rah rah sis boom bah

please do something for me

Please sign the following petition:

To: Newsweek magazine

As feared, the fall fashion season has brought an influx of rabbit and other fur products into department and other stores. There are jackets, ponchos, shawls, shrugs, boleros, collars, mufflers, hat trim, coat trim, glove linings, and rabbit fur trimmed boots. The October 11, 2004, issue of Newsweek carried an article titled “Real Fur Is Fun Again: It’s less expensive and more popular than ever than ever. But as young people snuggle up, where are the protesters?” See http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6160136/site/newsweek

Fur is not fun. Rabbits in fur and meat farms have miserable, short lives. They are slaughtered by electrocution or having their heads bashed against a wall. Then a few incisions are made in the fur, and their skin is literally ripped off of them. Since the killing methods are imperfect, it's inevitable that some rabbits are still conscious when their fur is removed. Governmental oversight of the fur industry is minimal, enforcement is lax, and prosecution unusual.

Fur vendors frequently claim that the fur is a "by-product" of the Chinese meat industry. That's deceptive. The fur is a product, not a by- product, because it generates revenue and it encourages more breeding of rabbits. Furthermore, rabbits with the thicker fur desired by designers and manufacturers are not necessarily those bred for meat. The bigger the market is for rabbit fur, the more likely that rabbits are bred primarily for their fur.

Fur is entirely unnecessary. Synthetics look great, feel great, and are cheaper to produce. Fur is currently being heavily marketed, which drives up demand. The solution is to reduce demand. One of the most effective ways to do that is to let people know about the suffering that goes into every fur garment and to remind them that faux fur is a widely available attractive substitute.

Indeed, where is the protest? Please sign the petiton to let Newsweek know where the protestors are.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

at http://www.petitiononline.com/bunaide4/

i can't believe this. it makes me want to cry. how can people do this, it's disgusting!!!

i have always tried to be at least somewhat 'tolerant' of the fact that other people simply don't care about animals that much, and eat their meat, etc. but i cannot tolerate this. it's unnecessary and it's disgusting and it's cruel. thanx,

today has been a shitty shitty shitty shitty shitty shitty day

now that i'm allowed to curse on my blog, there you go. this is actually a lyric from a puberty boi song. i think some of you know what that is.

since i woke up this morning i have:

*woken up way too early

*gotten in the shower, only to realize i had no soap left in there and i had to get out of the shower and go out of the bathroom to get the soap. i hate getting out of the shower to get something once you're already in there it sucks.

*almost got hit by a car when i was passing through an intersection, she knows it was my turn to go (oh yeah i was on my bike) and i looked at her and i could see that she was saying "something something you stupid bitch". and she had a toddler and a small baby in the car. way to set a good example, super mom!

*at the very next intersection, i was trying to make eye contact with the driver crossing my path, you know to make sure that she saw me, and she did and stopped and i started to go and right then i looked down and noticed that i had run over (on my bike!) a dead opposum. that's right. in the middle of the city. with guts and stuff hanging all out of it. i don't deal well with that. i had to pull over and gag. seriously.

*at the very next intersection, the person behind me honked at me, (cross traffic does not stop here), presumably because i wasn't able to easily and fearlessly zip through the speeding cars. scared the crap out of me.

*so by now i'm a little uptight, just come back to my office to chill. decide to call a few principals, because this is how i get kids in my study. let's just say one of them decided to verbally abuse me. i won't go further. she called me a crackpot.

*when i got in this morning, someone said, oh we're going to hear about your blahblah reserrch today huh? and then i remembered DUH i was supposed to have a short presentation for the labb meetting about some research i'm "doing" and i left the data at home because i was going to look over it last night and get everything all ready but then i hung out with brian and i totally forgot about the whole thing.

*called mike to complain and to ask him to please bring the papers with the data. then i felt guilty about calling and started getting all defensive, totally confusing him. then i burst out crying and sat in my office for a while crying hoping that no one would try to come in and talk to me. i'm done now. blog blog blog. all before noon. pretty impressive for someone who doesn't even normally get out of bed before nooon, huh?

now that we've all agreed that i can curse whenever i want to the hell, (except for my sister who is a total square), i'm going to let loose....

nah, i'm just kiddin.

yesterday mike and i had a lovely and domestic day. first i slept until 4pm. well not really,,,i slept really late then i woke up and then i went back to sleep until 4pm. i felt really messed up when i got up too like my brain was no longer able to function. it took me like 45 minutes to take a shower! i have to get up "early" these days...and you all know that early for me is 8...so i told myself i would sleep until i couldn't sleep anymore yesterday. and so that's what i did. i think if i would have slept longer i probably would have stopped breathing. in fact for some reason yesterday was a really bad asthma day for me too. at one time yesterday i was having an asthma attack *thlobber* and mike went to get my inhaler and then my nose started bleeding. it was really horrible. so i went back to sleep for a while.

but oh yeah except for the wheezing and bleeding, we had a lovely day. we decided to clean and mike went on a cleaning rampage. i can't believe what he did...he cleaned up so much stuff. then i finally woke up and cleaned the kitchen and the snickers area, which was really messy because she just finished shedding (hey maybe this had something to do with the wheezing...) so that took me a while to clean up. then this lady called to see if we wanted to get DSL so i decided to do that and the phone call took like an hour.

and mike and i decided to cook.

which we never do.

so we had the following:

salad
salsa (mike made it himself! yummy and spicy, huh, mike?)
pasta with vegetables (i sauteed!)
corn soup (seriously, it's delicious)
pumpkin pie

also i made this fancy appetizer, leeks with some sort of lemon/egg sauce. but it turned out that of course (since i'm not domestic) it needs to chill for a while before you eat it. and we were so stuffed at the end of the meal that we decided to let it chill until today.

then mike cleaned up and made me a margarita and i went to sleep. again. then he woke me up with laughing because apparently, i didn't see it, but he said that something really funny happened to ashlee simpson on saturday night live last night...did anyone else see this?

according to him the "singing" started playing and she wasn't going along with it...exposing that she was, duh, lipsynching! no surprise there, right? then instead of just catching up with it or something she just danced a little bit and then ran off the stage. at the end of the show, she blamed the band for playing the wrong song. i wish i would have seen this cuz it sounds hilarious.

well anyways i'm going to go...i have to do some cleaning today since mike cleaned up all his crap yesterday.

etc.
etc.
etc.

well, shit.

i haven't updated for over a week even though i totally meant to.

basically what's going on with my life is well um not much.

i'm getting subjects for my experiment, so that's cool...i'm hanging out with mike.

mike got a job at a hippie grocery store.

mike's car got smashed n grabbed just like mine did.

we went home to visit my family this weekend. it was fun.

my siblings got a little bitty baby bunny; snickers doesn't like that bunny, it turns out.

made some anti-fur tshirts.

ate some food.

hung out with ronnie and brent, my friends from bloomington last week when they came to chicago to visit brent's sister.

overslept today and missed the class i'm the TA for. that's too much pressure for me anyways. i have to get there a half hour early to unlock the media cabinet, i'm the only one with a key so if i don't go in there in time, the class gets delayed, everyone's mad at me, etc. so yeah i screwed up real bad. but whatever, life goes on.

i'm going to see team america tonight. i heard it's funny and really really offensive. so we'll see.

everything is a mess because mike and i continue to be total pigs and slobs.

snickers is a happy bunny because mike and i continue to be totally doting bunnyparents.

butt butt butt.

the end.

don't buy stuff on tuesday

i'm not really into business or interested in that whole world, but many women are and they should have more control. so buycott, baby!

Tuesday, October 19:
85 Broads invites you to leave your checkbook and credit cards at home as a symbolic gesture that women no longer "buy" the glacial pace of change for working women in America. Instead of shopping, go for a walk in the park, write a letter to a friend, enjoy a museum, or help someone in need.
85 Broads, a networking group founded in 1999 by Janet Hanson, who worked for Goldman Sachs, is askign its 4,000+ members in 450 companies, colleges, and B-schools not to spend today. The "buycott" will show the gap between women's purchasing power and their underrepresentation in boardrooms and executive suites.
Women control $3.3 trillion in early consumer spending, 44% of national spending. If women shut their purses and didn't shop for a day, would the economy suffer? According to Catalyst, only 6 CEO's in the Fortune 500 ar ewomen, 12.4% are board directors, and 5.2% are among the top earners in the country.
According to Business Week, the U.S. economy has become increasingly FEMALE-DRIVEN!
Did you know that women in the U.S.:
1) Control $3.3 trillion in annual consumer spending?
2) Make 62% of all car purchases?
3) Take more than 50% of all business trips?
4) Control over 50% of the personal wealth in this country?
Source: Business Week

okay
so my cellphone battery appears to have two settings: fully charged and totally dead. and switches back and forth between them for no reason, staying on with full charge for eight days without explanation, and clicking off with a loud "beep" in the middle of the one phone conversation i'm having this week after having been on the charger for six hours. i don't get it.

signing off,
totally confused

You should check out this webpage:

things my girlfriend and i have argued about

because, well, it's really funny. it will make you feel like maybe your relationship is emotionally stable. here's one that's pretty funny:

" The Terror Of Lids: Yes, the rewards are high, but it's a game where the price of defeat is savage. Sometimes Margret, after grunting with it herself for a collection of 'hnggh's, will hand me a bottle or a jar that has a screw top along with an impatient, 'Open that for me.' If the gods lie content in the skies above England at that moment, then what follows is a rapid flick of my wrist, a delightful 'click-fshhhh' gasp of surrender, and my handing the thing back to her FEELING LIKE A HERO OF NORSE LEGEND. Generally, though, what happens is that I strain for a while and strip the skin off the palm of my hands. Then I wrap the lid in a tea towel and strain some more to equal effect. At this point I'm on to using the jam of the door as a vice to hold the lid while I twist at the container; Margret will be saying, 'Give it back here, you'll wreck the door,' and I'll be swearing and twisting and saying, 'I'll repaint that bit in a minute.' The fear is upon me. If it's a fizzy thing, you can sometimes puncture the lid to relieve the pressure and then get it open, but you're not often that lucky. 'Give it back,' Margret repeats, reaching around me, trying to take the item from my hands. I swivel away - 'Just a minute' - and desperately twist at the lid again, now not even attempting not to squint up my face as I do so. At last, though, Margret will manage to get the thing back. This is the darkest moment. If she tries again and it remains fastened, then I am saved. 'It's just completely stuck,' I'll say, 'It is. Stop trying now. Stop. Stop it.' However, there are times - and my stomach chills now, even as I write this - when she gets it back and, with one last satanic effort, manages to spin the lid free. A slight smile takes up home on her face.
'What?' I say.
'Nothing.'
'No - what?'
'Nothing.'
'I'd loosened it.'
'I didn't say anything.'
And I'll have to drag the tiny, damp shreds of my manhood away into the reclusive garage until the slight, slight smile disappears from her some thirty-six hours into the future."

hahaha.....

you really know it's fall on the south side when...

well there is a lot of really strange stuff going on here lately. mike has had some unfortunate luck with car vandalization.

a couple of weeks ago, we went to target, when we were going inside he noticed that someone had *stolen* the sticker off the license plate of his car, like the sticker that says what year the license plate expires. I thought those were supposed to be theft-proof. i'm totally confused by that. it was just gone.

a few days later he goes out to get in his car and has a flat tire. when he takes it to the shop, they show him the giant gash in the side of the tire. although there are myriad possible reasons for this, the most likely is that his tire got slashed.

now, i'm not sure what exactly motivates people to slash someone's tire, but it seems to me that if i were the tire-slashing type (and i'm not, by the way), i would slash the tires on the mercedes benzes and the BMWs and the lexuses (lexi?) on our block, not the 1987 toyota corolla. but that's just me. the next day, we saw another old corolla with a tire slashed. like some sort of random serial tire-slasher is terrorizing our neighborhood. it's messed up...

but apparently for the last few days no one has wanted to mess with his car, so that's great. i keep expecting to go out and find my car not there or to find the window bashed in again or something. messed up things have been happening.

there are some other random criminal activities going on in our neighborhood, i'm not going to go into details but just to let you all know, i'm being extra extra careful. i spend most of my time locked up in my office anyways so im pretty safe overall. :)

i'm not going to let the terrorists run my life though. i'm going to get out to the mall and spend spend spend. that's my post-9/11 method of dealingwith things. seriously, i'm not joking.

the other day mike and i bought some new pots and pans. oh maybe i already told this story, never mind. anyways i am ms. spendy pants 2004 these days. i swear.

but the spending has to end because i have to pay bills. so yeah.

well anyways lata.

a few things:

i cleaned my room. well, it's still a little messy but it's not that bad anymore. the thing is that the landlord was coming to remove the air conditioner so i cleaned it out.

mike put the bike light on my bike. i haven't ridden it at night yet with that on but it's gonna be cool.

we bought some new pots and pans after our friend marty told us about a sale at carson pirie scott, they were selling all this stuff for 50 bux. we needed some new cooking supplies. they're purty. but we bought them down town and then we had to lug them all over and then carry them home on the bus. where there was a very cute little boy dressed as a dragon who, i might say, was quite enamored by me.

ATTENTION EVERYONE:
this is a very important announcement. everyone needs to go out right now and rent/buy/otherwise see the film "iron jawed angels". you will not believe it. it's a really amazing movie. so do that.

okay that's pretty much it. i was supposed to be gathering up dirty clothes while mike was in the shower but instead i blogged and now he's getting out of the shower and i didn't do what i was supposed to. it must be really hard living with me.

you got ghosts, girl!

"Women with their long dresses were being pulled underwater due to the weight of their drenched clothing."

has she ever talked about this on her show?

i'm getting sick of how my blog looks. i'm thinking of changing the template. isn't that great? yes yes.

cough.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm



i am TAing a class and desperately trying to get a new research assistant because my old one is way too busy to do any sort of assisting. so yeah. i have three people from my class who are interested. i guess we'll see what happens.

i need to clean my room real. real. bad. but i'm so lazy and it's hard.

i have had a headache all day.

i have to ride my bike home now before it gets dark. because mike promised to put a bike light on my bike, but we decided yesterday that there is as much chance of him doing that as there is of me cleaning my bedroom. because every day i'm like oh i need to clean the bedroom today i'll do that in a little bit and he's like oh i need to put that bike light on your bike today i'll do that in a little bit. and then nothing gets done.

mike and i went to a party on saturday night for the beginning of school and something miraculous happened. mike was sociable. like really really sociable. like mingling with other people without me and i would look over and it would be like this:

characters:
mike
guy
other guy

mike: says something

guy and other guy: laughing

mike: says something else

guy: replies, laughing

mike and other guy: laughing

he doesn't seem to remember what they were talking about, but apparently it was fun fun funny.


then the next day mike very badly wanted to get "cool guy jeans" so he got some at target and they are so cool that i barely recognized him. because he rarely looks cool. dissssss!