Random Little Things That Piss Me Off

• John Madden exclaiming over every freaking step in the football game. For one, he sounds like he's spitting when he talks. Also, he can't seem to control his compulsive need to draw everything out on the freeze frames with that damn pen. Why doesn't someone just take the pen away from him?! And finally, he should be made to choose whether he's gonna give the color commentary or the play by play because he tries to do both and he just ends up endlessly interrupting himself. "Okay now Thompson just called for a time out and that's the second time out this half, you know I heard that when he played for Georgetown that he used to pass his classes by hiring an underclassman to, and they're back on the field now, whoa did you see that snap?"
  

• Black Friday shoppers with nothing in mind to buy. There are about a dozen sale items in every store the day after Thanksgiving and usually about two thirds of the people in line are there for the same two or three things. But then there are those people who have no idea what they want to buy, who have woken up at four a.m. to stand in a cold parking lot just to browse the clearance rack. These people should be pushed to the front of the line so that the real shoppers can trample them.

• Sex Trend Articles. As the concerned mother of a 9 year old daughter, I can tell you without reservation that I DO NOT need to read about eleven year olds having oral sex, or how a rising percentage of teenagers don't consider anal sex to be violating their virginity pledges, or about the cuddle puddle craze sweeping the nation's middle schools. I don't need to fear colored jelly bracelets or the retro cherry pattern my daughter loves but I can't find because someone decided it was somehow sexual. Why can I not be allowed to believe that nine year olds watch Hannah Montana for the music and still see sneaking into Mom's make up as the pinacle of rebellion?

• Fattening food that's good for me. So olive oil is good for me, has lots of health benefits, but it's just fat so it's high-calorie and will make me gain weight? SO somehow I am supposed to eat like 20 servings of food every single freaking day to stay healthy, yet not eat too much lest I become a fat American stereotype? Suuuure. That makes sense.

• People who claim that cutting calories too much will stall weight loss. Explain to me how, if I cut the calories I take in below what I burn, I'm not going to lose weight? I mean, say what you will about the anorexic - they are thin. And correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most people who starve to death kind of scrawny when they die? I mean, eating less isn't a real controversial and untested form of weight loss. It's pretty tried and true.

• Lawn Nazis. No I'm not going to rake. No I'm not going to fertilize. No I'm not going to do a damn thing about the brown patch. And yes, I like dandelions. It's natural, and I believe that my yard is my own tiny sea of nature nestled in amongst all the concrete roads and sidewalks and driveways. So please, stop raking and chemically treating and seeding my yard. You have your yard and I have mine and leave mine the hell alone thank you.

• People with secret upscale rules for living. There are some pretty basic rules for living in polite society, some conversational lines we don't cross and some behaviors we just don't engage in publicly. But some people seem to really make things up as they go along, just so they can then be disgusted when you break a rule. My brother is one of these people. He can share personal information that I never needed to hear and do it with a sense of camaraderie. But if I say anything personal back then suddenly he's all offended and all "TMI TMI". Like if I say something about a broken dresser drawer (hypothetical for instance but still), he'll jump up all put off like "I don't need to know about your bedroom." Yeah, little brother, cuz it's the PORN DRAWER and it's busted from the weight of all my PORN.

• People not much younger than me who speak like they're either a) from "da hood" or b) fifteen years old, and then try to blame my not understanding them on just how old and out of touch I am. This happened the first time my brother called to ask me for a solid ( A what?? Oh, a favor. Well, no, cuz you're being obnoxious, Mr Solid.) and also when a Canadian friend (and by friend I of course mean a guy I know online by a screen name and will never meet in real life) called a video game sick. And get this, he meant sick as a compliment. Because somehow "sick" is the new "awesome". And when I didn't know wtf he was talking about, he acted like I was all decrepit because I don't understand CANADIAN VIDEO GAME SLANG. I mean, c'mon, eh?

• People who point out my gray hairs as though their very existence proves me to be so old and cataract-ridden as to be unable to see them myself. Thanks, Mom.

• Parents who let their teenage (or younger) daughters wear tummy-baring clothes and pants with words on the ass. Also, why are these girls almost always obese? I mean, it's bad enough that your daughter looks like a hooker for the chubby-chasing demographic, but now I need to know that her backside is "Phat"? First off, why are you letting your kid show that much skin at that age, regardless of weight? Second, why are you not teaching your kid about shape-appropriate clothing? And finally, why do you let her wear clothes designed, with big bold font, to draw attention to her butt? And don't be all "You're a pervert if you see a kid that way." The fact is that no matter how asexually you see your kid, the guys her age don't agree with you and letting her dress like Anna Nicole in the 9th grade is just asking for trouble.

• People who act all hurt that you don't trust them, and then prove themselves to be untrustworthy. Gee, I wonder why I never told you what was wrong the other day, considering that I can name at least 3 other people who would have known by now if I had. And don't ask me what's wrong now either, because what's wrong is that you're still trying to get me to tell you my shit and it aint gonna happen.
  

I Finally Got It, And It's Signed!

It's a cell phone photo so forgive the quality.

GLBTCIQQPHalfdyke

When I log into blogger here, I have to use a google login. But for some reason, it's not set up as the same google login as my google homepage. That is to say, I have 2 main email addresses and the one that gets me here is not the one that gets me to the igoogle page with all my headlines and news stories and all that. So after every time I blog, I see a different google page when I hit the little house icon up by my address bar and go back to homepage. And the page that I see has topix.com gay/lesbian headlines front and center, as opposed to on page 2 under the "special interest" tab like it is in my real google account. So when I close out here, I see all sorts of depressing headlines like how Guiliani is disavowing gay rights and 3 people somewhere got arrested in a gaybashing death and a new state or two have banned gay marriage. Real upbeat stuff. But sometimes, in the second it takes me to click 'sign out', I see a headline that grabs my attention enough that after I click 'sign in' I go into the "special interest" tab and look up the article. And such is how I found Dyssonance.

I have been in an online argument for a day or so now with some face-face avatar bashing gays. It happens from time to time and usually I recognize the names and treat them like old feeble-minded friends. "Hey Wil, how ya doin? Haven't come out to the wife and kids yet, huh?" Or "Hey RMOG, I been meaning to ask you, as a biological male how has being diagnosed with micro-penis affected your life and have you considered going to a surgeon specializing in ftm srs?" Sometimes I slip up and, in defense of minorities I don't really belong to, accidentally offend someone. Like when I explained transgenderism as a horrible birth defect wherein the external body is wrongly formed. Yeah, apparently the actual transgendered didn't get their info from the same discovery channel shows I did.

So, after bitching at this bubblegum bimbo on topix for a bit (all in good fun and only during the football games I was powerless to stop), I decided to reach out to a fellow poster. I asked her if she would maybe be willing to educate me so that I don't make the same mistakes I have made before and stick my foot in my mouth. I have heard no response. But in a posting not long ago, she referred to me as "he". See, I have no picture up and since I often post in the gay/lesbian forums, and since I also have been known to mention a husband, and since I like the idea of online anonymity, I do not have a photo in my profile. So there is no reason why anyone on topix should know that I am female, or in a straight marriage. To be honest, there is a tiny part of myself that wants to hide the straight marriage thing, not because of Tom but because for years I clung to the gay identity thing so much and there is a decent anti-bi movement within the gay community. I don't want to be singled out as the one who took the easy way or the one who only does things half way, so I let them assume what they will and only correct what I feel like correcting.

So anyway, waiting to hear from Dyssonance got me thinking about why I don't claim my rightful bisexual title/label. Why do I invent terms like halfdyke? Well, here's what I've come up with: Too many people have too many separate definitions of the word bisexual already. There are just too many completely different pictures that pop into people's heads when they hear the word. If I have to wear a label shouldn't it at least be one that evokes an accurate description? Halfdyke does that. "Half" is pretty self-explanatory, and "dyke" adds a serious lesbian aura to the term and, I hope, pushes hopes of lipstick lesbian 3ways out of people's heads. To too many guys the word bisexual evokes porn cliches where the women are only too eager to welcome the plumber into their party. To a certain percentage of gays, the word bisexual describes a person who just isn't ready to accept their own homosexuality yet, who still desperately clings to the hope that they can be at least a little bit straight. And to some straight women bisexual just means sex, like "bicurious". I've known plenty of girls to whom sex with women was fine, but not dating, or marriage or children or any of the more fulfilling and mundane things. And even though I'm not shopping for it anymore, those mundane things were what I was looking for. I don't even think I really am bisexual. I think I'm probably more pansexual, although the titles don't mean near as much anymore now that I'm married. But I could have gone for anyone as long as I liked them. Gay, straight, male, female, TG, TV, I never really had a preference. I think when the gods were handing out orientations that I missed my turn in line. I could have fallen in love with Tom no matter what he was. The fact that he's a big old hairy mf doesn't seal the deal or anything. I'm not into bears any more than twinks or femmes or butches or pre-ops or post-ops or intersexed or any of it.
But there's no P in glbt so I don't claim pansexual. Or glbtciqq or whatever it is today. And also, the only title I need to describe my love life and sexual habits or leanings is "Married", a title I share with the world with a big fat diamond ring. But otherwise, yeah I still like halfdyke.

ESPN Is Gloria Steinem's Fault

In the 1970s women rebelled. They burned their bras and marched on Washington on a teat-flapping mission. They stopped shaving their legs and gave whatever frightened, cowering, leisure-suit clad man willing to fuck them a rug-burned trip to Hell, demanding the expert orgasms Cosmo promised. They saw themselves as the next formerly oppressed minority granted instant equality and tried to retrain American men overnight to become stay-at-home breastfeeding househusbands.

And for that, the sins of my mother's generation, I am being punished. What was once a weekly ritual is now almost daily, is daily if you have the right cable channels, and I am subjected to it almost constantly during Tom's days at home. I can't even protect my child from it, and in that way I have failed as a mother.

Televised football. Right now, not ten feet behind me, Tom is arguing out loud with the television. Did he drop the ball or didn't he? Did it bounce or not? Was it on the line or over it?

WHO CARES?!?!?!

Why have men lost all perspective? Why would my brother, an otherwise perfectly logical, if possibly sociopathic, man be happy with a home enema kit as long as it had a navy blue sans serif M on it? Why would Tom eagerly pay for a transvestite hooker if (s)he were wearing a University Of Nebraska jersey? Why do they forget that it's a game? It's a children's game, like tag, but it has been stolen by grown men and assigned so many rules, and so much funding.

I don't understand glorifying the athlete. Why do we have Olympics? Why do we have professional sports? And why do we televise these things? I can understand people liking to play sports. I mean, it's playing a game, by definition a fun thing. But to pay other people to play? And to have fun watching total strangers play? And the machismo!

Someone explain to me, please, how it proves your heterosexual manliness to writhe around in a pile with other men, fighting over a ball. And then on top of that, there's the whole "chase the guy with the ball till you score in the end zone" thing, and the tight pants, the butt-slapping, the group showers. I'm not gonna argue that all of these things sound vaguely bath-housey (even though they do) but they sure don't sound like the exact opposite. It's like the homophobia has looped itself, has rolled like an odometer, gone so macho that it flipped over into gay. The same sports that women aren't allowed into have spawned the most vulgar sexual terms. "Which base did you get to?" "Did you score?" And don't even get me started on wrestling. The televised folding-chair kind is bad enough (nothing gay about a 'tag team' in matching sequined unitards) but the official kind is even worse. Yeah, I know. It's ancient and Greek. Well, guess what else is ancient and Greek!

I don't care that the stuff is more than a bit homo-erotic. Hell, I gravitate towards the homo-erotic. I just don't like the Billybobs who have to watch it all the time to prove that they're straight. And by Billybob, I of course mean Tom. Because it doesn't affect me at all when other people's TVs are on for eighteen hours every day, and set to three consecutive football games every day. It only bugs me when it's my TV.

How I Know He's The One

A couple months ago I thought up the perfect idea for my first novel. I had read somewhere that Vonnegut had outlined Slaughterhouse Five on the back of a roll of wallpaper but lacking that, I scrawled a time-line out on post-its and stuck them to a dry erase board. They fell off after about ten minutes and I realized I needed a cork-board. Tom, in his infinite kindness, surprised me with a big cork board and some push-pins. Push-pins, not thumbtacks, since I hate thumbtacks because they always get pushed in too far and I have to push my thumbnail under them just to get them out of the damned bulletin board.

So Tom came home with a big gorgeous cork board exactly like what I needed, and he handed me a little clear lucite box of push-pins. "Is this what you wanted?" he asked. I looked down at the perfectly adequate ho-hum push-pins and nodded. There was no way to tell him that if I had been the one to buy them I would have preferred to get half the amount for three times the price just to get the brightly colored jumbo novelty ones my mother would never let me have. I mean, Tom's the one with the job and all and it's ridiculous to buy 25 pins for the price of 200. And after all, I'm thirty one and by all rights I should be past the stage of having to have every over-priced gimmick my mother wouldn't buy me. So I thanked him and I started hanging up my post-its in fictitious chronological order when Tom took a second little clear lucite box out of his pocket and handed it to me. Brightly colored jumbo novelty push-pins, just like my mother never bought me.

No matter how many times he burps into the phone or declares putting my bra into Ryan's dresser to be "an honest mistake", I will always know that he is The One. He knew to buy me the stupid frivolous waste-of-money push-pins, and he got them without complaint.

I Am Not That Demographic! (denial strikes again)

For my entire life, commerce has pandered to my mother's generation. She is a baby-boomer, and that's a huge demographic, lots of potential buyers. Freedom Rock compilation tapes for aging hippies, kitchen gadgets for the new working moms, and tons of junk being sold by celebrities from back in her day. Suzanne Somers exercise machines, Sally Struthers home diplomas, Lindsay Wagner sleep number beds, all ads aimed at my mother's generation. But now I sense a new trend. The market is pandering to me. More specifically, it's pandering to my childhood.

Bridge To Terabithia, the movie. Transformers, the movie. Psych, a television show about men my age who can't seem to move past the eighties, which ends every episode with an a cappella version of some twenty three year old pop song. Maybe it's just that the retro movement has hit an age I remember from the first time around, or maybe it's that people like me (what a frightening concept) are a big enough target group that they have to notice. I know that the 'skinny' jeans and leg-warmers are just retro fashion. I get that the neo-mullets and giant hoop earrings are a nod at the past and not the return of it. But a Transformers movie twenty years after people stopped buying the toys? What's next, a live action Jem? Thundercats? NOOOOO!

I am not old enough to be pandered to, not on my own dime. Look, manufacturers and ad execs pander to kids with sugary food and over-priced toys, because they know parents will sometimes give in and buy the crap if the kid yells loud enough. And they pander to the middle-aged, because they know that at that age it becomes very important to try to buy back youth. But I'm 31. I am too old to be asking my parents to buy me stuff and I am not yet old enough to be buying back my childhood, or reliving it through senility. I am still young, dammit! I live in the now, not in the past. Old people live in the past and say things like "back in my day," I don't.

Look, I have fond memories of the eighties too. But I also have a distinct connection to reality and the call on that line says not to bring back the big-hair decade. We don't need rockers in spandex, although the return of long hair is of course a welcome respite from insanity. We don't need colored jeans. We really really don't need the musical instruments of the eighties. Keytars, synthesizers, saxophone solos? Am I the only one who remembers how much the eighties sucked? Am I the only one here who remembers MC Serch?