Servicey

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Lessons in Competitive Parenting: Digital Life

Life takes dedication. As we all know, second best is really the first worst. To succeed in our uber-competitive world, where only the strongest survive to get into a decent preschool, it is never too soon to set the standards that others will follow. Thus begins our lessons in competitive parenting.

If you are expecting, or expecting to be expecting some day, you are lucky to gestate in the modern era. Thanks to social media, today’s expectant parents no longer have to suffer through months of anxiety and anticipation in silence. You can gain immediate validation and affirmation online, any time, for your literal navel gazing. Here are some guidelines for making social media work for you during your pregnancy.

Facebook is a must. If you are not currently on Facebook, or quit in disgust when all of your friends posted preggo updates all day, every day, now is the time to activate your account and enact your revenge! Be sure to friend everyone you know, however tangentially. And your professional colleagues want in on this, too. Trust me, everyone wants to share in your joy by watching your burgeoning belly expand, almost in real time. (Hey! There’s an idea…time-lapsed pregnancy videos!)

Be sure to post pictures of your belly each week. If you want to be cool yet servicey, give a nod to Dylan by holding a hand-numbered sign showing your gestational week in each shot.

People will notice if you skip a week, so do not let them down! Added bonus: shortly after each picture posts, your ego and hormones can be boosted with strings of compliments like, “You look great, Mama!” or “Even preggo, you are adorbs!” or “Love the new outtie! Your bellybutton looks so cute poking through your shirt!”

While uploading pictures, be sure to update your status. Today, people enjoy sharing their medical records! You’ll get plenty of quality medical advice about how to deal with swollen ankles and constipation from your friends and family and that girl from junior high who got a hot dog stuck in her hoo-hoo.

Don’t hesitate to crowd-source Facebook for product recommendations. Mobilize the armies of mommies online, poised at the ready to share their experiences with the least smothering sling or the crib painted with acceptable levels of lead paint. Uber-parents must get the best of everything and have it all before the baby arrives. Yes, people used to let their babies sleep in dresser drawers, but they also used to change their own oil and talk on phones with cords. This is now!

Start a blog. A blog is imperative. A pregnancy blog is the perfect place to expand in long form on your daily trials and tribulations while waiting anxiously for your uterus to explode. Really, you should have created one before you got pregnant to chart your attempts at conception, but it isn’t too late to start now. Use it to coordinate your multi-state, multi-event baby showers, guest lists, and gift registries. And while there are no limits to what you write about, keep in mind that most pregnancy blogs take one of two thematic approaches:

• OMG! What is happening to my body and my life?!, or
• I am so blessed to have the perfect family, spouse, job, house, life, and soon-to-be baby.

Twitter is perfect for pre-borns. Just because they aren’t free of the womb, babies should not be restricted from tweeting. Do sign up for a Twitter account in the baby’s name or come up with something really cute and creative, like BabyDouche. That way, your baby can tweet delightful missives from the womb: “Gross! I may need therapy. It was kind of dark and mostly muffled, but I’m pretty sure I felt ‘it.’” If you tweet as yourself, you should give a daily pregnancy update, two or three on sonogram days. Remember: moderation is out! There is no such thing as over-sharing.

Email is not totally over yet. It may be a dying art, but there is some value in securing an email account for your pending spawn ASAP. If your top choice of name is not available at Gmail, you can tweak the spelling of the child’s name or use another middle initial to get the right email address. Your child will have to live with this email address for life – it is important to lock it down now.

YouTube. Make a channel for your pregnancy videos. While you can’t upload actual birth videos, you can start making a digital scrapbook of clips of You! Being Pregnant! If you’re lucky, you’ll go viral with a hilarious video of your water breaking during your prenatal tap dancing class. Shuffle-toe-tap-swoosh!

Our lives will be lived out loud and online! Dive in, pre-parents! What could possibly go wrong?

My Lady-Centric Money Strategy

67 comments

NPR recently ran a story on women and pay raises/promotions, a topic that has been near and dear to my heart for a few years now.

I am loathe to admit this, but for many years I was an absolute steal of an employee. With a background in non-profit work and education, I bought into the line that we had no money or were facing a deficit or any other number of excuses (real or imagined) about our financial situation that caused me to never once ask for a raise for the first eight years of my career. I’d never negotiated a starting pay either.

My mentors over the years had been wonderful for many things. I learned to teach well, to write well, and to become decent at graphic design – a skill that does not come naturally to me. But not a single one of them taught me how to network or negotiate.

Networking came naturally. I’m an extrovert and genuinely like most people. But negotiating…ugh…

I’m going to admit that I didn’t really understand that negotiating existed. I thought, essentially, that if I was offered a job that I needed to jump on it and take it or it would somehow evaporate. Asking for money was so foreign that I didn’t even think to do it, and if I did I was ashamed of seeming greedy.

Now, that said, I am in the process of turning that around. And for those of you who are like I was, I want to take you with me. I’m going to start with a number.

40. As in 40%. As in my income has increased 40% from three years ago when I changed how I thought about myself and my worth.

A little over three years ago, a colleague got it through my thick skull that I had too thoroughly absorbed the societal expectation for a nice, Midwestern woman. She was right. “Don’t push too hard,” my mother said when I told her how much less I made than younger, less educated male counterparts at my organization, “they might fire you.”

I finally realized the quandry I’d put myself and been put in. Push yourself hard at work, do a great job, get praise and accolades and attention – but not money. Pushing for money will make you disliked or worse. (The research NPR cites supports that, to be honest).

I want to tell you how I did this, and YMMV. I also want to acknowledge that this does not override the discrimination that many women face that is very, very real. Like a friend who worked somewhere where all the men got raises and the employers told the women, and I quote, that the men “needed it more because they are heads of households.” What that points to is the need to be more strategic and more adept at manipulating a situation. And that sucks.

I’d also really like if others shared their strategies in comments – or stories. And make sure we know if you’re male or female, because I hate to say it, but that matters in what strategy you take.

Without further ado:

As a public employee, I was lucky enough to know that I can find out any individual’s salary in my organization. I found every person who did equivalent work to my job, and analyzed their salaries in relation to myself, considering their education level, skills, and ROI to their departments. All but one made more than I did though I was in the mid range for experience and high range for education.
I determined what my pay should be and talked to my boss. I said, “You know, I’ve been looking at our salary structure here, and I am doing X and Y and Z – like Persons ABCDEFG in my role, and I’m exceeding them in A and B and C. I know you value the work that I do for the School and you know that I’ve done X and Y and Z to improve/streamline/make awesome what I work on and I would like my salary to be in line with those doing comparable work.”
I got dicked around for almost a year and never pushed. When excuses were made, I said I understood and would be patient. [This was a mistake. If I had not done what I did below, I wouldn’t have gotten anything.]
I used my network to get another job offer and negotiated for the first time ever
- a salary was offered
- before telling my boss, I said that “I would be more comfortable taking on the new and additional responsibilities if my pay was X.”
- they said no, that the offer stood [This was fine. It was the first time I experienced what people kept telling me – that they expect you to negotiate.]
- I gave my boss the offer letter
- My boss offered me more
- I turned down the other job [This was a mistake. I found out when I ran into one of the hiring committee members later and he said – “Why didn’t you let us counter offer? We really wanted you.” – to which I made up some excuse, but I didn’t even realize that was a thing.]
A year later, I’d finished half of my PhD and had expressed the desire to move into a new position within the school that I knew I could do well and help a lot at. It was promised and dragged on and on.
I started looking for another position
At the same time, I wrote up a statement to push them on it, talking about my experience, the innovations I had done that benefited them, the skill sets I brought, and included my CV as a reminder of how much I had done to improve my own skills, our department, and our visibility at our university and at the national level.
I became a finalist for another position and was immediately offered a promotion, a salary adjustment, and a raise on top of that.

I want to note that none of what I was asking was excessive for my background/profession. In fact, my old boss said I could have gotten more. He’s right, but this kind of financial self-advocacy is a work in progress and I am emotionally exhausted from all of that.

A Fallout Shelter of my Very Own

56 comments

“I saw the new house,” my wife told me. She was looking for houses near her work in Downey, CA and this one, in South Gate, CA, was only five minutes away by car as opposed to the hour plus she was having to commute to and from North Hollywood every day. It had everything we were looking for- three bedrooms, central heating and A/C, a gated backyard with lots of room for the dog to run around. After describing it, she added, “and it has a fallout shelter.”

Yes, the house came with a fallout shelter in the back yard. It was built in the 1960s when people were building them all over the country. Most of them had been removed or filled in decades ago, but this one was still there. I hadn’t seen the house or the shelter due to how far away it was. I was taking care of my daughter an hours’ drive away and my wife checked it out on her lunch break.

Sure, I wasn’t looking for a house with a fallout shelter. Even if I wanted one, we live approximately here-

If there ever is a nuclear war, where my house is now will be replaced by a very, very large smoking crater in the ground, rapidly filling with water. I have no idea why someone thought it would be a good idea to build a fallout shelter in the middle of one of the largest cities in North America, but there it was. I was excited to see it… and why not? What a conversation piece!

I was expecting something like this:

It would be perfect! A little place to get away from stuff. I could set it up as a little lounge, put a new mattress on the bunks, hang out in the hot summer and read a book or have a few drinks and relax. As a friend of mine said to me, “you can turn it into a mancave.”

Well, he was right about the cave part anyway. It’s totally useless as any sort of room. Water seeps in from the ground, so the walls are moldy and musty. There’s no electricity. The only access is by a rickety ladder which isn’t even bolted down. So, it’s a bit of a dismal and useless shelter, but it’s still a conversation piece. Here are some photos:

Here is the hatch to get into the shelter. Note that it is made of wood, a substance guaranteed to keep out all that nasty radiation and ash. At some point, someone tried to paint the wood and failed. As you can see, it’s also rotting. Next to it is a lime from our backyard lime tree- unfortunate because I don’t like limes, but we didn’t get the house for the tree. When you open the hatch, you see…

Yep, scary ladder down the scary hole. Not exactly a place I would want to head down quickly with my wife and daughter when the bombs start falling, but hey, it’s an emergency, right? We don’t need a comfortable way in as long as it’s… oh.

My amazing fallout shelter was a moldy, filthy concrete box about the size of a delivery van. Even though that wooden hatch is there to protect me from the toxic air and the cannibal mutants, I think I might take my chances on the surface. Let’s turn around and climb out…

There’s that horrible ladder. It’s a little slick and also rotting, but I somehow managed to haul my fat ass out of there without being bitten by any of the nasty things that probably live in there now. Note that it is also nearly pitch black in there with the only light coming from the hatch. I used the camera’s flash to compensate.

So… that’s my very own fallout shelter. We have no use for it, we can’t put anything in it that we don’t want covered in mold, we certainly don’t want to hang out in it and it is way in the back of the yard behind the garage, so even if we could put stuff there, it wouldn’t be especially convenient to access it.

I love my house, but the fallout shelter is really only good for telling people I have a fallout shelter. Any suggestions you have for a mold-covered electricity-free concrete bunker under my backyard, feel free to make them in the comments.

Welcome to the First Crasstalk Writing Workshop

724 comments

Well hello there, cuties! Welcome to the Crasstalk writing clusterfuck. If you have an author’s account or are planning to write in the near future, you are in the right place. Tonight we are going to try to get everybody ready to post or to improve your posts if you already are. I am going to try and cover some basic issues about the mechanics of posting, but I also want people to kick around some ideas and coordinate with one and other if you are working on related topics. I will be around for the next few hours and will occasionally add to the post, so refresh your screen now and again for new announcements. I will be in the thread so feel free to asks questions, but since I am drinking some delicious beer tonight look for the last 20 minutes or so to consist of my sending you bunny pictures and typing I love you guys in all caps through my drunken sobs.

All right, let’s get to work. First, everyone of you need to go and read this now. Yes, you! I don’t care if you read it yesterday, take 5 minutes and look it over again. I’ll wait.

Ok, so now I want to post something for those of you who are new to Word Press. First, click on this link and bookmark it. This will answer 99% of your questions about creating a post. Also, if you have never posted watch this video to help get you started.

Ready? Great! Now that you have Word Press mastered you are set. Now, let’s move to the next issue. What the hell are we going to write about? There are no content limitations for the most part and there are no assigned beats. Write whatever you are passionate about. Don’t feel like you have to have some amazing topic to get started. Write about what you find interesting and your enthusiasm will probably spread to your readers. Don’t be afraid to take the plunge. We are all pretty nice over here. Also, the beauty of Word Press is that if you really hate it you can just take it down. Take a deep breathe, you are going to be good at this.

So let’s go ahead and throw out a few ideas for each other and try to give each other some feedback so everyone can develop their ideas. Please post ideas if you have them, or if you want to see what people think about a topic. Also, I know several of you have similar interests, so maybe you can work together to come up with some stuff. I know there are a lot of TV fans out there, so we can try to come up with what shows you guys want to cover.

Here are a few things that myself, Dogs, and Meat want to stress:

Please try to take the time to write up good material. You don’t have to write a novel, but you are making this for our community, so give them something good.
Please don’t over post. Everyone who is taking the time to write here deserves to have their stuff seen.
Don’t be a jerk commenter to people who are just getting the hang of this. I should not have to add any more to this.
Let us choose the categories for the posts. It is necessary to keep the front page looking orderly.
Make sure you have a thumbnail image for every post. You must load the image into the media library and link it from there. You can not just copy the link from the internet.
Ask of if you have any questions are need help. The admin types here are doing this because we really enjoy all of you guys, we are here to help.

I am going to post a few links to some good stories that have been posted in the past. Please take a look at them because I think they will really help you.

Here is a wonderful story from Aunt Betty Crocker.

A great music column from Left Coast Lady.

Great political column from Arken. I think this was Arken’s first post so he deserves a bro hug.

I can’t even really explain this one, although it is an example of a post from a recurring column.

Ok, let’s get to it. Post your questions, ideas, irrational fears below and we will all try to make sense of this.

Quick note: If you are interested in a certain topic, put that word first in your reply so others can find you. Second, please thank Coffee and Cigs for being our sexy secretary this evening.

New Update:

I am putting some topic threads below. If you are interested in those topics, put a reply in the disscusion so I can see who is who. Also, I noticed no one said thank you to Coffee and Cigs for taking notes. Don’t make me take the cute bunny pics away.

BTW, here is a really fun TV column.

OK. I am going to take a break for a minute. Please take a brief dance break.

Also, I could really use a few news items for tonight’s overnight open thread. Send ’em if you got ’em.

Update: I think we have had a productive night. If you are reading this late still feel free to add comments and sign up under a topic section. I will check this post in the next couple of days to see what people are thinking and what they are interested in. I think the next step will be to have some posts for each section so we can help each other develop our posts. I will try to get that started in the next week. In the meantime, please feel free to put up posts and get started if you haven’t already. Let us know if you need help.

It has been an honor to serve with you all. Together, we will win the internet.

Recipe: Spicy Honey Chicken? Yes You Can!

44 comments

Hi, my name is GtCosita, and I love P.F. Chang’s Chang’s Spicy Chicken. I am not ashamed to put this love out there for everyone to see. You would think that as someone who loves food, I’d be all about trying new things. You would be correct, except for the fact that money is tight and Orlando, FL is not exactly a Mecca of diversity when it comes to restaurants. A few years ago, one of the servers at Chang’s let me in on a little secret: order the honey chicken, ask for a side of Chang’s spicy sauce, and mix. I’ve been hooked on that combo ever since. Last night I felt like making my own, and found two recipes that I merged into the following deliciousness:

Spicy Honey Chicken (2 servings)
Total prep time: About 20 minutes
Total cooking time: About 15 minutes

Ingredients:
Two medium chicken breasts cut into nuggets (or any size you prefer)
1/3 cup cornstarch in a medium bowl
2 garlic cloves – minced
1 tablespoon minced or grated ginger
2 tablespoons chopped onion (if you have green onions feel free to substitute)
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon chili sauce (more or less depending on your spice preference)
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar (you can substitute apple cider vinegar or white vinegar)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon cornstarch mixed in 1 tablespoon of water
Vegetable oil for frying

Prep
Heat up oil in a wok or skillet under medium heat. I use enough oil to almost cover the chicken without completely submerging it. While the oil is heating up, combine the soy sauce, chili sauce, honey, vinegar, salt, and the 1/2 cup of water in a bowl. Stir and set aside.

Don’t be afraid to try the sauce and adjust the spice to your liking (if you use your finger to try the sauce, you may want to wash that finger after you’ve put it in your mouth). Add the chicken pieces (a few at a time) to the bowl with the cornstarch and “bread” the pieces with a light coating.

Once the oil is hot (you can test dunk one piece of chicken – if it starts bubbling, you’re ready to go), fry the chicken pieces (turning once) until the chicken is cooked through (about 3 minutes per side for nugget-sized pieces). Take the chicken out and place on a plate with paper towels to drain. Carefully, remove some oil from your wok or skillet (you can put the excess oil in a ceramic bowl to cool), leaving about 1/2 an inch of oil.

Place the wok/skillet back on the burner (still at medium heat), add the onions, garlic, and ginger and cook for about two minutes. Add the sauce and stir for a few more minutes. Once the sauce starts boiling, add the cornstarch/water mixture, and stir for about two minutes. Once the sauce thickens, add the fried chicken back and stir to coat and heat through, about 1 minute. Serve with sticky white or brown rice.

Easy Tips for Picture Perfect Cuticles and Nice Nails

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Keeping your cuticles “picture perfect” is an easy way to make your home manicure look professional, Even if you don’t polish your nails, keeping your hands looking well-groomed is a really easy way to look put-together without taking that much effort. Alternatively, if you’re like me, and you like to post pictures of your manicure on the internet, you may have noticed that the macro setting on your camera makes your cuticles look like an emery board.

Moisturize! Dry cuticles peel but moisturize, and they will look fantastic within a few days. The trick is to moisturize them with something whenever you’re thinking about picking at them. I carry Burt’s Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Balm. Because I’m a reformed nail biter, whenever I get the tense urge to bite my nails, I moisturize my cuticles instead. (Think: smoker who tries to replace with gum-chewing.)

Mango Mend

Wear gloves when you wash your dishes (and other things)! Water will destroy your hands. Don’t listen to that dish soap commercial where the sponge thinks that the soap makes the lady’s hand sexy. It doesn’t. It just dries it up and makes you smell like dish soap. Do your dishes—that’s important. But just, invest in some plastic gloves. I also recommend dishes for gardening.Humans use tools! Please don’t use your nails to open things or rip off packaging. You will break your nail. And if you’re really unlucky, you will break it so it exposes skin and that will sting like fire the next time you try to make lemonade from scratch.

Burt’s Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Cream

Speaking of tools, the best nail file advice I ever got was to use a glass file. It’s less damaging than a metal file and less wasteful than an emery board. File in one direction (this is a lot harder than it sounds) instead of sawing back and forth. It’s better to file than cut but if you want to get rid of a lot of length all at once, it’s helpful to soak your hands first so the nail is a bit softer to cut. The other trick to filing your nails is to file your nails with nail polish on. It makes it easier to see if you’re shaping it the way that you envisioned in your head.

If you have any questions or nail polish requests, feel free to post them in the comments and I will use some of those (as many as possible, I’d love to answer all of your questions) as material for future posts. I also like trying nail art and will work on making some easy to follow tutorials for you. So consider this (first) post, “Total Request Tunamelt.”

Tips To Enjoy Disneyland

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Yesterday, as part of Operation Get Some On Valentine’s Day, I took the girlfriend to Disneyland. Below is a list of tips to make your time there more enjoyable, and some general observations of the day.

If a friend or family member works there, they can get you in for free. I strongly recommend this. It is a mathematical certainty that “Free” beats “$74 A Person.” Also, with this free ticket, you get the ability to go into Disneyland’s bastard stepbrother, the California Adventure Park. I don’t understand this thing. They have a scale model of the Golden Gate. Sure, you could drop the money to see that, or just drive north for six hours and see the real one. This was like putting a Planet Hollywood in Beverly Hills next to the old CAA building. Sure, I could see the white T-Shirt Bruce Willis wore in Die Hard, or I could just walk outside, and see Bruce Willis for realsies.
Get some sort of ailment. I’m not proposing breaking something or contracting lupus, but if you have an old ankle brace, dust that sucker off, put it on, get in a wheelchair, and get on all the rides from the exit, thereby avoiding the line. (WARNING: Not all of these tips are particularly honest, and anything between you and your God is your business)
Fast Passes: These are basically vouchers that you can get to hold a place in line. If a ride offers a Fast Pass, you insert your ticket to Disneyland in a machine, and get a ticket that allows you to get on a much shorter line between two certain times. When you’ve hit your time window, you go back to the ride, show the guy at the beginning of the line your Fast Pass, and he puts you in a shorter line. It’s worth it if the wait time for the ride is 20 minutes or more, but don’t bother if it is less. Also, if you go at the very beginning of the time window, you get to the front or near the front of the Fast Pass line. The longer you wait, the more people who got Fast Passes when you did will be in front of you. Get a Fast Pass, go back to the ride right when the time window opens, and you’re looking at a five minute wait for the ride.
Fast Passes are offered, but provide no advantage on the Autopia. That ride is a steaming pile of shit anyway, so just skip it all together.
This is my first time back since 2002, which is crazy, because I love it there, and live two hours away. In fact, until 2005, I lived 45 minutes away. Since then, Disney has hit on this idea that if a movie makes money, and there’s a ride that somehow fits in with that movie, they should redo the ride to fit that movie. Johnny Depp is now in Pirates Of The Caribbean. This isn’t so bad, except for moments when it’s glaring that they just shoehorned references in. Davy Jones now talks to riders via a projection on a curtain of dry ice. This happens right before you go into the huge naval battle, and now Geoffrey Rush is demanding that the Conquistadors who are manning the fort hand over Captain Jack Sparrow. Granted, I never saw Pirate 3, and stopped paying attention halfway through 2, but Captain Jack hanging out with Conquistadors seems to violate quite a bit of history. The Submarine Voyage is now “Finding Nemo While We Get Rid Of Everything That Made This Ride Fun, And Now It Makes Absolutely No Sense.” You start out with a speech similar to the original saying you’re going on a submarine voyage, only now the accents are Australian, and you get to watch a lot of underwater animatronics. That shit I love. Then, the people stop talking, and you watch video out of your portholes while the dad fish and the stupid fish swim around and talk. They can’t even get the mix on this ride correct. At one point, the crew of the sub breaks in and says something, but you can’t understand it because there’s still dialogue going on from the two fish. They finally find Nemo, I guess, because there’s a fish that looks exactly like the dad fish, but with a different voice, and something about an underwater volcano. See, in the original ride, you see the eruption of an underwater volcano, and the narrator discusses how dangerous it is. Now, there are fish swimming around on the volcano set, and nobody says a word about it. All of a sudden everything is just red. Then the narrators come back in to remind you that they were once there in the first place, and mention the mermaids and sea monster from the original ride. But you don’t get to see them. This ride now sucks out loud.
Strangely enough, they didn’t add Eddie Murphy to the Haunted Mansion ride.
If you’re on a ride that breaks down, you get a pass to avoid the line of any ride. It’s a one-use thing, and works for parties up to 6. The girlfriend and I were on Thunder Mountain when it broke. We used our pass to get on the Matterhorn. Here’s a tip: If you’re in this situation, when they walk you back to the beginning of the ride, they ask how many people are in your party. Have each person in your party say “One.” You get as many passes as you have people with you, and can use them all over the place.
Space Mountain has the same moving lights we do at my work. They seem to not work for them either. If anyone is in the theatrical entertainment business, DO NOT BUY STUDIO SPOTS. Space Mountain redid the ride so now you get music and a much darker room. The darker room is amazing. The music is terrible. It’s some soundtracky adult contemporary music with an epileptic drummer playing behind it. They also do the thing where they take your picture, but it’s when the ride slows down to return to the beginning. The photos have shots of a lot of people pitched forward as the brakes kick in.
Captain Eo is fucking terrible. I mean absolutely fucking terrible. George Lucas, I can believe you put your name on this because of every movie you were involved with post 1989. Coppola, you fucking made The Godfather. Granted, this is mid-80s broke Coppola before he started making money on wine, but still. You are much better than this. You wrote Patton. You go from George C Scott’s monologue in front of the flag to the dialogue in this piece of shit? The inventor of the written language is rolling over in his grave.
It’s somewhat depressing to watch a friend be the Jungle Cruise Skipper. Watching your friend repeat the same jokes they have for the last three years, and hearing the “(kill me)” riding on the carrier frequency of the terrible jokes makes you kind of sad. I was wearing a Yankee hat, and my friend introduced me to the rest of the boat as Short Round, despite the fact that I’m 6′, and white. I took a second to tell of the time Ponies! and I tried to start a twitter rumor that Short Round had died. The rumor didn’t take.
Skip Fantasmic and any parades or the fireworks. Fantasmic is some flashlights shining on water. The fireworks are controlled explosions in the sky that, frankly, you can see from anywhere in the park. The parade is a parade, and like all parades, sucks. Here’s what those events are good for: GO ON ALL THE BIG RIDES. Everyone is watching those things happen, and you can get on with little or no wait.
Last thing: Went on Pirates at like 9:30 AM, and saw a couple riding alone in a boat. They were both texting. It broke my heart to see that two people let such a prime opportunity for some ride head slip past them.

Bah, lovebug!

65 comments

If you’re one of those jerks or jerkettes who awoke this morning to a blissful, dizzying euphoria, good for you. If you want to read happy Valentine’s Day stories, Betty Crocker has put together two absolutely adorable posts on his ridiculously healthy and happy relationship with Cap’n Crocker.

For the rest of us, today’s just another Monday. Except on most Mondays, I don’t call FTD and ask them to bring me long-stemmed roses from an anonymous secret admirer.

“Ooh!” I don’t say on most Mondays, “I wonder who these are from!” “Haha,” I don’t continue on most Mondays, “guess it’s just my lucky day!” “Don’t be sad, it’s just a silly greeting card holiday,” is something I don’t say to my coworkers on most Mondays.

So whatchall doin’ this Valentine’s Day? If your answer includes…

dinner with a significant other
a date you’re excited about
the reasonable expectation of good sex

…then please head on over to Betty’s posts. We’re not tryna hear that over here.

Happy Anna Howard Shaw Day to all of you lonely hearts out there. Leave your suggestions on how to spend Valentine’s Day on your own and be totally fine with it, okay?

Grape Expectations: Wine and Monogamy

20 comments

Have you ever blamed being over-served as an excuse to cheat on your lady love? Sorry guys, that excuse doesn’t hold water (or wine) anymore.

Two wine economists (who knew those existed?) noticed that societies which embraced multiple wives, polygyny, do not consume alcohol. Two notable examples of this in today’s world are parts of the Muslim world and parts of the Mormon church.

Pondering over a glass or two of wine, these economists pondered two questions: “is this ad hoc observation representative of a true phenomenon? Does a real (positive) correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption exist?” I recommend you read this study, “Women or Wine? Monogamy and Alcohol” as it is fascinating. The bottom line is summed up nicely by Mara Squicciarini, one of the co-authors: “We were surprised to find that there is a trade-off between alcohol consumption and the number of sex partners that men tended to keep at any one time.”

Notable points in this paper:

Apparently there is a ton of data on “frequency of drunkeness” – data that goes back centuries.
Greek and Roman Empires were the only societies who consumed alcohol in that point in history. They were also the only societies who embraced ‘formal monogamy.’
Alcohol consumption did not alter the number of sexual partners a woman had. Slut shaming strikes again!
The Catholic Church may have its issues, but the Church was critical at spreading viticulture around Europe. They were also helpful at spreading breweries around the world too. Servicey!
The Industrial Revolution appears to be the tipping point for both alcohol consumption and monogamy.
Lord Krishna was said to have 16,108 wives and King Solomon had 700 wives and about 300 concubines — all without any social networking or Gawkerdating.

So when you open up that bottle of bubbly with your loved one this evening, you may want to ponder: do we drink because we are monogamous, or are we monogamous because we drink?

The question all parents dread…

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We all asked it when we were children, or we really, really wanted to: How are babies made?

How does it work? He sticks what where?!?!

As a child I was fascinated by it all, and to my mother’s dismay, asked endless questions about peepee’s and weewee’s and whozits and whatzits galore (I also liked The Little Mermaid.)

My mother was conservative, but also a nurse and therefore believed it was better to answer the questions in a straightforward manner, lest I seek other more embarrassing sources for the questions that kept popping into my little head. Rather than describing things for my more visual-oriented mind, mom sat me down with a book instead. “Where Did I Come From” By Peter Mayle along with it’s companion, “What’s Happening To Me” became frequent sources of information for me growing up- I would read the descriptions of sex, ( One page reading, “By this time, the man wants to get as close to the woman as he can, because he’s feeling very loving to her. And to get really close the best thing he can do is lie on top of her and put his penis inside her, into her vagina.” left little to the imagination.) and look at the diagrams showing the stages of puberty in awe, feeling very enlightened for a 7 year old. Being let in on the big secret of the adult world opened the floodgates of my inquisitive mind. Did the man always lay on top? Did it always feel like “scratching an itch, but a lot nicer”? What happened after? How often did it happen? Did my parents do that? I never had “THE TALK” because the topic of sex and puberty was always open for discussion (In privacy, of course) with my mother.

This behavior on her part came from growing up in the 60’s with a cold-as-stone mother. Think Betty Draper, but instead of being the pampered wife of a New York Ad Executive, being the poor wife of an alcoholic farmer in the middle of nowhere. When my mom asked my Baba (Grandmother in Ukrainian) how she would know if she had gotten her period, Baba replied curtly, “You just will.” And the discussion was never to be brought up again. My mother never wanted her children to grow up distressed with unanswered questions and feeling shameful for having them in the first place, like she was made to feel.

Now I ask, how did you learn about the birds and the bees? And if you have children of your own, how have you dealt with their questions?