theSEX

I've been reading a lot lately, as evidenced by my very disjointed post. (I know, normally disjointed wouldn't be a sign of reading, but i've been reading Tom Robbins.) I've also, surprise surprise, watching a lot of movies and tv and I realized that, not only are all of my preconcieved notions about the things i'm attracted to true, they're getting more pronounced :P

The 4 Day War

I don't know how many of you were ever kids but, if you were, you probably played more than one game of WAR. A little bit like Bullshit, WAR involves a single deck of cards - no jokers. The deck is divided evenly between the players - if you have more than four, it's wise to get a second deck. Then, each player throws the top card from their pile and throws it into the center. The person who turned in the highest card takes them all. The game can end two ways. One, when one of the players have all of the cards or two, when you run out of time and you count the number of cards in each players hand and the person with the highest number wins. (There is a small variable there - when I was a kid, we used to - on occasion - actually count the point value of each card and the person with the highest number of points won.)

Well, you all also know that I am a terrible multi-tasker and that I have an almost pathological need to be entertained by several sources at all times so, since Mike and I haven't been particularly chatty lately, when I'm saving a .psd or a commercial is on, I've taken to playing cards all by my lonesome and one of the few games it's not totally weird to play alone is WAR. Divide the deck in two and there you have it.

Oh my god for the four day long game of WAR.

But, it's over now :) And that makes me happy so...ya know, yes, i'm still alive.

...and i'm getting a little closer to the thing that intrigues me most

I once had a friend.

I know. Shocking. But no, that wasn't the end of the thought.

I once had a friend who got angry with me over my least favorite word – potential. More specifically, he was angry because, at 17, I was spending my afternoons with him and my evenings with Mike, taking 200 level courses at the local four-year community college when, in his eyes, I could've been curing cancer, making a bid for office or winning the Nobel Peace Prize. No lie – these are his words, not mine.

At the time, I was furious. How dare someone tell me that instead of being a teenager, I needed to solve world hunger or prove the existence of a higher power or get involved in some new physical study? I was seventeen and a senior in high school already working hard on my second semester in college with a six credit overload – what more could he possibly want from me? {The part of me that feels a need to insert a joke in the middle of all this sincerity would like you to know that I found out exactly what more he could possibly want from me about a year and a half later and I really don't think Mike was happy with the exchange. God knows I wasn't.)

The friendship has since ended and it went up in a fiery mess that could hold most people in awe but, when quorum was last called, we'd found some sort of peaceful coexistence and, frankly, I think that's the most anyone ever could have asked of us.

Until this afternoon, I hadn't thought about that argument in three years and, for the first time since it happened – and, hey, I'm 21, so there's some air in between the issues – I realized that there are very few people on this earth who will ever have the fortune of meeting someone who believes in them that hard. How often do we meet people who believe that not only could we achieve something grand, but that we will simply as a matter of inevitable course?

My life, of late, has given rise to a lot of flogging and a few epiphanies, but I certainly didn't see this particular realization coming.

I won't say I miss him, because what I miss was someone who was never really real and I won't say I'm sorry for everything, because I'm not. What happened rests equally on the shoulders between us but what I can say for it is this – I should have taken better care of one of the people who used to believe in me most.

Luckily, and if I can keep my head on straight, there are still a few out there – a few bridges I haven't burned and I swear to god, I'm trying to put the matches down.

Incan Matrimonial Headmasks?

I am about to blog.

Why am I telling you that I'm about to blog? Well, it's because, though I've finally thought of something to say, I feel a need to explain my recent absence but I feel no need to tie the two posts together.

My life has been…complicated…of late. Which isn't to say that my life isn't always complicated, it's just reached a new plane of complicated.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

I don't blog to update people on my life, save the occasions when I've recently disappeared or the times when there really is news to pass on and I'd like to impart it without going to through the painful and difficult ordeal of actually having to talk to people. I blog either because I'm hoping someone will read it and it will change their mind, like posting about someone doing something stupid, or I blog because there is something going on that I really hope people know about, like when I update the latest PEEJ arrest scores. I blog when something amusing happens and I just feel like talking about it, like when a funny news story comes off the wire and, lastly, I blog when I feel the need to talk but there's no one to listen.

With that having been said, it's not that I don't have anything to say or that nothing is going on, it's that too much is going on and I can't get a grip on it. I feel like James fucking Joyce.

King would be proud.

Some News

"Army Pvt. Evan A. Bixler, 21, Racine, Wis., died Sunday in Hit from enemy indirect fire; assigned to the 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Baumholder, Germany."

[[From the AP]]

...

I never really know what to say in situations like this, but they always leave me feeling like the event should be marked somehow - like maybe saying something with make it feel better. In my experience, it never does, but maybe this time it will.

Yesterday, an old friend was killed in action in Iraq. I found out tonight halfway through gift opening at my uncle's house. In the words of my tenth grade history teacher: War Bad.

Evan, thanks man. Amy, if you're out there, I'm sorry.

The Common Cold

Among teenagers, depression is like a bad cold in a pre-school. It starts with one kid bringing it home and, before you know it, thirty-six thirteen year olds are listening to Sunny Day Real Estate and researching the vegan diet from their darkened basements. I don’t know if anyone else is aware of this fact but if my teenage years taught me nothing else, it was that.

So, a few weeks ago when my brother sent a quasi-suicide note to a friend, I immediately pulled back on the reigns of his relationship with Mike’s nephews to stop the spread of life threatening bacteria.

Well, apparently I’m the biggest bitch in the world.

99% Nerd and...Embracing It?

So, I took a nerd test tonight and the results, they were depressing. Following it, however, I had this conversation:

BitterEpiphany: and he pointed out that the fact that i can identify all of the kennedies in the family photo album counts against me
Other Person: oh my god. that is weird.
Other Person: There was an arguemtn on face book on how Rob Kennedy was related to John Kennedy. care to enlighten us?
BitterEpiphany: As in Bobby Kennedy of recent film fame?
Other Person: yeah.
BitterEpiphany: Brothers
BitterEpiphany: If you're refering to John, not John John

I am severely depressed right now :P

Angst In My Pants

Perhaps I don't have quite as much angst in my pants as I once did, but I spend a lot less time musing than I used to. Which, for you, is probably a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you probably pass by my page as often as you once did but, instead of finding 1000 words to read while you're avoiding – what was it, Susan? 18th C literature? – you end up with a whole lot of nothing or some vague one-liner about Christmas lights and how much I hate it when the flash. (Seriously, I do.) Nevertheless, this morning I woke up with a nagging feeling that today was not going to be one of those days. It wasn't.

Over the years I've been accused of a lot of things – not the least of which is that I'm a bit of a complete bitch. Look up "bitch" in the dictionary and you get a great big picture of me and a link to my website. I can go from the simply unfeeling to deliberately cruel in fifteen seconds flat and I can do it without batting an eyelash. There has been more than one casualty, laying limp on the side of the road of my life. I've deflated more egos than I've boosted and I've done most of it relatively unintentionally and even more unapologetically. While there are, of course, some people exempted from this rule, I tend to treat the people who I would call my friends, or at least my round about acquaintances a lot like I treat my so called enemies.

I can't say that I've ever spent a good amount of time wondering why it is that I'm so hard on people. I know that I can be nothing if not verbally abusive and it's never been a mystery why there are some who deal with the business end of that sword almost every time they come into contact with me – and sometimes simply when the memory of them collides with a bad day. What I never really considered was why people like King, Nate, Aaron, or even Mike, who, for the moment at least, I had made peace with, often felt certain – or should have, at least – that I had it in my mind to be horrible to them on a given day.

I woke up at 5:30 this morning. Actually, I woke up at 11:30 last night, and 12:30, and 1:30, and 2:30, and 3:30 and 4:30…but at 5:30, I decided "fuck it" – and emphatically. Well, maybe not emphatically, but I don't really do anything emphatically at 5:30 in the morning. My point, anyway, was that between 5:30 and 6:30 I had solved a problem that has plagued the people in my life for years. Gotta love it when I day starts off like that – huh?

Okay, so maybe "solved' is a strong word. I haven't actually solved the problem, but it's less bad than it used to be. You see, there are very few people in my life that I'm not horrible to – and then I realized that there are very few people in my life who I don't hate a little, on some level and it all clicked into place.

The problem, not that you cared, is thus; if I'm treating you poorly and I haven't disclaimed my behavior with "I'm crabby today," the truth of the matter is that I probably hate you a little.

Were King alive, I'd still hate him a little. Actually, I kind of hated him a lot. A lot, a lot. Less than I did at one point, but more than was probably good for either of us. I think I probably hated him the most out of anyone I was at all nice to. Aaron…well, yup, kind of hate him a little. Not at lot…mostly because I wasn't really a big fan of him already by the time he elected to start doing things that annoy me. Hell, even Mike, I kind of hate a little…and he still lets me sleep in his bed.

While I'd love to say that the moral of the story is "don't poke the bear," I have to recognize that none of my considerable loathing, for these people at least, comes from an action I can't "get" – I may feel, quite certainly, that I never would have done any of the things that they did, but I've always, at least, been able to understand why they make the decisions that they do. So, in that vein, I guess I have to consider the moral of the story a change that has to happen on my end, rather than the other way around and, from that perspective, the moral of the story seems to be "let it go." Granted, knowing the moral doesn't mean I'm going to do anything with it, for no one has trust and betrayal issues like me. Actually, I think there are some East German Jews and a few Native Americans with small pox who might win the rodeo for that title, but no one does it with the kind of flair I do. ;)

In the end, now that I've publicly defamed a dead guy, my significant other and poor unsuspecting Aaron (told you I was a bitch) I don't really have a lot to say other than "hey, the trust and forgiveness thing was already on the to-do list."

Happy 23rd.

Every year I get just a little bit more superstitious.

WooT!

This would be an exceptionally self absorbed post, except that having a blog and knowing people will read it is kind of self-absorbed anyway, so I figure, I should just call it a wash. And, yes, I know that no one cares, but i'm telling you anyway - I dropped a dress size :)

I'm such a major fangirl for myself right now it's not even funny. :)

Would You Read This?

Tell me, would you read a book about my life?

Today, while i've got three people on the case of the disappearing lesbian Yahoo! Group I'm forced to wonder, those of you who've spent eons reading my blog - tell me, would you buy my book :P

Family

I long to belong to a family where a kids worst fear is walking in on their parents having sex.

What The Hell?

Sometimes, I'm forced to wonder - what in the hell is wrong with this world?

Everyone reading this, far and wide, knows that I frequently rail on my mother for being a generally insensitive individual. She's intelligent enough to make you think she should know better, but no matter how hard you try, she never seems to actually know better. It's enough to drive a sane person crazy.

This morning, when I woke up in my freshly colored hell, I was striken with the overwhelming sense that I should not get out of bed today and, as I rolled over, kicked off my blankets slid my feet into slippers and plodded over many many moving boxes to the bathroom, I was certain there was something wrong wtih the air. Fifteen minutes later, I was aprised of what that was.

It, ladies and gentlemen, was the stink of extramarital affairs. Not mine, nor mikes, but my mother's - because nothing says dysfunction like a 40-year old, married, dyke. Yes, it's true, this morning, my mother was to be found galavanting around town with another married 40-year old dyke whom, earlier this week, she asked if she could sleep with - illiciting a completely called for "No," from my father. Since that ill-fated day, she has seen this woman 3 times, exchanged countless e-mails and phone calls and generally completely disregarded how uncomfortable her husband is with the situation as a whole.

He's packing.

Huzzah for the tippers!

Happy Birthday To Me!

So, last year I asked for fruit snacks. This year, I didn't even try.

I did, however, pop online to find a medly of songs ,dances and visual representations :) They're no fruit snacks, but they'll do :P There were lots of other happy birthday,s but tehse were some of the fun ones :P

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear BitterEpiphany aka Kaaaaaaayyyyyyyy
Happy Birthday to you!
You are now the big 21
You can now drink legally although someone else probably has already told ya thaaaaaaaattttttt
And you can now do just about anything else you wanna do puuuuubbbbbblllllllliiiiiiicccccccllllllyyy(sp?)
And I think that I spelled that wrrrrrrrrooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnggggggggg
Oh, and if you wanna killl soooooooooommmmmmeeeeeeeooooooonnnnnnneeeee- you have the permission to kill me because I hate making tyyyyyyyyyyppppppppppppooooooooooossssssss
But you should be made Ultimate Admin noooooooooooooooowwwwww
Which is right around the time I should be hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidddddddddddddiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnngggggggg *keeps singing while looking for a place to hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiddddddddeeeeeeeee*

http://food.oregonstate.edu/images/fruitveg/banana/banana016.jpg”>one, two and three

this one bullied me into using it, four

Five and six complete with a Buddha

Why have bumps when you can have bananas? seven

the eighth banana, although wooden, still counts as a banana

Nine and ten love each other a lot

eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and fifteen just to get rid of a lot at once

Just cos I'm saying the shadow of this one counts as number seventeen doesnt mean I'm cheating, you try having to come up with original banana comments evertime someone has a birthday

18, 19, 20 almost there

Number 21 is blow up. No I will not be giving one for good luck. A blow up one if quite enough.

We've had an epiphany today!
To Kay's birthday, we'll all say hooray!
She keeps us in stitches
and her blogs do enrich us.
'In the pink' she appears every day.

Hard Drive Failure Is Imminent

I am an idiot.

This morning, I woke up and thought today was going to be an OK day. I logged on, took a glance at the skins I'd finished working on last night and uploaded them to my server to give them a test. They all looked just fine and I was happy. So I contacted our coder and told her they were ready to go if she was ready to pass on a few details i needed so that I could tweak them for posting and she enlightened me to the notion that I was doing it the hard way and my method could be improved upon infinately with just a little bit more knowledge than I had. And I was happy again.

And then all hell broke loose.

Dreamweaver stopped working, so I decided to reboot. Except my PC wouldn't reboot. The system simply couldn't seem to start up. So, off it went and on went the phone - to call Mike, that is, and very gently suggest that he come save me from myself. An hour of looking at it later, the sad sad piece of information is revealed that my hard drive is or is most likely toast - and not in any polite, gentle way, but in fact, with the very error message that titles this post.

On the lucky side of things, the files I was most concerned with losing are safely on the web - and I'm hoping against hope that they remain so and that Norton System Works can recover my poor sad hard drive, and if not the drive, at least the data off of it so that I can hide it elsewhere and get my system running again. Then, well, then I promise to be a better PC user and i'll stop threatening my computer - I promise!

If, however, it's not, I probably won't cry, but I'll want to.

So, after all of that, a quick dinner and giant bag of skittles and a rice krispy treat (who thinks Mike was triyng to make the catastrophic failure of my computer up to me?) I came home, turned on the cute little useless laptop who is diligently trying to provide me with some form of entertainment for the evening, and what did I find when I finished saying "hello's" to my e-friends but 15 messages in my PM box at HPFF informing me that for the third time this week, the Dark Arts was hacked. This was the point at which my brain started oozing out of my left ear because, as this PC has neither anti-virus or FTP software, I had neither the ability to look into the problem or to step in and try to make it go away. As it were, my Prince Charming came to the rescue on is big white horse yet again, found the problem, took the board offline and changed the folder name so determined but idiotic users can no longer access the corrupted little fucker, but damn today is out to kill me.

Dear Diary...

Last night I had a really weird dream. (And by last night I do mean last night, not the night that it currently is because its' 3am)

In my dream, there was an assasination attempt on Ted Kennedy. He was wounded, but not in critical condition by any means and I, being the fangirl that I am, apparently raced to the hosptial to see him - i think it was probably hoping he would do something funny. So there's me parked on a bench of some sort outside of his room, peering through the crack in the door and in walks Jimmy Carter, apparently there to visit my good man Ted.

But wait, there's more. This was the worlds most star studded hotel because not only was Ted Kennedy in traction, with Jimmy Carter at his side, but in the ultimate of oddness, Jake Gyllinhall, who I loathe, was there also - walking down the hall - i dont know, maybe he was visiting Ted too, because he also sat down on the bench I was camped out at.

To make a long story short, a nurse came in - clearly east German - and chased Jimmy back out into the hall, at which point I abandoned Teen Beats most popular hottie and dedicated all of my attention to a conversation with Jimmy Carter about the Iran-Contra scandal.

Fun, huh?

Boot Camp

Well, I just got some "sounds like fun" news today. When my parents and younger brother return from their wanton trip to Wisconsin Dells, where I suspect they plan to drink, sleep, cook over the fire and fight like heavy weight champions and then come back intoning the wonders of family bonding, I get to keep the small one.

Yes, that's right, I am about to be charged with a 13-year old boy. Problematic on many levels, no?

So, does anyone want a kid for a few days? As it turns out, he has a batmitzvah to attend in town on Saturday of next week and, until then, he is under my care because my parents would like to return to Ohio.

Can anyone think of an injury that would prevent me from caring for a child but not prohibit my coffee-pouring abilities?

Pedophiles on the Brain

Yes, I know what time of year it is and, yes, I know why I have pedophiles on the brain, but what I can't help but notice is that the world is, for once, working with me.

This morning, Dateline goes before congress today with PEEJ at their side to present the data they've gathered during their stings over the last two years. Now lets just hope the friendly staff of PEEJ have a few moments - perhaps while waiting for people to make it in through the flood waters - to answer my e-mail about lending us a little hand at HPFF.

I would encourage those of you who have the time to take a moment to give it a watch. The live stream starts at 10AM EST (9AM CST)

Hey, shouldn't we all be dying of Bird Flu right now?

Meth Addicts

Not so terribly long ago, I complained quite publically about the damn meth addicts that took my beloved breathing meications (pseudoephedrine) behind the evil evil counter and out of my precious NyQuil. Now i know that most people dont' suffer from allergies like I suffer from allregies - because when I do something, I like to do it to the extreme - but anyone who has ever been exposed to an allergen knows, there's nothing more fun than not being able to breathe because your sinus cavity has swelled into nothing and the best part - now that i'm registering everytime I have to buy cold medicine and half the time I find that I still can't get the stuff that works because they're now using a substitue (really - what is Sudafed without the pseudoephedrine?

Well, today I learned something even more tragic. It's not working. According to statistical analysis and data, the meth on the streets today is more pure than it has ever been since it's inception and more easily available than ever before.

I hate suffering for nothing.