Aw, minions. Someone call the office and tell ’em I’m never coming in again.

Okay, that’s just the kneejerk Monday reaction. Why? Because I can’t even begin to believe how much I’ve gotten done this weekend. I’m clearly indestructible. Obviously those Borg implants have made me into a tower of force.

I mean, I even assembled tricky Ikea things this weekend, man. I came, I painted, I reassembled, I tidied, I conquered. And now I’d like to die, but instead I’m chowing down on Shredded Wheat with strong coffee chasers, dreading 7.5 hours of work flanked by rainy scooter rides wearing my no-longer-waterproof riding gear. Perfect Monday morning.

But I’m almost done around the house, man! Yeah! (Okay, not even close, but… Hey! Serious progress! “Day” projects remain, but no more “weekend” projects.)

And the things I’ve come across. Finally I can end the all-consuming hunt for the Babysitter’s Certificate I lost 22 years ago. It’s been located. Whew, what a stress off my mind. Wow. I can resurrect my long-lost babysitting career after two decades of hiatus. Hell, I even found my “Cooking with Mom” cookbook I made my mom when I was in Kindergarten (1979). Let’s make cookies!

Nothing like completely rearranging your home, painting everything, swapping out furniture, and going through every little thing on the way to give you the world’s biggest glimpse at what has been your life. Man, I felt like a beaming white spotlight was going to land on me and a big voice would boom, “Scribe Called Steff, THIS is YOUR life!”

“Remember this rock? You found this on Nye Beach in the spring of ’99 and turned it into a pen holder! You industrious girl! Remember the promise you made your maker as you stared out on the rollicking Oregon ocean? That’s right! Say it with me…”

Very, very, very weird weekend. This is what happens when you spend too much time alone. Way too many lapses into yesteryear remembrances this weekend. Weird, weird times.

The good news is, my self-imposed isolation is over. Now I start peeling back the layers and start having a life again. And now that the gruelling physical labour’s done around my house, I need to bring the stairclimbing back in. Plus, the exciting experience of cooking food. Real, healthy food. One more fucking frozen pizza and I’ll take a fillet-knife to the stockboy, man.

By the end of tonight my kitchen will be clean and the Spackle dust and grime will finally be eradicated. A cook-worthy kitchen could be had! Maybe even as soon as tomorrow, a salad could loom! Green! Fresh! No cheese! No Spackle dust! WOW.

The hard part now will be continuing the weight loss and muscle-building. Hence why I need to get the food thing solved quickly, and why, despite bone-weary exhaustion, cleaning the kitchen’s the only thing I care to achieve tonight (and why I’m splurging on my all-time fave takeout for fuel to do just that). I mean, 10, 12 pounds down during a three-week beer and pizza binge? Granted, I counted some calories, but still, on general principal, it’s just wrong to lose weight when beer and pizza is involved. Now come the trick of actual weight-loss through lifestyle. 24 pounds and counting? Blah. 😛

And, in the next day or two, all the paint fumes might finally subside and my brain’s synapses may start firing again, yielding possibly interesting blogging.

But… thank you all for hanging in and letting me bore you with my adventures in decor. Y’all rock.

Soon, back to life amongst the living, and photographic evidence of all I’ve achieved around Le Pad du Steff. Enjoy your Monday.

I had a realization recently. I have never, ever lost weight in the winter. Until this year, of course.

I weighed myself yesterday morning. I’m down 10 pounds since the middle of February, but I’ve gained a lot of muscle too, so I’m now told I look “markedly fitter” since my friend WB last saw me mid-February. I showed him my driver’s license, taken on my birthday, September 29th last year, in which my face was way, way fatter.

He did a mini-jawdrop and smiled. “That’s quite some difference over a winter!”

I felt awesome. Still do.

The numbers:

The “goal jacket” I bought before Christmas, 3 inches tight on me, pretty much fits me now but could be looser. 🙂 I’ve lost 24 pounds since mid-October. I’d lost 18 a couple weeks before Christmas, but thanks to receiving 3 HUGE food baskets as gifts for Christmas…

Okay, who gives food baskets to fat people for Christmas? How is this a good gift? Would you give a heroin junkie a bag of smack and tell him “Hey! It’s only once a year”? What the fuck? Not one basket, but THREE.

Caramel popcorn! (Don’t get me started. Hull-less, kernel-less caramel popcorn? [shudder] A local product you’d kill for, man.) Nachos! Nuts, nuts, and, yes, nuts! (And nuts, nuts, and…) Cheese, salami, and everything else you can think of. One of the baskets was easily $150. Beautiful.

…I gained eight pounds in about 3 weeks. But it was so good, and I knew it’d hurt.

So I’ve lost 14 pounds in 6 weeks. Not bad. And, lately, I’ve had too much pizza and even a few McGriddles, thanks to all the painting, and beer almost nightly, but I’ve still lost 3 pounds. Heh. ‘Cos while I’m painting my apartment, I make it as strenous as I can, squatting to paint trim, not sitting on the floor. Reaching as far as I can, things like that. Toning up something fierce. Also, I’m always conscious of the calories, which is huge in this. When I’m “blowing out” a day, I’ll even still try to keep it to 2,600 or so calories, nothing too insane, and I have to either have worked out or been doing physical work, so I think it’s self-negating. Not healthy, but self-negating.

And the spring’s coming up. I lost 35 pounds over the summer a few years back, and all my weight loss was from exercising. (Meaning I never, ever counted calories back then and really had no idea how to do it. Now I’m much more informed. MUCH.)

I only ever gained 10 of that back, which is pretty good. But I’ll lose much more this year. My goal, 40 more pounds by my birthday. Here’s willing. Never mind hoping.

I’m now 5 pounds from my weight in college (15 years ago now that I started college), which’ll be a wickedly good landmark to hit, hopefully the next two weeks, and I got another weekend of painting. Plus, it’s Spring now, and I can begin adding cycling to my highrise-stairclimbing routing (which is what’s responsible for this fabulous ass I’m beginning to get. Bubbly!) so I can’twait to see what my fitness is like in six months!

In short, I’m having a nice moment. 🙂

This October will be the 10th anniversary of the Mathew Shepard fatal gay bashing, in which a young man from Laramie, Wyoming, was beaten nearly to death and then strung upon a fence in rural Wyoming and left so that time could finish him off.

Because he was gay.

First, I thought “Wow, 10 years.” Then, I thought “Man, only 10 years?”

I guess, then, that it’s no surprise that a clip has gone viral on YouTube of Okahoma State Rep. Sally Kern denouncing homosexuality as a plague and instrument of destruction far worse than terrorism or Islam.*

[Click here for the Victory Fund’s anonymous whistle-blowing original posting of the clip, with bad quality audio, or click here for a boring version but edited with normalisation ie: good audio.]

It’s so fucking weird. Isn’t it? I mean… Ohh. I only now listened to it, and I have to say I had something that I really only rarely get: the heebie-jeebies. Damn! This woman gives me the heebie-jeebies!

It’s like discovering cockroaches in your house. Oh my god. How’d they get here? Gasp. Just when I thought we were safe.

How has this woman gone unexposed this long? She actually thinks this shit? Un-fucking-real. Trouble is… just like the cockroach analogy, you know she’s not alone.

It ain’t “she”… she’s just a symbol for “they”. She’s the one who got caught. Things like this get said. You better believe they do. They just get said where there are secret handshakes and double-talk. Every now and then someone slips up and somebody else exposes it. And thank god they do. (Way to go, Victory Fund.)

You expect to hear political hacks spout this shit in countries that missed the “separating church from state” lesson at dictator school, like fucking Nigeria or Saudi Arabia, not in the USA.

I’m sorry, man, but I’m never, ever gonna buy that hating someone’s a good way to live. I disagree with beliefs, lifestyles, personalities, fads, and pundits, but it doesn’t give cause to do a whole lot of hating. I mean, I even think George Bush is a likable guy. I’m a sucker for a goofy grin.

But these people… these so-fucking-called religious types, be they Islamists or Christians or whatever, who claim they love their maker then seek to hate something he/she/it created make me sick. Physically ill. That, I can hate. That’s hypocrisy. That’s living a lie. That’s flat-out bullshit.

And I can sit here and call it names all day, but there’s nothing I’m really able to do to fight hypocrisy. It’s one of the only things that’s an easily unwinnable war. All you can do is keep telling the truth, saying it like it is, demonstrating the harm in their behaviour, and hope like hell the day they see things in a real light comes sooner than later. ‘Cause, man, sooner or later everyone winds up on a deathbed and most, if not all, will lament having lived a life in which they loved too few people.

These guys, natch, are at the head of the list of lamenters. You can’t hate someone for electing to choose who they love. As if homosexuality was something as simple as a choice, which it’s not. You can’t hate someone for being born with a desire to love their same sex counterparts, especially if you believe your god did in fact make all men in his image.

It’s bogus. Worse, it’s a hate crime. What this woman said is an offense against all homosexuals. It is a call to action. It is a cry for a revolt. She accuses gays of “infiltrating” city councils and all levels of government. Assures her listeners that any society to have ever embraced homosexuality openly was doomed to end in horror within decades. Homosexuality, she says in far less intelligent ways, is the doomsdayer of civilisation and the slayer of empires. I’m sure she feels the rallying cry of gays everywhere is just what Bin Laden would say, “Death to America”.

But Kern fights charges that she’s hate-bashing gays by saying it’s only the RICH ones, the ones with the AGENDAS that she takes issues with. Kinda like back in the ’50s when it was only the “uppity” blacks they’d have a problem with, huh? The ones who, I dunno, maybe thought they deserved to be treated equal in a country claiming to be founded on the principal that all men are equal?

Yeah, agenda. Agend this, Kern.

Fucking redneck political hack. And she’s been voted in? Yeah, this should be entertaining.

The only reassuring thing is, Will & Grace had 8 hit seasons, and ain’t no fuckin’ Okie taking that away. I’m no Nielsen’s expert but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t only gays watching. For eight years. And the show went on air the year Mathew Shepard died… and ten years isn’t that long after all. But, psst… it’s not just a sitcom, it’s a sign we’re starting to win this. Ignorance can be overcome. We gotta believe.

America needs to talk about this. This needs to be an issue. This is a hate crime in the guise of a political discussion. It’s 2008 in the land of “the free”. It’s time to fuckin’ decide: Free — A principal, or just a friggin’ buzz word to sell flags?

If it’s a principal, then it involves love too, baby.

(Oh, and, Oklahomans, if you’re insulted I mention Okies derisively here, then do something about it and get this fucking redneck off your state’s slate NOW, not in fuckin’ November. Create a movement. I’m just saying. Money and action where mouth is goes a long ways on this here issue. Here’s an article in the Tulsa World paper, though. Apparently she’s unleashed a shitstorm of discussion down there in Oklahoma and is on quite the defensive. Goodie.)

My living room: Chaos personnified. Everything in my bedroom is being changed, so every drawer has been emptied upon my floor. Laundry is piled in the corner. Painting dropcloths are everywhere. Empty bottles of Anchor Steam beer mark the landscape like roadsigns for a weary worker. Walking across the living room is impossible, but instead requires yogic contortioning to squeeze through awkward openings and a watchful eye so as not to step on anything fragile.

In short, my world has literally been turned upside down, and the remaining hours of this day are to be used to reverse that… Until I get my new bedroom furniture Tuesday and become Miss Ikea-Assembler WunderWorker, and, Friday, begin painting my hallway in a screaming crimson red. Work, work, work.

So, you have some idea of what I’m going through, and soon it’ll all come to an earth-quaking stop as I finally have about 2/3s of the painting done I’ve been wanting to do for the last couple years, and have one more four-day weekend to make sense of it all. (There’s the living and kitchen spaces I plan to paint sometime in the next three months, but girl needs a fuckin’ break, so, I’m divvying up the conquering a tad, and the rest can get done in a couple days when I wrangle friends for a painting party.)

Here’s the thing, though.

There was a time a couple years ago when I thought I could never do this mad-cap painting stunt again. I mean, I had serious whiplash twice in a year, two serious concussions, and I fucked up my right shoulder twice, also, that year. I spent the better part of the next two years getting past those injuries, but never imagined that I’d have the arm and neck strength to do work of this calibre again.

Obviously those fears died down over the last year or so, but I’m still shocked as hell that, not only can I do all this painting, but I no longer get the after-effect migraines I used to get from over-exerting my neck/shoulders.

In short, I’m bone-tired, weary as all hell, but I feel all right. I feel like I know, finally, that every injury I had is almost completely non-existent these days. There’s a mental freedom that comes with finally realizing “You know, I’m okay” that can’t be explained in words. It’s one thing to be grateful to survive an accident you should’ve died in, but it’s hard to cultivate that gratitude when you spend day after day for two years in constant pain. To finally be free of all that pain, and to finally have all the abilities back I once thought I lost… I don’t know. A wave of gratitude rushed over me last night as I felt the last of all those burdens lifting. Now I truly feel the gratitude of surviving. Now I’m excited for all that’s before me.

But another thought also occurred to me yesterday. The last time I decorated this much was right before I broke through six years of writer’s block for once and for all (I have a lot of interesting notions on writer’s block and I disagree with those who say “there’s no such thing” but agree that it’s always something that can be overcome)… and, I got to thinking about what this colour-splurge might mean to me.

And I can’t help but think it’ll mean splendid things for my writing. I know I can write. I know I can write really, really well sometimes. Most of the time, though, my writing’s pretty run-of-the-mill, because, for the longest time, I’ve been bored to tears. Bored, bored, bored. Bored with my life, bored with my home, bored with myself. Bored.

Pushing the envelope with some painting around the house doesn’t seem like a radical move, but it really is. By consciously choosing to live with big colours and drastically reinventing my home, I’m creating a major new creative environment. I’m consciously telling the world that a) things need to change, and b) I deserve better, more, anything I want. That I’m still organizing more as I go not only means I’m culling the chaos in my world, but I’m forcing myself to confront memories of my past that I may have wanted to ignore a while longer… something every writer should be forced to do, especially if writing really is the perennial quest for truth.

It’s a huge self-defining endeavour I’m in the midst of here, and while my writing might be somewhat boring “Oh, she’s painting again” right now, I guarantee you, I’m on the verge of a creative goldmine here. I know I am. I know what’s happening inside of me, the percolating bursts of creativity, the wanting to have more to say, the wondering of where and how to seed those notions and make them grow.

You can’t physically change your world and your surroundings to the degree I am, and not have that somehow redefine who you are.

I guess all I’m saying is, I know I’m a somewhat redundant blogger right now, and that’s just weariness and too-much-work-no-play resulting in the obvious, but, I’m telling you, people, you just wait. Things will get much better around here very, very soon. I’m painting the boring out of my life, and everything else will follow. I don’t know much about the world but I know a lot about myself, and I’m tellin’ ya. Creatively, I know I’m about fit to burst. Should be a very fun spring for my freshly-sprung mind.

Thanks for your patience. Now, back to Labour Steff and her Domestic Endeavours.

I’m almost at the bottom of my first coffee at the ripe hour of 12:44 pm and a painting job staring me down, ugly end up, after a morning spent prepping for the event.

My bedroom’s a shithole of spackle, drop cloths, and walls crying out “Get me wet! Paint me!”

Me, I’m thinking “What the fuck have I done?” I’m tired NOW, man. Nonetheless, I’m about 5 minutes and 250 characters away from doing something about it.

Today’s exciting colour is Exotic Grass from the Debbie Travis line at Canadian Tire. It’s a very spring green, that colour you see on grasses by the river in the height of spring, vibrant and fresh. Later this week I buy a new bed and I’ll order the duvet off the net, too. Very exciting stuff. This colour’s both energetic and calming, so it’ll be a great palette for a bedroom, methinks. This will be the first time I’ve redone EVERYTHING about a room, so I’m just so stoked. It’s the boost I need to do what I ain’t got the energy to get done.

‘Cause, my living room… oh, god. Everything’s in here. It’s a disaster. I’m five minutes away from a psychotic break, I imagine. So… if you’re wondering where I am, if I somehow get lost in this self-induced madness (with great payoff, ask me in 72 hours) and don’t pop in for a boo, then you know where I am. Getting a lobotomy, having a hot bath, or painting. Then there’s the party tomorrow night, where I at least get to drink. But the rest of the weekend will be all painting. Fun!

God. Some days I think it’d be nice to be one of those lazy people who just puts things in places and doesn’t decorate. And then there are days like I’ll soon have, where I look around at the home that’s mine, and think how fortunate I am to be me. This is the thought that pushes me through this wearisome toil. Grunt.

Awwright. Lemme at that paint. Time to get it done, man.

As you may or may not know, weightloss is a running theme in my life these days. I’m still drinking beer, having the occasional treats, and still haven’t cut out pizza, so I’m clearly not all kamikaze about it. I’m living a little smarter, but I’m still living. (Beer, pizza? Come on! Moderation, right?)

I’m down 8 pounds since the start of February, back on track with the weightloss I’d began in October, down 23 pounds overall.

The last month of stairclimbing (on hold as I’m semi-sick right now) has been sculpting a fierce ass and has resulted in crazy-good changes in The Bathtub Test. TBT is when you guage how much volume your body has lost via how much water you’re displacing in your tub. A very easy thing to guage in the world’s smallest 1950s bath tub, like your favourite blogger has (and in mint-green, no less). Lovin’ how I’m creating extra room in my itty-bitty tub.

But all is not bliss in the land of slimmin’-down Steffs.

No, there’s the panty issue. It was easier when I was Just Fat and could buy all my panties from the same plus-size girl store. Now, though, the plus-size girl store’s panties are too big, so I’ve been having to shop around.

And now everyone’s got completely different sizing for underwear. I buy large or extra large, and it’s anywhere from skin-cutting-too-tight to fall-down loose. It’s ridiculous.

I’m all for free enterprise, really, but why can’t we have fucking sizes regulated? Make ’em universal! My ass wants nice-fitting panties that feel cute and form-fitting. Is that so wrong? I have a couple dozens of undies in weird sizes, and I swear to god, like, four of ’em fit perfectly. How hard is it to have uniform sizes? A man can go on the moon, but a chick can’t buy undies from different manufacturers without taking a risk?

Today, I don’t want fame, riches, or glory. I want panties that fit my new bubble butt. Damn it.

I was amused this morning to catch a news clip revealing that American Idol‘s curmudgeonly judge Simon Cowell (“if it’s not black, grey, or pale blue, I won’t wear it”) rejected an offer by Viagra to be their new spokesman. Cowell said he was “offended” by the offer.
Good for him. I think Viagra’s too popular. It’s ridiculous.
There are men who really require it and I’m thrilled they have that option. A lot of men, however, simply don’t seem to be properly in control of their penises. It’s a muscle, guys. Learn how to make it stronger.
Christ. One of my friends back when once commented that the greatest thing he ever did for his sex life — and his penis — was to start taking yoga. Yoga* isn’t the sissy exercise it looks like, it’s hard, but it’s a mental thing, too. It teaches you how to isolate muscles, how to mentally focus on tensing and relaxing them — a skill many of us are lacking, even when it comes to things like simply knowing how to relax our whole bodies at bedtime, let alone how to fire individual muscles.
Instead of learning how to master penises, a lot of young guys are running to their nearest doc and trying to score Viagra. They want to think that because their penis is fired up and ready to go for hours that their lover’s somehow going to want exactly that.
Some women will, yeah. But I guarantee you, most women would rather be with a guy who’s naturally ready to go for that length, who can ramp his performance up and down to match the mood of his lover. Those women, when confronted with Energizer Bunny man who wants to fuck for hours just so he can say he did, will probably wind up making mental to-do lists of their chores around the house by the time he finishes his redundant fuckfest, since he’s so focused on just being a longtime lover rather than a good one.
The number of women complaining about “Vaigrafied” men will, I guarantee ya, be escalating in the future. Women physically need more stoking before the sex stage of the game, and given how many women can’t come from intercourse alone, this whole Manly Man How Long Can I Last game just doesn’t compute.
Yoga* is directly related to the ancient art of Tantric Lovemaking. You’ve heard about Sting and his magical penis that can have sex for hours and hours without coming? Sting does yoga, man.
But, no. I guess that’s too much work. Or is it just that? Maybe it’s just another symptom of our I-want-it-when-I-want-it flash-cooking, fast-food Instamatic society of ours.
We live in a society where everything needs to be fixed with pills. Pills should be our last choices. I know taking an anti-depressant was my last choice after nothing else I was doing made a dent in my horrible depression two years ago.
But men are running too easily to Viagra instead of trying to see what else they’re doing wrong with their lives that might be affecting their ability to stay erect. Bad diets can deflate penises. Being overweight can deflate penises. Not exercising can make a penis sad, too.
Is it a simple thing to overcome? No. Yoga’s hard. Eating well is hard. Exercising regularly is hard.
Being a good lover is hard. It is. It’s work. It’s being self-less and tuning in to what your lover needs. It’s ignoring your wants in order to deliver theirs. It takes focus, stamina, understanding, empathy, versatility, flexibility, time, patience, and, shit, even psychic abilities. Being a good lover takes time, man.
It ain’t about a little fuckin’ blue pill. If you’re running to a bottle of Viagra in the hopes that it’s going to save your sex life, the reality is, your problems are probably far more reaching than just a soft-too-soon weenie.
Yes. Some men really need to use it, and it’s recharged their lives like nothing else.
The rest of the men, however, really need to learn how to better use their penises. For that, they need: yoga, KEGEL EXERCISES**, a better diet, regular exercise, and the ability to understand that a woman’s orgasm is about her body and not just about yours.
**Kegels: Many online resources write about them only for women to do post-birth as a way of tightening up their vaginal muscles again, but this is bogus. Kegels are good for men and women of all ages and will help with your ability to control your orgasm. If you’re a woman unable to orgasm, this will help you towards that goal by empowering you to better control your physical reactions. If you’re a guy who doesn’t get hard enough, it will probably help you get harder, plus it helps your endurance (but if your cardio sucks, having a penis stay hard longer isn’t your ticket to ride, friends). Read about Kegels on Wiki, but try the external links at the bottom, or do a Google search for a Kegel method of exercising that works for you. Plus… you can do Kegels sitting at your desk at work. You can get paid to enhance your own orgasms. Lovely thought that, eh? Once you figure out how to isolate and fire your pelvic floor muscles for Kegels, firing the same muscles during yoga will further enhance the effect of Kegelling your way to better sex abilities.

(If you ignore the torment and turmoil suffered by this man for 35 years, that is. Surely he’s not the man he was, and that’s a tragedy, but we’re not talking about such things here, now.)

In Pakistan, an Indian man named Kashmir Singh has been freed after 35 years spent forgotten on death row for a death sentence imposed on long-forgotten charge of spying trumped up in bad times between India and Pakistan. His wife has spent the last 35 years hoping for a change in fortunes, despite the death sentence, and despite never once being allowed to see him during his incarceration.

Now, against all odds, he has been pardonned for everything, and will be reunited with his wife tomorrow.

The couple’s marriage, they both assert, was always a love match, not an arranged marriage. As the wife said, “Why else would I wait?” She apparently has never given up on being reunited with her love… and, I, for one, am thrilled it is working out for them.

Nothing like a little old-fashioned romance to remind us what love can sometime overcome. Very nice. One of the stories is here. Another is here.

Welcome to my world of pain. In it, we say “ow”. “Ow, that fucking hurts”, and “Ow, when will this stop?”

Things like that. Meet the right side of my neck. Its postal code is 0w0w0w.

I don’t know. It’s all the exercise I’ve been getting, I guess, and my neck’s all fucked up for the fourth day in a row. Since I don’t have good enough medical to go to town on the massage, I should put out a personal ad, like, “Will trade my cooking and hot sex for your cleaning and massage skills. And your similarly hot sex.”

Boo, hiss. Muscle spasms are evil. Sigh.

(Despite that, I shall climb the highrise stairs in the morning. I shall not be circumvented by a mere spasm!)

A Canadian medical study has “…found that the (Botox) toxin passed easily from the targeted muscle into surrounding ones, weakening all the muscles in the area. ” Hence the whole new era of the non-smiling smile, brought to you by the makers of Botox, in which the smilers can’t smile because all their muscles are weakened. Instead, they have that weird spawned-by-the-Joker deformed smirk that just makes you leery of them and distrustful of their sincerity.

Then there’s the warning issued earlier this month about how, gasp, Botox has been found to result in some cases to cause strong side effects, sometimes even death.

Hmm. See, I never fuckin’ thought it made any sense to use a toxin that can cause death as a means of making myself pretty, even if a regulatory body and highly profitable industry managed to magically extract the killer deadly stuff from within.

…Which, surprise, surprise, reports now state they didn’t do so well after all. My question is, how many hundreds of millions of dollars were made in between the “Duh, looks okay to me” stamp and the inevitable realization of the obvious: Playing with toxins appears, at first glance, to be a real fuckin’ moronic thing to do.

Sorry, not shocked here. Ooh, scandal of scandals… botullism toxin, even when namby-pambied by a board of experts, can still fuck you up.

I pointed the story out to my boss and she goes, “It’s called BoTOX! Suddenly it lives up to its name and people are surprised?”

Unfuckin’ real what we do to ourselves, all in the name of beauty.

The silly people with their Botox, me with my stairs of evil. But only one of those two things will extend a life expectancy.

(It’ll be spent in agony, but it’ll last longer. Now… how is this a good thing? Okay, let’s not think about the pain/longtime deal and just pretend it’s an adjustment period… which it is, right?)

People probably think I’m anti-religion. I’m not. I don’t think it’s right for me. I have faith, I have beliefs, and I have a very strong moral code. They’re not exclusive to religious types. Problem with religion is, it’s run by men, and I usually take issue with the stupid rules of man intervening where mortals shouldn’t tread.

My problem is when we go mixing politics with religion. Like the sticker on my scooter says, “The last time we mixed politics and religion, people were burned at the stake.”

Religion can, and has, accomplish both wonderful and horrible things. It’s like Uncle Pete says in Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

One church in Florida, “Relevant Church”, which dubs itself a casual and contemporary Christian church, has put out a 30-day sex challenge to its parishioners. In an attempt to stop the always-rising tide of divorce, the reverend is asking his married parishioners to have sex every day for a month.

They’ve even created a guide with an “exercise” each day. I haven’t examined it too much, but I suspect people will need other sources for how to go beyond just committing to having sex each day to instead having great, mindblowing sex and stoking the romance, but, hey… sex every day is something I think is awesome.

You can check out the church’s website here, but beware of its bandwidth doing the herky-jerky with so many surfers coming from all the different media covering this “revolutionary” story. If it’s giving you a message about server problems, just try again.

Personally, speaking as one of the undersexed, I think it’s a crime that anyone who has the option of frequent sex is not capitalizing on it. Sex, it’s better than valium, it’s free, and it’s heart-healthy. Frequent sex inspires conversations and does wonders for both people’s self-esteem, and poor self-esteem and lack of trust are two of the biggest catalysts for relationships failing, aside from no one getting laid.

Sex every day makes sense. Nice to see some churches getting in on the action.