Did the Chinese just not have wandering missionaries? Were they not good at lion fighting?

People have had religion since the beginning of recorded history. Roman and Greeks had many similar gods.  I'm sure they heard tales from the East and the South of strange and new religions all the time. I wonder what made Christianity the prevailing European religion and not, say, Buddhism.  What made them all convert to a Middle Easter one and not a Far Eastern one.  How different would the world be if Norse polytheism had taken hold instead? Would scores of emo kids on facebook be saying Ohmyloki about everything? Would the Thor movie be more like The Passion Of The Christ and less like Ironman? Seriously, this is the shit I wonder about at almost midnight.
Crap. I gotta go to bed.

Also today I ate

Today I also made supper from the internet and it was SO YUMMY! It was kind of like Noodle Company's thai noodles but no store I went to had sprouts so I left them out. This recipe calls for green onions and cilantro but I replaced cilantro with parsley and would have replaced onions with sprouts but there were none so I just left them out and added more carrots. Being all clever and frugal I bought baby carrots because those get eaten faster in our house but once home I realized that I am an idiot and that shredding baby carrots with a potato peeler is really hard.  But anyway, here's the recipe, which I found on pinterest but will post the original link here:
http://asmallsnippet.blogspot.com/2011/03/spicy-thai-noodles.html

Also, I used 1T of pepper flake and it was so hot, so next time I'll probably halve that. In fact, it made a lot of sauce so I'll probably halve the whole sauce recipe and then take out still more pepper. This was a meal that required a lot of milk.

A goal has been reached

I got 4 inches cut off my hair today, mostly by way of new layers added. It's shorter than I usually wear it but I can still pull it up so all is well. The big thing is that now it's finished. I am fairly certain that it's all my own natural dye-free hair now. No more embarrassing ponytails that don't match my head. No more trying to figure out what colors look good on me because I'm a "cool" tone with my hair up and a "warm" tone with it down. No more hearing "About time to touch up those roots, don't you think?"  It's finally finished, a goal has been met, and it's a very satisfying feeling. My hair is, without the red ends to lighten the look up, darker than I thought it would be. But the gray strands are a silvery white and they sparkle.  Also, as short as it is now, it has waves in it so it almost resembles a deliberate look when I wear it down rather than just middle-parted mom hair. I really like it. I hope I never get used to it and always feel this happy with it as it changes and gets lighter.

My feminist rant against uncomfortable clothes and femal athletes

There's the is insane sexist philosophy out there that says you have to be sexy to compete with me, and conversely if you compete with men you must be sexy. Have you ever watched Xena? Eyeliner and a miniskirt, on a badass babe who did nothing but beat up men the whole series. And then you also have female athletes in male sports. Danika Patrick, that golfer girl, they aren't all that hot, and yet they're TOTAL BABES because there's nothing else with a vagina anywhere near them!
And look at politics. Sarah Palin (against all women's issues) and Hillary Clinton (for all women's issues). One was hot and one wasn't. And Hillary isn't ugly, she just doesn't look like Tina Fey in a hot for teacher video. But somehow hotness counts.  It shouldn't but it does. But to whom? Who gets to decide what counts? And why do we let them decide? If Xena were real she wouldn't waste time on make up, and she wouldn't wear a strapless corset to fight in and sleep on the hard ground in. We need to stop falling for this shit. We need to point out that Wonder Woman would wear sleeves!

There is no danger of this becoming a fashion blog.

I'm a jeans and tee shirt girl, and not in the fitted tee and skinny jeans way. I buy boot cut jeans and boxy tee shirts and that's what I wear every day. If it's cold I'll either throw a flannel shirt over the tee or trade it all in for a sweatshirt.  It's very difficult to go out because I never have anything to wear. I always try to have one brown button up shirt on hand, and I wear it with jeans, chunky heeled boots, and make up. That's my date look.  If it's a funeral I trade the jeans for a long black and brown skirt. I know squat about fashion. But I've been trying. I bought a pair of brown cords, and a couple new shirts (although I can't wear them unless I suck my belly in and remember not to breathe), and I really think I need some black pants, but I'm stuck in between sizes where some brands fit me in a 12 and others fit me in a 14.  I sewed elastic into the waist of my (only) pair of jeans because of this. Now my pants are adjustable like toddler pants. lol
Maybe once my hair grows out the rest of the way I'll know better what colors suit me. Also, I need to learn how to accessorize. I think I like necklaces, and I even like cocktail rings, but I don't think anything looks good on me. I need a personal assistant to tell me. :(

Damn uterus

Diaper bags. Baby Mum-Mum crackers.  Gerber Puffs. Folding the front of the diaper down for the umbilical chord. The Moby wrap.
Oddly enough, I don't want them.  I truly think that even if I won the lottery and all my kids died, I wouldn't want to have a new baby.  I think I'm done.
I want a hysterectomy. 
I'll have to think on it  a while. My Mirena is still good for another 3 1/2 years so I have time. But if I'm done using my uterus, why deal with periods at all?

The birth board

I am in a group online. It started out as a "birth board" 4 years ago when I was pregnant with Tommy, a bunch of women due in August of 2008. At some point we remaining few joined with the July 08 group when ours died down. But for 4 years I've stayed in this group, checking for updates almost daily, with the same women.  But you know me (maybe), and I don't do well with groups.  Groups come with group dynamics and group mentality, and I always feel like I'm on the outside of that stuff.  And now I'm in some stupid feud with some lady in the group who has "anger issues" (who doesn't?) and everyone walks around her on eggshells deferring to her triggers and I stepped on her invisible landmine issue and she went nuts and they all told me to drop it.  So I left the group for a few days.  Now, I know that mathematically she's no more important than me, but I can't help but feel that they'd rather she stay than me, and that it's a choice that has to be made.  Like, someone has to leave so why not be me?  But, why should I cater to her hissy fit?  I'm somehow not allowed to defend myself because she has shit in her life? We all have shit in our lives. That's just life.  Anyway, I'm leaning toward just leaving the group and  moving on.  But then a part of me thinks maybe I should be part of a group, a group I've got a 4 year investment in.  I don't know. It's just drama.  But seriously, we were all supposed to go to Vegas next year and meet in real life. Wtf.

My mother is now art.

This is not my mother. This is a random photo from a google image search. But this is how they do whole brain radiation, which my mother had. They mold a plastic mesh mash to your face and use it to bold you to a table to hold you still, and then zap you with radiation from all sorts of different angles. The thinking, as I understand it, is that by coming at the tumors from all sides they will hit each known tumor with a lot of radiation without having to send such a powerful beam through any healthy brain tissue, but they'll get the whole brain with enough radiation to take care of any loose cancer cells that may be loitering in there.
My mother gave me her mask.  I asked her if they'd let her keep it and mentioned that it'd be a slightly more personal momento when all this is over than a generic colored ribbon car magnet, so she asked for it and gave it to me. But what do you do with an irradiated mask of your mother's face?
I screwed it into the wall in my hallway.  We don't have any "art" on our walls.  We have family photos (a lot of family photos), and one large piece of white cardboard Tommy colored a rainbow onto, but no actual official art.  And now I have my mother's three dimensional plastic mesh head silhouette sticking out of the wall.  It's kinda cool, but it's also kind of macabre.  Because even if she lives to 100 and dies in a home full of other old ladies, I will still be able to squint at this thing and see my mother's face, at least in profile.  Someday it will be all I have, the only way to see her in 3D. This thing they used to bolt her head down with and shoot laser beams through.  Creepy, yet too personal to throw away.

A good Mom update

My mom's post-chemo pet scan results came back and she has no visible cancer in her at all. This is small-cell cancer so she has to amass a pretty big grouping of cells for it to even show up, so the odds are very much in favor of her having cancer still inside her.  But she has less than she did when this whole mess started, so that's good. The bad, though, is that this is a very very fast-spreading cancer. And if the chemo every 3 weeks has been keeping it in check, it could just go nuts and run rampant now that chemo's over. I need to find out when her next scan is, or blood test, or how they're going to monitor this to know when/if to do more chemo.  I'm hesitantly optimistic, but still scared shitless.  This isn't like breast cancer, where you can beat it. This will kill her (unless she gets hit by a bus first or something); it is terminal and the very fact that it spread to her brain makes it stage 4- the worst.  But for right now, she's healthier than she was 6 months ago and that is great.

I'm still the only one who can understand him

"Chetch! Chetch!"  Danny comes walking into the room with a half-deflated miniature basketball held on top of his head. He throws it to me, and I "chetch" it. I half toss - half hand it back to him and he holds it over/on his head again and walks out of the room calling to his brother to play with him. "Tah-ee! Chetch!"