it's goooooood).  I then took the rest of them and mixed them with some pears that were going soft and a couple of rather dodgy mandarin oranges and made a sauce.  I froze half of that.  The other half I served on plain yogurt for dessert.  A bunch of the carrots from our garden were also starting to get dodgy--I don't know what the hell happened to them--but anyway, I pickled them.  The same vitamins and all that, but they won't spoil.  Actually, you all know how many hours I spent pickling and canning and freezing all the crap from our garden, and we're eating that stuff every day.  Sometimes, when T thinks I've been profligate in my grocery spending (you bought persimmons?!?), I point out to him how many items on his dinner plate came from our garden, essentially for free.  If you've got dodgy lemons in the fridge, then make lemonade and candied lemon peel.  That's our philosophy.

I don't know what to call this category, but we also manage to do some minimal giving for free.  We cut off all our Boxtops for Education and give them to the local school even though our kid doesn't go to school yet, but it costs us nothing to do that, and it helps them buy books for their library.  We also end up donating a lot of the free toothpaste and stuff that we get, since we manage to get way more free toothpaste than we need, and anyway we use Tom's Natural most of the time.  Often I'm just getting the free toothpaste because I can, in other words, and then I give it to women's shelters or food banks.  It makes me feel like Robin Hood. 

Which person from your past, who you've lost touch with, do you wonder about the most? 
Submitted by ancora impara.

Hmm.  It's hard to choose between two. 

The first one was my best friend in my first high school (I went to two different high schools--we moved the summer between my junior and senior years).  Her name, and I'm going to go ahead and put it on here because every other long-lost friend (and even the very first guy I kissed) seems to find me via this Vox, was Patricia Cano.  She and I were soulmates.  No, seriously.

I don't remember exactly when she moved to the little hicktown where I was living, but it was some time after me, and she was therefore more "new girl" than I was.  Her family was Seventh-Day Adventist, which meant (among other things) that they observed the Saturday Sabbath, which meant Patricia couldn't be on the basketball team or nearly any other extracurricular, and extracurriculars were really the only way to have fun in that town.  Patricia was, I suppose, a pretty devout Adventist.  She would go to parties but not drink, and she would also manage to refrain from judging those of us who did.  She would tell you about her faith but not try to force it on you, and she managed to refrain from judging people of other religions and people with no religion at all. 

From the first time we met, we just clicked in that super-awesome way that friends sometimes do.  Within a week, we could finish each other's sentences and make the exact same gesture at the exact same moment, and then we would laugh while no one else had any idea what was going on.  She had a similar obscure, ironic sense of humor as I did.  She liked the same kinds of books.  And she dated BEN!  You bitch!  No, just kidding, but Ben was so hot, especially when he would get pissed off at Mrs. Macdonald and throw that tennis ball around the newspaper room.  Or in the time in welding when the slag went down his shirt!  Fun times!

Anyway, the point is, I felt more like a sister to her than anyone I've ever known, and we've lost touch.  Oh, Patricia, how I would welcome an email from you!

The other one I am extremely curious about is a fellow whose name I think I ought not mention, although it is a common enough name I suppose.  Let's call him Brandon.

Brandon and I were on the speech and debate team (he was speech--a rather rousing orator, he was--while I was debate) at my second high school.  Brandon was immensely popular and incredibly gorgeous, and I have no idea why he ever started talking to me, as I was neither of those things, but one day on the way to a tournament, he sat next to me on the bus.  It turned out he wasn't just popular and unspeakably hotttt, he was also very, very funny.  We became friends, although our social circles were quite different outside of the speech team. 

Fast forward.  I'm going to college in West Texas (the marvelous Hill Country!  Texas, I hate you!), while Brandon is going to Pepperdine in Malibu.  He's in a frat, of course.  He's getting work as a model and occasional male stripper.  He's banging, like, every blonde chick in California, and I gather there are a lot of blonde chicks in Cali.  He drives some sort of small red sports car.  He works in a restaurant where even the busboys wear ties and the Red Hot Chili Peppers come in to eat.  That sort of thing.

Also, it takes him like an hour to do his hair.  God.

Alright, so he decides to come visit me--I think his school year ended earlier than mine or something, so he was on vacation.  He shows up at my door looking insanely gorgeous, but even more so for the slick sheen of California all over him.  My roommate, who is another story entirely and I'll have to tell you about her someday, instantly takes to traipsing about in her skivvies, and he is repulsed.  He sleeps in my bed, with me, completely asexually, and we're both cool with that, because judging from the tickle fights and the sharing of hair-care products, we are much too good at being friends to ruin it with sex.

Brandon has such a good time with me for a couple of days that he ends up staying a week or so.  I take him to my favorite gay club--indeed, my favorite dance floor in the entire world--The Bonham Exchange.  It is a place of legend, at least in my mind.  The Bonham was a really pretty gay club at that point.  I liked it for three reasons:  The music was always good, I didn't get hassled that much by guys because, uh, they were all gay (no, there were bisexuals, but they seemed so much less aggressive and assholish than straight guys), and also the bartenders were all hot and mostly straight and would flirt outrageously with me and give me free drinks because I was the only chick in the house.  Anyway.

So, I take Brandon there.  While we're dancing and mingling, I introduce Brandon to Alan.  Alan was a really good-looking and funny guy, but, you know, gay and all.  I was pretty sure Brandon was really straight.  Ummm, so then Brandon fell in love with Alan.  Oh, my.

I guess he didn't realize it that night, so we had to spend the entire rest of the week trying to track Alan down.  Now, I only knew these guys by their first names, and we only saw each other at The Bonham, so tracking them down was complicated.  The one guy that I knew where he lived, oh, well, he lived on base.  Mmm, Air Force I think, or was it Army?  I can't remember.  So, one night, Brandon and I get the awesome, genius idea to SNEAK onto a military base and find this guy.  Yes, that's what we did.  In the middle of the night, we steal across the open expanses of grass, expanses of grass that just screamed, "shoot me, as I am a communist saboteur," to the barracks.  We find this guy, and he's all, "Alan?  Alan who?  Is he hot?"  D'oh.  But this guy can give us Luis's phone number, and maybe Luis knows Alan, because Luis knows everyone.  As we're waiting for the military police to come arrest us, he sleepily (and in his underpants, which inexplicably had rainbows on them--isn't there some kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy?  wtf?) calls Luis who also does the "Alan who?" thing before recalling that Alan is in Dallas for the week.

Too bad.  Brandon never saw Alan again to my knowledge, as he couldn't stay long enough.  Alan offered to pay for Brandon's plane ticket back to see him, but I don't think it ever happened.  Brandon felt confused and all that for a while, and then I got a letter from him saying that he thinks maybe he's gay.  He says he has a boyfriend, although he still fucks girls sometimes, but he thinks maybe that's just for show, but then again, he doesn't really enjoy the gay sex, and ...

Oh, hell.  Of course I want to hear from him again.  For one thing, I could use some hairstyling tips, as mine is a bit limp lately.  For another thing, "gay or not?" is totally a question that I want an answer to.  It doesn't really matter I guess, except that I feel like I had some part in introducing him to the rainbows and unicorns. 

Other people I'd love to hear from:

Stacy Barnier

Brandon Fryar (different Brandon)

Sean Summers

Clark Chatlain and Megan...damn, why can't I remember Megan's last name?  Clark and Megan.  Megan...Megan Awesome.

Colin Hester

David Breeden

Courtney Wilder

Terri Heynekamp

What experience or moment in your life have you learned the most from? 
Submitted by AngieK. 

I hate this kind of question.  I don't know.  I've learned important lessons from a lot of different experiences.  Here is a sample, with the moral of the story patronizingly stated.

1. When my son was born, after I recovered from the hypothermia and they could lay him on my chest without fearing that my shivers would send him falling to the hard, cold, antiseptic floor, he suddenly did a very important thing.  He pushed himself up, with his little Popeye arms, so that he could make eye contact with me.  I didn't think he could do that, and he didn't do it again for quite a long time.  But in that moment with his dark eyes staring at me, he seemed to be trying to figure out who I was--not just in the sense of, "so, this is my mom, eh?" but actually trying to figure out what kind of person I was.  And his look said to me, "Listen up.  This is a big responsibility you've taken on here.  I need you, your love, your support, your guidance.  I will take up a lot of your time; I will make you age prematurely; I will make you want to pull out your hair with anger and frustration and worry; I will also give you some of the happiest and most thoroughly engaging moments of your life.  But the show's all about me now.  Sure, you can still have your own life sometimes, but ultimately you have to move over and give me my space.  You've been borrowing this space, this oxygen here on earth for a while now, but it's my turn."  Moral:  That is the moment I fully understood what it means to be "being-toward-death" and the fact that the best you can do in life, in the end, is to die and get out of the way and let others live their own lives.  It sounds sad, I guess, but it's not.  So it goes, so it goes.
2. My dad was a born-and-bred Southern white guy, and as such he had a natural prejudice against black people.  He always had, and I assumed he always would.  It's hard to outlive your upbringing.  He did successfully bite his tongue when I started dating a black guy the summer I was 13 or 14, but it was clear he didn't like it.  Then in 1987 or '97 (can't remember), the Little Rock newspaper published a special book that contained all the stories that had been published 30 or 40 years before about the Little Rock Nine and the integration of the Little Rock schools.  It was a heartbreaking chronicle.  And my dad wrote a letter to me saying he hadn't realized how heroic they were, how much courage those students had displayed, how terrified they must have been.  Moral:  He finally realized the necessity of racial equality and the civil rights movement.  I learned that people can change. 
3. I went to rape counseling for about three sessions.  I'm not the type of person who usually goes to counseling, and in the times when I've been forced to go, I've usually lied a great deal to the counselors, for no reason other than my own amusement.  However, I voluntarily went to rape counseling, because I had to tell my story to someone who would listen without prejudice and I had to get a few things about it straightened out in my mind.  I found a fantastic counselor, just the sort of women I needed, and I learned a few important things.  Mainly I learned that it wasn't my fault.  But the best thing she taught me is that I had to decide that I was not going to be his victim forever.  I'm not the sort of woman who is kept down, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let some random asshole with misogyny issues be the one who controls my life.  Moral:  It's a fact that I was raped; it's not a destiny.

Eh, I'm sure there are others.  But I have a really irritating headache, so let's leave it at that.

You know, I was sitting here reading EvilWombatQueen's well-written post about that lesbian couple in Australia who had IVF and ended up having twins when they only wanted one baby, and now they are suing.  For a while there, I was really getting worked up about this.  The fact that they are lesbians is receiving a lot of press, but personally I don't care about that.  I don't find it germane at all to the story at hand.

What I do find germane is their complete, grating, whiny sense of entitlement.  It's not enough for them that they are entitled to have IVF in the first place, thus enabling them to reproduce even though they don't like to do it the way most of us do.  And nevermind that they were not informed about what the boxes on the form they had to fill out and sign meant--no, certainly, they can't be expected to interpret forms by themselves, and so the nurse is to blame for the checked box specifying "up to 2" embryos be implanted. 

So, then they decide not to abort one fetus, for various reasons, and not to give one up for adoption.  So, now they want the doctor to pay for one twin's upbringing.  Mmm, the entire upbringing.  Including private school, because obviously public schools are far too prole for bitches like this.  Oh, and naturally, they make over $100,000 a year.  Naturally.

But it gets worse--much worse in my opinion.  In the inevitable media circus, they have been going around littering the airspace with quotes like this: 

She said she enjoyed some aspects of the pregnancy, such as decorating the girls' nursery, but other parts were distressing, including purchasing a pram. "It was like the last frontier of acceptance to spend hundreds of dollars on a pram."

And this little gem:

"I find (now) that she doesn't have the same ability to love that she used to and the same capacity to, I guess, embrace differences and issues as a couple or as a team."

She said the pair lost their lives functioning as a couple, becoming mired in everyday tasks associated with raising two children.

Who the fuckingfuck do you think you're kidding with this stupid whining?  They lost their lives as a couple?  WTFF?  More than any other new parents?  Was their relationship that fucking tenuous?  And the pram?  Oh, jesus.  You people just need to shutup. 

These are people who were totally unprepared for parenthood.  No, I take it back--these are people who are totally unprepared for life.  What would they have done had nature split the one embryo and they ended up with twins and no doctor to sue?  Even if they'd only had one child, wouldn't they still have needed a pram?  Do they realize that "becoming mired in everyday tasks" is the way most people actually live their lives, particularly those of us in the lower tax brackets? 

Anyway, when I first started reading about this, I was all enraged and my head was spinning around, Exorcist-style, from my irritation at this enormous sense of entitlement these women have.  I was especially angered because I am currently re-reading Dorothy Allison's book Skin, which delves deeply into the feminist blindness to class lines.  I think about all the women in rural America who have little access to birth control or health insurance that would help them get it (I know I didn't have health insurance or access to anything like a Planned Parenthood for the past couple of years), and these are women who frequently will not even listen to or associate with any kind of feminist message because they have come to believe that feminism is all about helping lesbians make babies through IVF and then get extra time off from their highly-paid jobs.  And that's nothing to do with their lives...er, with my life either, actually.

But, you know, this getting all enraged at stupid, irritating people...damn, it just makes me tired lately.  I don't really care that much.  Whine all you want to, people. 

Life is hard; it's work.  That's how most of us survive, by working every day, all mired in everyday tasks.  It's also absurd and pointless.  It's also hilarious and beautiful and a lot of fun if you figure out how to make it so.

So, to hell with it, to hell with them.  I'm not going to think about them anymore.  I'm going to focus on my Fat Tire and my friend I'm chatting with and my son who keeps rushing to the top of the stairs to shout, "Mama's working!  I will rescue her!" and then come down here to mess everything up and stab himself with my pencils.  I think I'd rather laugh with him than be mad at some strangers.