We Heart Abcakes & Tacos

Tonight is the final Presidential debate. The only debate I've watched was the much discussed VP debate a few weeks ago. I arrived home from work just before 10:00pm and thought I would relax with some TV. Everyone else was already occupied so I actually had control of the remote. Imagine my delight when I found "Aliens" playing on one of the movie channels! My best friend Jess texted me to ask if I was watching the debate and when I responded that I was not ("Aliens" was on and the debate was nearing its end), I was promptly told that I needed to tune in immediately. Jess loves "Aliens" as much as I do, and in school she was my loyal and hilarious debate-watching partner. Yes, debate watching is an event and an art form, especially when you watch back to back airings of the 2008 VP debate and Canadian PM debate and decorate your living-room with flags made out of bristol board. That being said, had this demand to tune in come from anyone else, I likely would've ignored it but I knew Jess was to be trusted here. Thanks to her I was lucky enough to catch the always juicy abortion question. No thanks to work, I missed out on hearing Joe Biden say malarky. 

In my current sickly, robot-voice state, this post of terrifying art is the most comment I'm currently willing to make on the upcoming election. I was just cruising around Twitter when I found this page, and I don't know exactly what made me feel like sharing it with you. Perhaps it was the expired Buckley's that I choked down.

Choosing a favourite was nearly impossible, but here's a little sneak peak to really get you salivating for some politics. I think the reasons for my selection are obvious.

So...enjoy?

Okay.

More Books You May Enjoy

The Internet is a place of diverse and endless subjects. Anyone who hasn't been living in a cave for the past decade knows that the Internet is also a place of diverse and endless advertisements. Sometimes they are in-your-face banners, and sometimes they appear in the form of the slightly more inconspicuous product recommendation. My emails to friends often contain wide and strange assortments of subjects and I've always enjoyed the website recommendations that Gmail suggests for me by picking up keywords in my correspondence. A few years ago while I was in school, I wrote a post about the interesting assessment that YouTube made of me based on its video suggestions. Amusing as the assortment was, I think that considering the selection of videos on YouTube a person would have to display incredibly suspicious viewing habits to be red-flagged. But the other day, I was presented with perhaps the most troubling product recommendation I've seen to date, and it came from Chapters.

I absolutely love Chapters and, even more, I love ordering books from the Chapters website. This is probably because I enjoying receiving mail so much. It truly is a dying practice. So, I occasionally receive emails from Chapters regarding promotions or certain books, and a section of "More books you may enjoy" is included at the bottom. More often than not, the books listed there are books by authors I've searched and it's common that they're books I've already read, so it's not the most useful tool for me. This particular email's recommendation maintains that uselessness, but I cannot figure out what triggered the selection of these three books and, more importantly, these three subjects:

Diet & Weight Loss, Self-Help, and Christianity. Plus, there's a horse on the cover of the middle book! (We all know how I feel about horses.) I thought Chapters knew me better than this. If I was asked to list the Top Three subjects that I'm least interested in reading about, I would probably spout these off without even thinking. "Clowns" and "Ventriloquism" would round out the Top Five. What is Chapters trying to tell me? Does it think I need to diversify? Is it judging me? Mocking me? Honestly, I'm kind of scared.

Sewing is an Acquired Taste

My elementary school canceled its shop and home economics program with the local high school the year that I would have participated. I blame this decision for my lack of sewing skill. Now, anyone who knows my family personally would contest that claim because my mother is quite skilled in this department. I have always had a great teacher at my disposal, but it seems my interest in sewing was never very prominent.

On Sunday I offered to fix a pair of Ryan’s pants. Thankfully, they’re work pants so functionality is really all that matters. I figured the fix would be easy: slap on some patches, reattach some sections. No problem. Well, apparently it’s not so easy to sew together the fabric equivalent of ground beef. The zipper was almost completely detached and the fabric covering the front looked like pulled pork. The outside tops of the pockets had come unstitched, and each leg had a mangled hole in the front. My mother had recently hemmed a pair of black pants so I folded the remnants into patches. (And yes, I patched the holes from the inside.) I figured that the more stitching there was, the better the patches would hold, so I set the machine to zigzag and just sewed the shit out of those patches for maximum reinforcement. I’m telling you, those former holes are now the sturdiest parts of the pants because if you sew two things together enough, they will eventually become one harmonious piece of fabric. Just be aware that the harmonious piece of fabric may closely resemble the clothing of Frankenstein...

Perhaps someone with more skill could have made the alterations with more finesse, but I’m quite confident that I achieved similar results with my blunt force sewing technique. However, this undertaking was, unfortunately but not surprisingly, not without incident despite my overwhelmingly successful technique. One needle fell victim to my heavy sewing hand, several thread refills were required, and the left pocket got caught in some crossfire and had its bottom corner sewn to the patch. Considering the amount of stitching applied to the patch, I had to sacrifice the corner and close up the new bottom of the pocket. Oops.

My mother, who oversaw the project for the sake of her sewing machine, thought this was simply the most hilarious sewing attempt that she’d ever seen. I must admit that I had more fun than I though I would, but I also did a fabulous job and I absolutely do not understand why my father declined my offer to alter some of his items. So whoever said that sewing isn’t fun (I’m sure at some point someone said that), didn’t ever sew with me. The right attitude and the willingness to accept your own ineptitude is all you need to turn any misadventure into an enjoyable and educational experience, even one as domestic as sewing clothes for your boyfriend.

(Writer's Note: Ryan agreed that I did a fabulous job. Unfortunately, it means he's started a pile of "to be sewn" clothes for me. Ahh the burdens of being so awesome.)

A Simple Question

Long ago I accepted the fact that working in the hospitality/retail industry means dealing with strange and unexpected customer service issues that will test the patience of the most even-tempered people. As a generally impatient and often judgemental person, I may not seem like the ideal fit for such jobs; however, I appear to possess the power to hide these traits just long enough to deal with the issue at hand.

Monday was a P.A. Day, which meant a lot of teenagers were unceremoniously unleashed on the town. A group of these teens came into the store I work at and began aimlessly wandering through the racks. I was going about my business behind the cash desk when a girl showed up in front of me, having broken away from her posse. I smiled and asked her how I could help. She quickly glanced around the store and replied, "Ummm, could you do me a huge favour?" I was taken aback by her casual request and foolishly thought perhaps she wanted to purchase something on the sly as a gift for another member of her group. As she shiftily looked around again, I realized my mistake and hesitantly said, "Sure." Our conversation proceeded as such:

Teen: "Okay, so this is going to sound reeeeeally terrible..."

Me: starting to worry while maintaining a neutral facial expression

Teen: "I need to make my boyfriend jealous, so do you have any really cute guys working right now?"

Me: fighting my eyebrows as they quiver with the urge to turn up into a condescending peak - I point to one of my colleagues who's helping a customer nearby "Well...he's actually the only guy working today."

Teen: looks at my colleague and turns back to me with a look of dissatisfaction and dejection "I am sooooo screwed."

Me: mouth slightly gaping while I try to think of what the appropriate response is - the teen turns to leave in a huff, then suddenly turns back to me

Teen: "Where's your rugby stuff?"

The joke was totally on her because we didn't have any rugby stuff.

I wanted to share this gem with all of you so that (a) You could hopefully have a bit of a chuckle, and (b) I could pose this very simple, but very serious question: What is wrong with people?

The Committee of Our Lady of Perpetual Birth March 2010 Newsletter

Hello Friends! We hope you’re all enjoying the positive change in the weather. Spring is definitely on its way, and you know what that means: its time for more babies! Spring always brings the promise of new life, so we’ve decided to dedicate this month’s newsletter to reminding everyone how important that new life is by reiterating why you should always (say it with us): Say no to abortion.

(1) Abortions are expensive and hinder the economic growth of our country. If we didn’t waste all this money on aborting the babies of young women who took all the proper precautions and women who were raped, then we’d have enough money to pay off the country’s $500 billion debt. Then we could afford to send all your babies to Catholic schools so they’d learn that sex before marriage is bad. This would prevent even the consideration of abortions (married people never get pregnant by accident and always want babies). What’s more important: paying off the national debt and sending all kids to Catholic school, or killing unborn babies? Yeah, that’s what we thought.

(2) Abortion is like slavery: embryos have civil rights too. Just because they’re in your womb, doesn’t mean they’re not people just like the rest of us outside of that nasty placental barrier. Those embryos have the right to free speech…if it was possible to talk inside of a womb…and if embryos had issues they needed to vocalize. Perhaps they would say, “Please don’t abort us; we need to grow up to be crack-whores, serial killers, sexual predators, and general drains on society.”

(3) People who think abortions are acceptable also think child abuse is acceptable. They are child-hating hippies who think that life is as expendable as that condom they clearly didn’t use. They don’t respect the life of unborn human babies; they eat chicken eggs, which are unborn chickens, so they’re also baby chicken munching monsters; and they even think it’s okay to dump out the stagnant water that holds the unborn mosquito babies that will grow up to kill people with West Nile and malaria. Outrageous! They must be stopped.

(4) Some people think that an unwanted baby is like a disease, but the joke is on them because the abortion they want will give them some real diseases to worry about! Not only do abortions potentially cause every known kind of cancer, but they also cause women to develop a very specific and horrific form of anti-social personality disorder that causes them to hate all types of babies. This includes, but is not limited to, baby birds, baby elephants, baby carrots, and Baby Spice.

(5) People say Earth is overpopulated and that aborting unwanted babies would solve this problem. Well, newsflash, Earth isn’t overpopulated; that’s just a myth, like evolution and that pulling-out isn’t a valid method of birth control (it totally works, kids). If you’re so concerned, then move with all of your babies to South Africa because, quite frankly, South Africa is severely under-populated and is possibly the safest place to raise your new family. Also, it’s about quantity, not quality. The more babies the better, right? Babies for everyone! Buy a farm, have lots of babies, then use them as a work force. The farm will provide the babies with everything they need and your family will be totally self-sufficient. Don’t worry; it’s not like slavery (see reason 2) or a cult. It’s just like…like being an Amish family… Yeah, that’s it.

We hope you enjoyed this month’s newsletter. Thanks again for subscribing. See you all next month when we discuss how you should eat your own placenta because it’s super nutritious and cuts down on waste, which is good for the environment.

Love always,

The Committee of Our Lady of Perpetual Birth

Is the Housing Torture Over?

As previously mentioned, ever since returning from Christmas break our house as been shown to potential new renters pretty much every single day. It's been hell. Complete hell. The rental company is totally unreliable: they say they're going to show up and then don't, they don't notify us of showings and then show up, they don't show up on time... Hell. Multiple times there have been groups who sounded very interested in the house, but so far none have committed.

On Saturday, I stepped out of the bathroom fresh from a shower and wrapped in a towel to hear a man downstairs saying, "Ok, why don't we head upstairs." Shit. As the first person began ascending the stairs I asked if they could look in my bedroom first so I could get back to getting ready. The guy leading the tour all but shit his pants in uncomfortable surprise. He began apologizing profusely and trying to avert his eyes as he was forced to stand beside me so the group of six (the three girls looking at the house plus three guys for moral support) could make it onto the landing and into my room. As they all awkwardly apologized to me, I assured them it was fine and that I just needed them to look at my room so I could get along with my business.

I could hear the group asking questions and making comments about the house as I stood, still towel clad, in the safety of my room. Everything sounded quite positive, although the guy from the rental company was bumbling around trying to answer their queries. However, we had no showings yesterday (Sunday) and I haven't received notification of any for today (Monday) so I'm hoping my Saturday house cleaning and my almost naked shower-fresh body tipped the scale. Please let the house be rented. Please please please. I can't have anymore strangers see me in a towel. That's why I stopped living in rez after first year.